The following interview with Ken Butigan was conducted by Nissa Mattson of the Nonviolent Peaceforce in the summer of 2005.
Please tell me your story of how you became involved with the peace movement. Did you have a role model or mentor who has guided you through your peace work?
Beginning at a very early age many life experiences contributed to this involvement, but to highlight those would require a much more complicated and lengthy account. I will therefore try to tell the most straightforward story I can about my journey of peace and justice.
It began in the summer of 1975, just after my junior year in college, which I had spent studying at Oxford University. A history and English literature major at the University of San Diego in Southern California, I was enthralled by Oxford’s radiant scholars and the careful but jolting pyrotechnics they ignited on a regular basis in the large lecture halls overflowing with students at New College, Magdalen, or Christchurch. I was keenly moved by lectures on Joyce, Eliot, Auden, Isherwood, and Larkin, as well as the innumerable academic knots of British history that these dons (as the Oxford professors are called) unentangled before our eyes like some Einsteinian magic trick.
By the end of the year, however, my enthusiasm for academia had dramatically waned. Perhaps it was the brilliance itself that had undone me. Academic achievement, it seemed, mostly depended on erudite demolition of the arguments of your peers and predecessors. It was a perennial round of “Can You Top This,” and perhaps even then I was gnawingly suspicious of this kind of grating hierarchical posturing.
It was in this frame of mind that I went off to Europe that summer for one last grand detour of hitchhiking and camping. Along the way I was unexpectedly jolted by the beauty and soaring, monumental grandeur of the visual arts in the countless museums and churches I stumbled into. In the end, I decided to make a fundamental shift: from history (this nit-picking, grubby, scholastic warfare) to art history: something sublime and transcendental. I would get a doctorate in the history of art and spend the rest of my life entranced by the allure of creativity and its productions while doing my level best to avoid being capsized by the furiously tiresome naval battles that erupted with predictable frequency on the choppy high seas of scholarship.
Back in the States, I headed from my family home in Olympia, Washington to San Diego, again by thumb. I stopped to visit my roommate at his home in Mountain View, California, south of San Francisco. As it turned out, Bernie had spent part of his summer in silence in a monastery and had a gift for me that he had toted home: a book entitled New Seeds of Contemplation, by a writer – and monk – I had never heard of: Thomas Merton. What followed would take far too many words to capture adequately. Suffice it to say, Merton yanked me out of one world and plopped me in another. I have never been the same since.
I followed the lifeline Tom threw me and found myself, eventually, deciding to study theology. This decision brought me to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
Intimately connected with this shift was Merton’s passion for justice and peace. I sat at mentor Merton’s knee (via his 50 books and hundreds of articles and journal entries and, eventually, a good number of his 600 audiotapes) and he led me, by fits and starts, through the door of Nonviolence.
The First Steps
Much happened after this, but here are the tips of the proverbial icebergs. A year with the Institute for Spirituality and Worship. A long-time association with the Center for Ethics and Social Policy. (I eventually became its assistant director, and published my first book on environmental ethics there.) My first nonviolence training (a brief workshop – one hour! – led by Ched Myers). A semester course on nonviolence taught by Daniel Berrigan, followed the next year by a pivotal meeting with Dan in Manhattan where he urged me forward with the simple but searing words, “Find some people you can pray with and march with.”
Eventually I got tangled up with Spirit Affinity Group, a circle of seminary students at the Graduate Theological Union. I was by now doing doctoral studies in theology, but soon I put these on the shelf and spent several years engaging in one nonviolent action after another for nuclear disarmament and peace in Central America. I spent a week in the county jail for protesting the design of nuclear arms at Livermore Laboratories, one of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories located 40 miles east of Berkeley. This was my formal initiation into the world of faith-based nonviolent resistance.
Nonviolent Action: An Example
Spirit Affinity Group was formed (by seminarians Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, Patricia Runo, Bruce Turner, Cathy Vahsen, Ron Stief, Sandee Yarlott, Rick Cotton, Jim Bridges, and myself) as a vehicle for undertaking nonviolent direct action to resist the design, production and deployment of nuclear weapons.
