During a recent Pace e Bene Facilitator Training, I joined with fifteen others for three very rich days in sharing our challenges and hopes for personal and social change.

We delved into the contradictions and possibilities of our lives and our world. We improvised the scripts of violence, slowing them down long enough to begin to glimpse how they work. We soaked up stories about real people—some famous, some unknown, some among our group—who had courageously and creatively committed to living another way.

Over these days together we began to imagine living our way into a new identity, exploring if and how we are called at this moment in history to be Peaceworker, Peacemaker, Catalyst for Change, or Promoter of “The Love that Does Justice,” as Dr. Martin King, Jr. described nonviolence. Becoming Agents of Nonviolent Change.While keenly aware of the roiling storm of violence and injustice in the world and in our own being, we sensed a deepening vision of a culture of nonviolence and justice, and the skills to help create it.

Since its founding in February 1989, Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service has provided many such opportunities to imagine, practice, and create nonviolent options by:

• Organizing 600 workshops for 25,000 people in the United States and around the world;

• Strengthening organizations and social movements dedicated to ending homelessness, creating peace, and challenging poverty;
• Publishing books and online resources devoted to deepening the nonviolent life; and
• Engaging in nonviolent action for social and personal transformation.

But this list only provides the most general and superficial sense of what the Pace e Bene has been about. Just like the recent facilitator training described above, Pace e Bene’s pilgrimage has been a journey into the depths of woundedness and sacredness of our lives and our world. And like the most powerful pilgrimages, the map is the least reliable guide to the heart of the matter.

Theories and models of nonviolence, though important, only take us so far. Principles and stories of nonviolence, though crucial, only take us to the water’s edge.Unless we get into the waiting boat of experience, taking only what is essential, can we “cross the great water,” as the I Ching (The Book of Changes) puts it.

We are called, in this age, to push off from the shore of certainties that have only kept us trapped in a cycle of suffering and retribution. We are called to set off for a world where we dissolve all the artificial lines that separate and strangle. In our time, we are called to cross the Great Water of compassion, transformation, healing: the Great Water of Creative Nonviolence.

We are called to press ahead through the waters of care, connection, and creativity.

We are called to swerve off in the direction of the unknown.

For two decades, the Pace e Bene community—a handful of people scattered around the planet—has been modestly exploring ways to support the emergence of a nonviolent culture of love and justice. The way is not clear. There is no blueprint. And we do not pretend to know what steps are required. Rather, we have been experimenting.

We have clambered aboard our peculiar dinghy of improvised action, education and reflection and headed out. We have, over these two decades, happily discovered that we are not alone. There are many skiffs and canoes and pontoons plying these tumultuous waters, and the number of nonviolence seafarers seems to grow daily.

As we enter our third decade, Pace e Bene will continue to offer trainings, workshops and retreats—elements of a formation process for all who seek to transform their lives and their world. We will continue to ruminate on this process of nonviolent change, producing resources that can become lamps burning brightly across the dark water ahead. We will continue to find one another—inviting a nonviolence web of individuals, groups, and movements into being. And we will continue to try to deliver the message of nonviolence in person—taking nonviolent action using the most powerful language we humans have at our disposal: our own creaky, beautiful, luminous, inspirited bodies.

Together—as Peaceworkers, Peacemakers, Catalysts for Change, and Agents of Nonviolent Change promoting the love that does justice—we will continue to cross the healing waters in these challenging and powerful times.

Click here to read more about the ten-month Nonviolence Education program>>