Prayers for Creative Nonviolence

A Prayer for Our Journey from Violence to Wholeness

Spirit of God, we long to mend the broken circle.
We long to heal the fractures in the world around us and within our own souls.
To learn from one another the ways of living fully alive.
To transform those parts of ourselves and our world
that block our making contact with our deepest reality
and with the deepest, richest and most sacred dimensions of all other beings.

Spirit of God, we long to see reality.
To contact our deepest yearning for a world pulsing with justice and truth.
To dream of a society where we all sit down at the Great Banquet,
where every person eats until they are full.

Spirit of God, we long to discover anew the courage deep within us.
To see and to listen. To discover our true selves.
To take steps to stop the cycle of violence
in our homes, in our work-places, in our neighborhoods, in our country, in our wide world.

A Prayer for the Living and the Dead

September 11, 2001
By Elias Amidon

Oh God pray for us,
God beyond the God we don’t believe in,
oh God who beats our hearts, who blinks our eyes,
the One who flames the billion billion stars
and cries our tears, oh God of infinite mercy
pray for us as we die,
we who are caught in this fury, this impossible collision
of jet and tower,
ignite in us your light as the force explodes our bodies,
receive us in your safety
as the weight of our collapsing world crushes every memory, every wish,
the steaming cup of coffee waiting on our desk, our weekend plans,
receive us – stockbroker, cook, secretary, fireman –
pray for us in our surprise
as we hurtle back to what we were before we were,
oh help us die beautifully, as we die,
into your sudden light bring us home.

God pray for us still here,
pray for us as we gasp, mouths open like babies,
seeing the impossible wrath of weight,
the inferno falling,
pray for us as we look up from our lives,
from our homes and schools and workplaces,
from our lawns and freeways,
as we look up from the dust of Kabul and Khartoum,
from our shanty towns and cardboard walls,
pray for us as we see
this repetition of ancient unkindness,
our judgment on ourselves,
oh pray for us.

May sorrow break the hearts of we who are the killers,
may sorrow break the hearts of the perpetrators,
may we weep to have done this to each other,
may we weep for the cause that would cause us
to stab with knives on a clear Tuesday morning
and drop from the sky this bomb of people,
may we weep for the hurt we have suffered
and the hurt we have made others suffer,
oh God pray for us and break our hearts with sorrow
for the lineage of dominance and greed
that has caused this to happen, this rage
that has crazed us with hatred, oh pray for us God,
forgive us

We who are left to pick up their bones,
pray we remember their calling us,
dialing their phones as they dropped from the sky,
calling “I love you, I love you,
take care of the children, take care of yourselves,”
pray we remember their words,
“I love you, take care of the children.”

Oh God stop our hands on knife and trigger,
stop our hands with sorrow,
break our hearts so we weep and in grief
learn the justice of mercy,
oh God show us mercy, show us no one is other,
neither enemy nor stranger nor even
You,
who we, in the birth of your mercy, reveal.

Elias Amidon and Rabia Roberts co-direct the Boulder Institute for Nature and the Human Spirit. Email: elias@boulderinstitute.org.

A Case for Utopia

By Peter Maurin,
co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement

The world would be better off
if people tried to become better,
and people would be better
if they stopped trying to become better off.
For when everyone tries to become better off,
nobody is better off.
But when everyone tries to become better
everyone is better off.
Everyone would be rich
if nobody tried to become richer,
and nobody would be poor
if everyone tried to be the poorest.
And everybody would be what [she] ought to be
if everybody tried to be
what [she] wants the other fellow to be.

The United Farm Workers Prayer

By Cesar Chavez

Show me the suffering of the most miserable;
So I will know my people’s plight.

Free me to pray for others;
For You are present in every person.

Help me take responsibility for my own life;
So that I can be free at last.

Grant me courage to serve others;
For in service there is true life.

Give me honesty and patience;
So that the Spirit will be alive among us.

Let the Spirit flourish and grow;
So that we will never tire of the struggle.

Let us remember those who have died for justice;
For they have given us life.

Help us love even those who hate us,
So we can change the world.

A Prayer As We Begin To Reflect on Violence

We huddle together as the storm shrieks around us
and through us.
The storm of misguided power, of icy blindness and abuse,
of the deep gulf that widens between us,
of the suffocating pathos, of the paralyzing unease we feel
when we are rejected and disposed of,
or when we reject and dispose of others.
Tossed by the storm where we lose our particularity and our irreducible richness.
Savaged by the storm that is inflicted on us, and that we inflict.
We ask for the means to live fully in the midst of this storm,
to embark on this challenging and difficult and powerful journey
from fear to love, from despair to hope,
from violence to wholeness.

A Prayer To Begin Our Exploration of Gandhi’s Vision

Spirit of God, You are present to us
in the midst of the sharp dilemmas of our lives
and the life of the world.
Open our hearts,
the way You opened the heart of our brother Mohandas Gandhi,
to see Your creativity generating alternatives, options and choices
in the face of massive violence and injustice.
Help us learn, as he did,
the “power of the powerless” in unleashing and nurturing
justice in an unjust world.
Bring us into contact with your Soul-Force
in finding solutions to the complex challenge of violence
that wounds our human family and the Earth itself.