Part of the larger anti-nuclear movement, Spirit opposed the Reagan administration’s dramatic military build-up which doubled the U.S. Defense budget and which sought to modernize and increase U.S. strategic and tactical nuclear forces. The group based its work on a theology of resistance, which combined liberationist, eco-feminist, and Gandhian theory and praxis.
Here is an example of the kind of witness in which Spirit Affinity Group engaged.
After organizing and participating in a series of nonviolent actions in 1982 and early 1983, the group decided to sponsor "The Way of the Nuclear Cross" at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory on Good Friday, April 1. This ritual sought to evoke the symbolism and drama of "The Stations of the Cross," a popular devotion of the Roman Catholic Church which originated in the Middle Ages and which re-enacted the final hours of Jesus’ life and his execution by the Roman state.
Three members of the group — Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, and Patricia Runo — had made the decision to enter the Roman Catholic Church. They proposed that the ritual be held at the laboratory as a way of signifying their theological conviction that entrance into the church meant reception into Jesus’ "way of the cross." The group decided that the service would culminate in nonviolent civil disobedience. Although this was a non-traditional approach to this Christian devotional rite, Spirit affinity group was convinced that such action would honor the spirit of its remembrance and re-enactment of Jesus’ death.
The group slowly developed a scenario for its nonviolent direct action at Livermore. We gathered that spring for shared prayer and shared silence. We believed that it was out of this centering and darkness that the most appropriate image, gesture, word, or drama with which to take action would emerge. We gradually realized that we wanted to clarify the ways in which nuclear weapons function as the modern crucifixion, and we wanted, as Spirit member Patricia Runo wrote at the time, to have the laboratory and the US government "take back the nuclear cross." Slowly, we conceived of carrying a 25-foot mock-up of Livermore’s most recent creation, the MX missile, to the gates of the laboratory. We decided to chain ourselves to the missile in order to symbolize the domination that the nuclear weapons regime exerts on humanity.
We produced a leaflet and a booklet of reflections entitled Carrying the Nuclear Cross. We circulated word about the event throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. We conducted three nonviolence preparation trainings, daylong workshops which grounded people in the "nonviolence guidelines" of the day and gave people opportunities to practice ahead of time what to expect in a series of "role plays." We wrote press releases, did mailings to local newspapers and electronic media, and alerted reporters that we knew. Ron Stief and I traveled to an industrial park in the South Bay to buy a large cardboard tube with which a friend of ours, Mark McDonald, created the body of the missile. Weighing 400 pounds, the mock-up represented a sleek rocket with a fluorescent orange nose cone "warhead" marked on both sides by Air Force insignia, a single black cross and two written explanations: "THE NUCLEAR CROSS" and "Mass eXtermination," which highlighted its status as an "MX" missile.
The three confirmands approached three local religious leaders about presiding over the Rite of Confirmation. Ultimately, Fr. Bill O’Donnell (pastor of St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church, Berkeley, CA), Fr. Michael Park (priest at Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Berkeley) and Mary Doyle (pastoral associate, also at Holy Spirit Catholic Church) agreed to lead this ceremony.
On Good Friday morning, we arrived at dawn to erect the stage and to test the sound system for the service on the edge of a field at the corner of East Avenue and Vasco Road, diagonally across the street from the southwest corner of the laboratory. We asked those who were risking arrest to sign in at a designated "legal table" so that a volunteer committee of lawyers could track us through the jail and court system.
The Confirmation service began at 6:30 a.m. with 700 people in attendance. Like many traditional church liturgies, music, scripture, formal prayers, and a sermon were woven throughout. The Rite of Confirmation — the Roman Catholic Church’s standard rite in "The Laying on of Hands" — included the renewal of baptismal vows adapted to the circumstances of a nuclear world. Each of the new Catholics was introduced by their sponsors, invested with a white stole, and given an opportunity to make a brief statement. After intercessory prayers, Eucharist was shared.
