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 Web of Influences

 

Yesterday I unexpectedly received an email from a student I had taught at Barat College in Illinois years ago.  She explained that, since then, she has put what she had learned into practice by being part of the emerging field of Restorative Justice, including Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs.

“Don’t do anything for me.  Find some people you can pray with and march with.”In addition to being moved by her note, I found myself thinking about the importance of mentoring at strategic moments in our lives — especially in opening horizons for personal and social transformation. 

Mentoring will be a crucial dimensions of mainstreaming nonviolence going forward. 

It can be a formal and long-term process.  For example, in Pace e Bene’s ten-month “Foundations for Agents of Nonviolent Change” certificate program, we provide mentors for the participants. 

Or, we can be mentored by people who, virtually in a moment, can open the door to new possibilities through their actions or a few choice words.

This is the case with one of my many mentors: Daniel Berrigan.  In 1980 I attended this poet and priest’s course on nonviolence at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, but it was not until the following summer that he offered me what I came to see as life-altering guidance. 

I was working on a project on the social and economic costs of the nuclear arms race at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, and had traveled to the East Coast to learn what I could from think tanks and agencies. 

At each stop I got more and more depressed.  No one saw any exit from a continuation of the barreling arms race.  When I got to New York, I called Fr. Berrigan and asked if I could come and see him.  I was in need of pastoral counseling: how, I wondered, are we to live in a nuclear world?

He graciously invited me up to his place.  Just the week before he and a handful of others – including his brother Phillip — had been convicted of nonviolent action at a nuclear arms plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania the previous September. They had taken the injunction of the Book of Isaiah — to beat swords into plowshares — to heart. If the governments of the world were taking on this job, they reasoned, it was up to people of  faith and conscience to do so.  He and the others were now facing between three and ten years in federal prison. (Several years later the courts ruled in the protesters favor, and Daniel, in the end, was spared a long sentence.)

This meeting proved pivotal for me, and helped prepare me for the path I have been on since – a path I never had expected or imagined. 

Daniel Berrigan has, over all these years, been a monumental influence on me and many others.  (Click here to see a poem I wrote in his honor some time later.)  The following is an account of this decisive encounter that draws heavily on notes I jotted down right after it took place in 1981.  I offer it in its own right, but also to encourage all of us to ruminate on and be grateful for the web of mentors — long-term and momentary —  who have made us who we are.  I especially invite us, in turn, to mentor – especially to mentor for peace, justice, and the well-being of all.

 

Fostering a Startling New Direction

 

The voice was crackly. “Ken, just come into the lobby and then, at your right, you’ll notice a short hallway. Go into it and you’ll see an elevator.  Come on up to the eleventh floor…” With the worn voice of the buzzer, I pushed through the doorway of the old, unprepossessing building. A couple of floors formed the West 98^th Street Jesuit Community. Dan came to the door.  Down the hall someone was coaxing soulful visions out of a recalcitrant saxophone.

“We have music today,” he said, shaking my hand. 

Once inside, he asked if I drink coffee and, if so, would I like some?  Settled into a straight-back chair at his table I said yes to both questions.

“Good, good,” he sounded back, almost impishly. He drew his thin frame from the chair across from mine and spirited into his small, plain kitchen. I followed.

“Do you enjoy milk in yours?”  I was in a very agreeable mood that afternoon.  “Very much,” I answered, and watched him pour it into a pan applied to the burner’s thin blue flame.

I watched his hands adjust the fire, pour the frothy warm milk into an ancient-looking coffee cup, stirring.  The delicacy conjured up his poem “Vision (after Juliana of Norwich),” perhaps written here:

then showed me he
in right hand held
everything that is

the hand was a woman’s
creation all lusty
a meek bird’s egg

nesting there waiting
her word and I heard it

new born I make you
nesting I love you
homing I keep you

My head was full of other thoughts as well. The hectic morning, the commuter traffic in the Path train from Jersey City to the World Trade Center; the trip from there to 86^th and Lexington for a meeting at The New World Foundation’s strangely lavish offices; the subways from there to here on the Upper West Side. And, the trip East itself — exhilerating, tiring, extremely informative and helpful, stretching mind, spirit.

After getting coffee, we sat in his small sparsely furnished living room. The walls were lit up with several striking woodcuts that, with both form and subject matter, stretched the room in several directions at once: Guatamala, Southeast Asia, Athos—desert and mountain meeting in the wilds of upper Manhattan—and we sat under these black and white images, talking.

“When you were in Berkeley last,” I said to him, “you talked about ‘the moral assault on the culture’ which the presence of nuclear weapons has perpetrated on society, particularly U.S. society. What are some of the Instances of this?”