Prayer

Spirit of God,
you hold us in Your embrace.
Your presence burns through this world,
transforming it.
You hold us in Your embrace.
You call us to see confront the mystery of evil.
You hold us in Your embrace.
You call us to live the astonishing mystery of good in the face
of the mystery of evil.
You hold us in Your embrace.
Be with us as we experiment with your nonviolence.
You hold us in Your embrace.
Give us the strength to break the rules of war,
to move from the war zone to the house of love.
You hold us in Your embrace.
We are grateful for You and for each other.

You hold us in Your embrace.
You hold us in Your embrace.
You hold us in Your embrace.

The House of Love

by Henri Nouwen

How can we live in the midst of a world
marked by fear, hatred and violence, and not be destroyed by it?
When Jesus prays to [God] for his disciples he responds to this question by saying,
“I am not asking you to remove them from the world
but to protect them from the evil one.
They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.”
To live in the world without belonging to the world
summarizes the essence of the spiritual life.
The spiritual life keeps us aware that our true house is not the house of fear,
in which the powers of hatred and violence rule,
but the house of love, where God resides.
Hardly a day passes in our lives without our experience of inner or outer fears,
anxieties, apprehensions and preoccupations.
These dark powers have pervaded every part of our world to such a degree
that we can never fully escape them.
Still it is possible not to belong to these powers,
not to build our dwelling place among them,
but to choose the house of love as our home.

Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying With Icons
(Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1987), p. 19.

The Canticle of Brother Sun

by St. Francis of Assisi

Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor and all blessing.
To you alone, Most High, do we belong.
No mortal lips are worthy
To pronounce your name.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the light of day; and light you give to us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them, bright
And precious and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all the weather’s moods,
By which you cherish all that you have made.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Through whom you brighten up the night.
How beautiful is he! Full of power and strength.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces
Various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon
For love of you; through those who endure
Sickness and trial.
Happy those who endure in peace,
By you, Most High, they will be crowned.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
The second death can do no harm to them.
Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
and serve him with great humility.

“Do not return evil for evil. Avenge not yourselves, but rather give way to wrath; for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord. Therefore if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink: for in so doing you shall heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

-- Romans 12:17-21

“The first duty of love is to listen.”

-- Paul Tillich

“Nonviolence is the inherent quality of women. For ages men have trained in violence. In order for them to become nonviolent they have to cultivate the qualities of women. Ever since I have taken to nonviolence, I have become more and more of a woman.”

-- Gandhi

“Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism… Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”

-- Emma Goldman

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace, more about killing than we do about living.”

-- WWII General Omar Bradley

“In nonviolence, the masses have a weapon that enables a child, a woman, or even a decrepit old man to resist the mightiest government successfully. If your spirit is strong, mere lack of physical strength ceases to be a handicap.”

-- Gandhi

“The soulless corporate exploiters and militarists, each poised to become our future oppressors, somehow always succeed in staying on the gravy train no matter which cards fate deals them. It seems like it would make sense to stop voting for, stop paying for and stop supporting any system or group that could turn out to be our future executioners.”

-- Gary Kohls

“Nonviolence, when it becomes active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle.”

-- Gandhi

“There must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

-- Frederick Douglas 1857

“If any preacher tells you that personal salvation can be achieved without first paying attention to social justice, you may know by this sign alone that you are listening to a false prophet.”

-- Sydney Harris

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems, maintaining my convictions that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But, they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn”t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their question hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against violence on the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - our own government.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. NYC April 4, 1967

“No one has a right to sit down and feel helpless, there”s too much to do.”

-- Dorothy Day

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice…Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance - how violently I hate all this; how despicable and ignoble war is…I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

-- Albert Einstein

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

-- Daniel Berrigan

A journey of A thousand miles must begin with A single step.

-- Lao Tzu

-- Daniel Berrigan

“One cannot level one”s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”

-- Daniel Berrigan

“Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world, in armaments, is not spending its money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war it is humanity, hanging from a cross of iron.”

-- Dwight C. Eisenhower

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

-- Theodore Roosevelt, on April 19, 1906

-- Albert Einstein

“If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor.”

-- Desmund Tutu

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

-- John F. Kennedy

“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”

-- Benjamin Franklin

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love turns upon a commitment to a certain kind of seeing, a certain kind of sharing.

-- R.C. Solomon.

“Love is the most durable power in the world. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Christians no longer take up the sword against nation, not do we learn war any more, having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader.”

-- Origen

“A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”

-- John K. Stoner, 2001

“Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Star Wars will take money away from education, programs for women and children, and health care. There is a direct link between promoting weapons for space and the destabilization of our communities. People must connect these struggles.”

-- Bruce Gagnon

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder…. the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace… They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.”

-- Eugene V. Debs

“Put up the your sword into its place: for all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword.”

-- Jesus

“The world will change because of your smile… to sit, to smile, to look at things and really see them”

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

“It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.”

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

“These form the basis of peace work. You can get something from a book. That something may be so important as to lead you to the recognition of the real thing.”

-- Idries Shah

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Military power is as corrupting to the man who possesses it as it is pitiless to its victims. Violence is just as devastating to the soul of the perpetrator as it is to the body and souls of those who are victims of it.”

-- American Friends Service Committee

Pace e Bene