This was followed by two significant acts. First, a commissioning of all present to continue to deepen and spread their peacemaking. Second — as an extension and example of this group initiation — the labeling of the MX missile (which has been laying, up to this point, unobtrusively to one side of the stage) as "The Nuclear Cross." From the stage, Terry Messman declared,
Almost 2,000 years ago, a Roman government crucified the Prince of Peace, who became the first of many…Christians throughout history to be persecuted as peace criminals. The Cross was the instrument of torture used by the Roman imperial government to execute Jesus. The MX warhead designed at Livermore Laboratory is the Nuclear Cross while can be fired at any moment by an imperial government to initiate a First-Strike Crucifixion of millions of defenseless children. Some of us today will be carrying this Nuclear Cross to enact the Nuclear Passion of Christ as a warning to all people that we must resist the radioactive crucifixion of the world.
Members of Spirit Affinity Group hoisted The Nuclear Cross from the ground. We then carried it into the roadway, beginning to travel east along East Avenue.
We had planned to carry it down to a traditional civil disobedience site — the laboratory’s South-West Gate — but a long flank of California Highway Patrol officers had been flung across the width of East Avenue. We would not be allowed to reach the gate. Slowly moving forward, we put our heads together and improvised: we decided to reverse field turn and to lay our 25-foot sacred object in the center of the intersection of Vasco and East. We gradually eased to the left and lumbered into the middle of the intersection. The hundreds of people who have been following us — with banners, signs, and large crosses of their own — were momentarily confused, because we were not acting according to the plan we had laid out only moments before from the stage. Eventually, we managed to communicate what we were doing via some clumsy miming. As we chained ourselves to the missile, beginning to enact a "die-in" (dramatizing the nuclear death pulsing under the skin of missile we were now sprawled across), we asked the others risking arrest to kneel, sit or stand in lines at each of the four perimeters of the intersection.
Our improvisation did not conform to the plans of the California Highway Patrol — most previous demonstrations had concentrated on the four main gates of the laboratory; no one had occupied one of the intersections — so it took some time for them to regroup and to arrive on the scene. By the time they did, traffic attempting to precede east on East Avenue was halted well back into Livermore. Our intention was not to inconvenience local residents; we did, however, feel called to interfere nonviolently with the smooth operation of this nuclear weapons design complex. For ninety minutes, people either risked arrest — and were, eventually, arrested and handcuffed — or protested from one of the four corners of the intersection. In the end, 75 women and men were arrested. Approximately 300 people continue a legal witness.
The police used a Department of Energy (DOE) flatbed truck to remove the mock missile. As it was being dragged away, it occurred to us that the DOE was enacting the symbolism we had been groping toward in our planning process. The nuclear weapons system, symbolically, had in fact "taken back the nuclear cross." (Months later, after all the court proceedings were finished, the judge in our case ordered the lab to return the missile to us, which had been held as evidence. Lab officials eventually told us that it was sitting "at the bottom of the Livermore dump." At first miffed — we could have used it in another action — in the end the sense of this symbolic disarmament and "trashing" of a nuclear rocket and warhead was very satisfying and, more importantly, a truthful act carried out in spite of the conscious intentions of the laboratory.)
Seventy-one of those arrested were transported to a temporary booking station on laboratory property. They were fingerprinted, photographed, given a citation ("cited out") and released on their own recognizance. Four of us —Terry Messman, Joseph Samudio, Jim Leweke, and myself — decided to spend the Easter weekend in jail. We refused the citation and were transported to Santa Rita County Jail. On Monday, we were taken to an arraignment at the county courthouse and released. In the following months, some ten arrestees, including Messman, received 30-day jail sentences when they refused sentences of probation, fines, and community service. The rest of us received a wide variety of sentences. I decided to join a few people in mounting a full trial; when we were eventually found guilty, we were handed down relatively minor sentences of four days in the county jail.
A Few Other Steps
Spirit Affinity Group participated in (and created) one nonviolent action for peace and justice after another.
Against the backdrop of the times – the accelerating arms race, the total war of so-called low intensity conflict, and the bitter sting of Reagonomics – our actions mixed creativity, passion and spirituality. They felt like rites of passage that were equal parts wacky and transcendentally meaningful. In those days we ate, drank and slept the life of resistance, and this was reflected most pointedly in the actions we fashioned and carried out: joining the flotilla of rowboats that Shelley and Jim Douglass organized to nonviolently confront the USS Ohio (the first Trident submarine) in the waters of Puget Sound in the Summer of 1982; repeatedly dramatizing the chilling reality of counterinsurgency in the offices of the Salvadoran consulate; standing in solidarity with one of our number, Terry, who floated over the fence at Livermore and, sprinting up the outer stairwell of a key building, found a side door open and hurled pile after pile of computer printouts out across the landscape.