“I think that this is especially true in the religious community. Particularly in the seminaries. [psychiatrist and author] Bob Lifton is right when he talks about ‘psychic numbing.’ So, it is coming down to individuals taking action, making peace.  Some of them have to do a ‘walk-out.’”

“I’m just now finishing a trip,” I said, “which has exposed me in an intimate way to a wide variety of approaches to the specter which nuclearweapons holds up before us. There is a lot of talk now about compromise proposals: seek nuclear weapons reductions but increase conventional capabilities; reduce both nuclear and conventional arms but develop a flexible defense-industry base such that weapons can be spit out the way they were in World War II—and use that capacity as a ‘bargaining chip” with the Russians.  Howdo you respond to these strategies?”

“It’s all bullshit,” he says definitively.  You’re still talking body-counts—how many deaths can we live with? If we take scripture seriously, we have to maintain that we don’t condone murder. Simply put. If we stand in this tradition—a tradition which values life so very much—we ought to be what we’re supposed to be.”

“How do you answer those who say,’The Berrigans have gone too far’ or ‘what the Berrigans are doing is unthinkable’?”

“I like to talk to these people. I don’t know what is unthinkable about what we do,” he said, slowly. “We think a lot about what we do. Pray a lot about it, too. My suspicion is that others don’t think enough about what is confronting them… I think that to do nothing is unthinkable when we look at the children.”

His words—regular, measured, relaxed—drew new words to the glassy surface

“If you bear with what is happening today, you will bear with what will happen tomorrow. Somehow, we must try to break this inevitability. You sec,” he said, looking down at a splintered toothpick he was fingering on the bright table top, “there’s something more here than the lousy facts.  There is a faith in the One who values life absolutely. Therefore, we choose not to act as though the gospel is the same as what’s being said by the White House.”

I was attracted by the lack of despair in his voice.  “You have said at different times that you do not depend on ‘results’ from your actions.”

“If you depend on ‘results,’ you’re finished. Instead, you do what you have to do. And keep doing it. Listening to the gospel and acting on it.  And it gets you in trouble. One of the reasons why this recent sentence was so stiff was because everybody knows that we are going to go right on planning similar actions. Since that incident, we have been involved in eleven other actions.”

Asked about the appeal, he replied that “they’ve got us in what they call the ‘speedy track’. Do you know the New York subways? Sometimes it is said that they are ‘slow, filthy, and unreliable.’  Well, we’ve been told that we’re on the express train—which, considering the court system, will probably be fast, filthy, and unreliable.”

“And these days, what happens?”

“I have been alternating between going around the country and sitting in my room writing. I was just in Chicago for a Puerto Rican demonstration. Next month I’m going to Seattle for a meeting about the H-Block prisoners in Ireland. Then, I spend the rest of my time here, writing. My time is filled with good contrarieties these days.”

When it got to be time to go, I said impulsively, “Dan, I’m going back to the West Coast.  What can I do for you?”  I was wondering if I might be able to help with his appeal, though the words ever seemed strange as I spoke the,  What could graduate student do for a guy facing ten years in the federal slammer.

He said in a clear and direct voice, “Don’t do anything for me.  Find some people you can pray with and march with.”

It was that handful of words that changed everything, as I would learn later.

 

The door flung open and, back in the street, my eyes darted up and down the adjoining block looking for the subway entrance.  Spotting it, I walked, with a light step, to its black-grill railing and descended, then caught a train heading downtown which had just pulled in and had slid its doors open like two hands drawn back in theatrical wonder. 

Graffiti and black spray paint figures, simply everywhere in the car, were not unlike the prints on Berrigan’s wall. With motion, the black and the white ran through each other, and in the tunnels they changed places briefly.

And, in the darkness, there was Berrigan’s image—thin face, a slight smile, eyes close and distant at the same time.  Hiss presence evoked for me the words of another theologian, Ray Hart, words which had traveled to this moment by a route even more removed from the surface than the one this car was taking: “Only in bestiality does [the human person] live under the power of fixed form, of rigid limit, of unchanging rhythm, of unmodified character; which is to say, only insofar as he [or she] fails distinctively human being.”

In the spattered darkness—with tails of light appearing, wrapping themselves about us, being withdrawn again—I was drawn into a momentary meditation on the failure of absolute bestiality, and the possibilities of true humanity which has deep powers of its own.

Special thanks to my spouse, Cynthia Okayama Dopke, for suggesting I write on mentoring and mainstreaming nonviolence.

Photo (Candles): Anna Graves.   Photo (Daniel Berrigan): Judith Kelly.

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