By John Dear, SJ

We lined up in a long row behind the old blue bus. I stood in the middle of the highway along with fifty or so Salvadoran campesinos who were traveling in El Salvador to the town of Chalatenango. Our bus was stopped and searched by the army. All the women were forced to line up in front of the bus. It was a Sunday afternoon and there was not another sign of life as far as we could see. We were in the middle of barren fields, surrounded by huge mountains far away on the horizon. We were somewhere in the north of El Salvador and we were surrounded by young Salvadoran soldiers with machine guns aimed at us.

It was a normal road check. The soldiers were looking for guerrillas or weapons that were being transported. But there was fear in the air; the weapons were meant to intimidate and to protect. I realized that any kind of accident could happen and I looked to see how the other Salvadorans alongside me were responding. They simply bowed their heads and stood in silence. We were all searched one by one and questioned as to our reasons for traveling in this part of the country. After a while, we were permitted to get back on the bus and we proceeded on our way.

On that day in El Salvador, I saw brothers and sisters acting toward one another as if they were objects or things to be feared or pushed around. I saw children of God sadly trapped into a way of life, dehumanizing one another and themselves.

Violence is best defined as that act of forgetting or ignoring who we are: brothers and sisters of one another, each one of us a child of God. Violence occurs in those moments when we forget and deny our basic identity as God’s children, when we treat one another as if we were worthless instead of priceless and cling to our own selfish desires, possessions and security. It can become a trap, a way of life in which we see no way out, in which we find no hope, in which we become unable to look into one another’s eyes with love and respect. Violence is any behavior that dehumanizes us, from thoughts of self-hatred to intentional harm or physical injury done to another. Our apathy and indifference in the face of relievable suffering and our willingness to defend our possessions and self-interests have harmful effects on others and are a participation in violence. The lack of love and the anxiety in our hearts, the unwillingness to suffer with others and to forgive others, and the insecurity, the fears and untruth in which we frame our lives are all participations in violence because their consequences are harmful to others.

Violence begins in our hearts when we give in to temptation and become anxious and fearful, when we lose inner peace and harmony. As we forget or ignore the reality that we are all equal, all children of a loving God, all brothers and sisters of one another, our hearts turn from truth and love. This negative state of forgetfulness feeds on itself and soon we find ourselves lying, hating and cheating others. Our communication with others is disrupted and we act as if we do not recognize who the other person is or who other people are. Any common ground of equality or understanding vanishes. We become unable to see the world from the perspective of others and we cling to our own absolute idea of right and wrong. In our self-centeredness, we become blind and unconcerned about others, especially those who are suffering.

When we characterize another or others as enemies, when we look with fear and suspicion at others, we reveal the violence in our own hearts, the fact that we have forgotten to whom we are relating. When we respond to threats or acts of violence by using violence or by passively receiving the violence, we act in ways that go against what is good for us, what we would truly desire if we only understood the fact of our common heritage as sons and daughters of God. In the spiral of violence, the perception of another as “enemy” stimulates the use of violence which in turn encourages that other person or group to label the initiators of the violence as “enemy.” Charles McCarthy defines an enemy as “one or many who negatively affect the survival of some self-interest,” such as life, possessions, reputation or power. An “enemy” poses a threat of harm to oneself, or to one’s values, friends or possessions, or may have already committed violence toward oneself or one’s self-interest. Quarrels and conflicts begin when opposing people insist and scream at each other: “I’m absolutely right.” With this absolute conviction and unwillingness to listen, people feel justified in harming and then killing one another.

Once we forget who we are and begin to act violently, we start to legitimize what we do and to systematize our wickedness. We keep working at this legitimization to defend our perceptions, our use of violence. With the systemic violence of society, we try to encourage one another to accept violence. The way of violence becomes a habit too hard to break. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we defend our use of violence and we are unable to break the habit, unable to change, unable to risk another way of life. We adopt patriotic and nationalistic symbols and ideologies which can divide us and we get caught in an uncontrollable, unreflected spirit which separates us and divides us from the whole human family. Soon we lose any faith in God and do not believe in the reality of the human family. Once we find ourselves in such an apparently hopeless situation, we can fall into greater despair, helplessness and self-hatred.