In June 1983 Spirit joined a large nonviolent blockade at Livermore. It was like a wave that built on all the surging energy of all the other actions that had taken place there over the previous two years. One thousand of us, after we were arrested, were held for two weeks in surreal circus tents on the county prison grounds. Here are a few of the experiences that stand out for me from that action:
The solstice, with a brilliant, ghostly moon rising at the very moment the sun disappeared behind the tan hills.
The Wicca dragon spiral dance of 500 men driven with energy and life.
The inhalation and exhalation – contraction and expansion – of the ongoing spokescouncil and affinity group process.
Deciding to fast for the last six days and carefully peeling and eating a tangerine before doing so.
And the seemingly endless round of arraignments when, after the district attorney and judge handling our cases relented on the imposition of two years probation, we decided to voluntarily drop our Jane or John Doe noms de resistance and resume our real identities.
I will never forget sitting in the makeshift arraignment area at 3 a.m. waiting for my name to be called. First, a young man sitting in front of me was summoned. When he was given a chance to speak in front of Judge Lewis, he said, “Your honor, I did this action totally as a lark. My friends were going to get busted, and so I decided to go along for the ride. I didn’t really know anything about it. But after two weeks of workshops on the national security state by Daniel Ellsberg, and having to learn about consensus, and of living with hundreds of men in a non-competitive way – thanks to you, judge, now I’m an anti-nuclear activist!”
The Pledge of Resistance
In the spring of 1984, I received a letter from a man in Nicaragua. I do not know how he got my address. The letter summarized a lot of things I knew already: about death squad activity in El Salvador, about the US backed contra army fighting the Nicaraguan government. But two sentences in this message riveted me. The first was:
I AM TELLING THIS TO YOU NOW SO TEN YEARS FROM NOW YOU CANNOT SAY THAT YOU DID NOT KNOW.
This haunted me, with its implication that I must do something, and with its damning evocation of the “good Germans” who claimed that they did not know what their government and army were doing. But even more urgent was the second sentence:
DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO STOP THIS DESTRUCTION.
It was as if he were standing in my living room, holding one of the countless dead. I asked myself, “What can I do?”
My mind spontaneously went to an article I had read in Sojourners magazine from the previous winter. It described how, after the United States invaded Grenada (October, 1983), 50 people who were worried that Nicaragua was next, gathered to commit themselves to take action if the US invaded that Central American country. I asked myself, “Why just 50? Why not 500? Or 5,000? Or 50,000?” I sat down and wrote “A Commitment to Take Action Stop the Killing in Central America.” Over the next several months I circulated this. Slowly some of us helped get this “pledge” off the ground.
Eventually we hooked up with people assembled by Sojourners magazine to work together. The Pledge of Resistance was born.
Begun as US involvement in the conflicts in Nicaragua and El Salvador heated up, the Pledge was a commitment that people throughout the country took to protest US military escalations in the region. Structured as an emergency response network, the Pledge was able, within hours of increased military activity, to organize scores (sometimes hundreds) of nonviolent marches, rallies, interfaith services, or civil disobedience actions in which people were led by conscience to risk arrest at congressional field offices, military bases, or other relevant sites.
Within a few months of being launched, 100,000 people took the Pledge. From 1984 through 1991, these members took part in literally thousands of demonstrations; Pledge records indicate that 20,000 people, in the spirit of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day, were arrested in acts of civil disobedience. Pledge groups held regular activities throughout the country, thus contributing to the deepening and broadening of the larger US Central America movement that, over the course of the 1980s, had a steady impact on US policy. (As part of this work, I engaged in a 1985 nonviolent action that netted me six weeks in Boron federal prison in California’s Mojave Desert.)
