Mainstreaming Nonviolence Toolbox: Building a World Where Everyone Matters
This blog by Ken Butigan highlights ideas, books, videos, websites, projects, campaigns, organizations and individuals offering new directions for mainstreaming the power of nonviolent change. Click here for more about mainstreaming nonviolence.
The Heights and Depths of the Nonviolent Life
Even
After All this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe
Me.”
Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole Sky.
— Hafez
Sometimes we are drawn to the nonviolent life because something very concrete and tangible has happened – some violence or injustice that we cannot let go by. Something either close at hand, like the haunting destructiveness of revenge that threatens to destroy a long-lasting personal relationship — or some larger juggernaut of suffering, like war. There must be an alternative between violence and passivity, we ask – what is the way out.
We engage with an endless series of challenges and opportunities to mend the broken circles in our lives and our world
It is this relentless question that, for some of us, bring us to the way of nonviolence. We embark on this path and, like Gandhi before us, seek out and endeavor to experiment with the possible nonviolent option and response to each concrete challenge and opportunity that presents itself. For the nonviolent life is the engaged life. We engage with an endless series of challenges and opportunities to mend the broken circles in our lives and our world, and to build, renew, replenish our lives and our world constructively.
And, at the same time, the nonviolent life is a life lived increasingly cognizant of the heights and depths of the human story in which these moments of engagement exist.
Many of us, for example, have been working for some time to end the wars that the United States is engaged in. We focus, appropriately, on the particulars of this policy: its misleading justification, its lack of international legitimacy, the horror of Iraqi and American death. Each of these realities is crucial to understanding the cataclysm of this conflict and the possible steps to quelling it.
But we also occasionally glimpse the larger horizon — the larger historical, even transhistorical – story in which it is embedded: the monumental narrative of brutal violence, and the concommitant narrative of nonviolent alternatives to that horrific violence.
This is an immemorial story. Its roots are ancient. And, at the same time, a new stage in this narrative is emerging.
This unfolding reality will offer us new insight into the challenges we face today but, even more momentous, it will reframe the past and future.
In this time, we are called to cultivate this crucial perspective from what can be called the heights and the depths: vantage points that not only reveal the vast framework of violence but of the even more potential of nonviolence.
Together, we are each called to play a role in assisting in a monumental, historical shift: from the standard of violence and domination to the vision and application of the path and possibility of nonviolence.
This reframing will extend to how us committed to the nonviolent journey see ourselves and the world. In this fundamental turning, we will discover that we ourselves are called to turn: to be transformed, to see from this perspective of the heights and depths at the same time, and to share this perspective through our words and actions to offer healing and hope at a time when our lives and are world are in tremendous need of both.
And to open ourselves to learning the love that lights the whole sky.
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