We create idols which take the place of the one true God, since by this time we have lost any sight of God’s presence in the other person. Idolatry is our denial of God’s existence in others and the placing of our faith and trust in anything or anyone other than God. Our new idols become our only security, our way of defending the forgetfulness, the lie that we are living in and the violence that we do. The nuclear arms race, for example, is the practice of idolatry: people have placed their faith, trust and dependence on nuclear weapons and not in God. We have forgotten that we are one family, have greedily pursued selfish interests, and have produced nuclear weapons to protect our possessions. The end result of this denial of God has been the violence committed against the poor who starve and suffer disease, illiteracy, and homelessness. Wealth, the desire for honor, and pride kill the Spirit in each of us, cause systemic violence against the poor, and lead to new and bigger idolatries in our world, such as the nuclear arms race, consumerism, abortion, sexism and classism.

Charles McCarthy defines violence specifically as “responding to a person as an object for the purpose of self-gratification. Violence is forgetting or ignoring that there is an infinity behind every human face.” When we deny the presence of God, of love and truth in another human being, we are committing violence. We are forgetting or ignoring who we are and what we are about. All of us forget who we are at various moments in our lives and so we all commit violence. The struggle of life is not to accept and legitimize our forgetfulness, our violence, but to repent of it and overcome it by doing good, by actively loving others.

When we forget who we are, we commit violence which results in physical injury and death to others, usually the destitute and voiceless poor of the third world. When we commit these acts of violence, when we deviate from love and truth, we do not know what we are doing.

The violence that happens when we forget or ignore our basic identities can take various forms on a continuum of violence, depending on the extent to which we have forgotten or ignored our basic identity. This spectrum includes any use of emotional, psychological, personal, communal or international manipulation or domination by one’s will over and against another’s will. Violence can take the form, on one end of the spectrum, of hatred and lying which we hold in our hearts and publicly deny and, on the other end, can include the use of physical force or power to damage or destroy humanity. It can come under the form of a spirit which makes people do what they do not want to do: threaten and inflict physical harm or any other form of punishment on others. Our support of the unjust, judgmental values of society which have led us into a nuclear arms race and militarism, and force the majority of the world into poverty, starvation, disease, homelessness, the denial of human dignity, and other injustices, is a participation in violence and a legitimization of violence. The systematic wickedness of good people in society who use cultural structures such as educational and religious institutions to defend their ideas and possessions, or who continue to work for money-making, military institutions and factories, legitimates violence. Destitution and poverty which result in early and unjust deaths among the world’s poor are caused by the greed and selfishness of people who are too afraid to risk a break with the way of violence and who forget or ignore the fact that every participation in so called legitimate, systemic violence has a harmful consequence somewhere down the line on others. Our greed causes direct physical harm and death to the world’s poor and thus each large and small act of greed can harm others.

Violence in society and in one’s heart is a false peace, an absence of love, life and real truth, and is usually founded on self-hatred, fear and lies. It kills one’s soul when it appears to be protecting and saving one’s life. Violence is the step toward spiritual death which one takes when one gives in to any suicidal temptation. It is any refusal of God’s gift of life. It leads not only to the death of others, but to the fulfillment of one’s own suicidal spirit.

This state of violence is a state of nothing-ness and meaninglessness, a denial of our identities and our existence as loved children of God, where each one of us is equal and precious in God’s sight. In violence, we forget our God and act as if we have no God. When we reject love, truth, hope and God in our everyday choices, in our complicity, apathy, boredom and passivity, and in the bigger decisions of our values, employment, and lifestyles, we reject ourselves and the life we can lead as children of God. Throughout history, violence has continued to lead to nothing but unhappiness, meaninglessness, despair, hunger, war, suicide, the creation and use of nuclear weapons, the perpetuation of unjust social systems, and more violence.

The struggle to be human in today’s world involves overcoming the forces of violence which attack everyone from every side. In the effort to claim our inheritance as loved children of God, we must claim our love for one another and choose life. We must remember who we are. We must recall and return to the knowledge and awareness of our identity. We do not want to forget. We do not mean to do violence. But we do forget, each one of us. Nonviolence is a way of remembering and recalling, every day of our lives, who we are and what we are about, and returning to that life whenever we forget. It is noncooperation with violence, a refusing to forget. Nonviolence is a way out of the trap of violence. Nonviolence offers a way toward the fuller life of love and community as God’s children. It is a way that can help us to be one human family, the beloved community God created and longs to see live in harmony.

Excerpted from John Dear, Disarming the Heart: Toward a Vow of Nonviolence (Paulist Press, 1987). Reprinted in From Violence To Wholeness (Pace e Bene Press, 1999).