The Pledge mobilized nationally coordinated actions in response to critical escalations of the war, including the US imposition on the embargo on Nicaragua (May, 1985), a string of military aid packages to the US-created Contra forces in Nicaragua (1985-88), the deployment of 1800 US troops to Honduras (March, 1988), and the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter by US-trained Salvadoran government soldiers (November, 1989). 2,482 people arrested in over 1,000 demonstrations held at congressional offices and federal buildings within ten days of this carnage played an important role in ending Congressional military backing for the El Salvador’s Arena government. This, in turn, catalyzed a genuine peace process and an eventual end to the war.
Joining Pace e Bene
From 1987 through 1990, I was the Pledge national coordinator, based in Washington, DC. One of the thrills of this job was the regular contact I enjoyed with the organizers of many of the 400 local Pledge groups throughout the United States. Many of these folks were working people, and often, as we talked strategy and tactics, we invariably discussed more practical questions: How do we do this kind of work and still live a human life? What is the connection between the personal and the political? How do we maintain an active political commitment and still put food on the table? How do we keep from burning out? These were questions about balance and integration, and I had many of them myself.
In the summer of 1990, I decided to leave my job with the Pledge to explore these questions more deeply. I wanted to learn more about living a life that balanced political work, personal life and faith—both to live in a more centered way day-to-day, and also to grow into a style of life that would support the vision and practice of faith-based, public witness for peace with justice. Moreover, I wanted to work with a team of people who were pledged to this vision and who would, in turn, offer these resources to others. I imagined a loose network of groups grounded in a lifestyle of deep and active nonviolence that would support one another over the long haul to be "relentlessly persistent" in living deeply human lives committed to the vision and practice of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the "Beloved Community."
And so I came to Pace e Bene. Since arriving, I have collaborated in developing From Violence To Wholeness with many people, including Patricia Bruno, Laura Slattery, Ken Preston-Pile, Veronica Pelicaric, and Brendan McKeague.
Since 1997, twenty thousand people—primarily from faith communities— have participated in 400 From Violence To Wholeness workshops, trainings, courses, and study groups in the US and around the world. This program has provided participants with a vision, method, and tools to challenge and transform patterns and policies of violence in their lives and in the larger world.
From Violence To Wholeness has invited thousands of people in a variety of contexts to discover powerful alternatives to violence in their lives and in society.
Coming to the Present
In 1995 I decided to return to the Graduate Theological Union and finish one of the life-tasks I had let slip away in the early 1980s as I had gotten heavily involved in peace work: finishing my doctorate in religious studies. (In fact, given the lapse of time, this involved started over entirely.) I focused on nonviolence in five religious traditions, and wrote my dissertation on the Franciscan-led movement to end nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. (A book based on this work was published in 2003 by State University of New York Press entitled, Pilgrimage Through a Burning World: Spiritual Practice and Nonviolent Protest at the Nevada Test Site.)
I then taught at a variety of colleges and universities. From 2003 to 2005 I taught the religious studies courses at Barat College of DePaul University in Lake Forest, Illinois.
Through all of this, I have continued to work with Pace e Bene. I have now returned to a full-time staff position with this organization. We have recently launched a revised version of From Violence To Wholeness entitled, Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living. It has the monumental and audacious (but, in the long-term, possible) goal of “mainstreaming nonviolence.”
What is your personal nonviolent philosophy? What role does nonviolence play in your life?
My nonviolent philosophy is that love is stronger, more resilient, and ultimately more effective than fear, hate and violence. Active nonviolence is “organized love.” It is an orientation, a set of principles, a method, and an almost limitless set of specific strategies that puts the Power of Love into practice. Active nonviolence, when it functions with integrity, recognizes that each of us has tendencies toward both violence and love. It recognizes, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through every human heart.” Nonviolent Power is stronger and more enduring than the Power of Violence. If not, human beings would have destroyed themselves long ago.
How have your activities impacted you personally? How has your view of the world matured due to your efforts?
I never expected to go down this road. Each step has revealed a new facet of the world – its challenges and joys. This journey has sharpened my awareness of the abysmal cruelties human beings can inflict on one another. But it has also highlighted how the conventional responses to such cruelties – either passivity or violence – are ineffective and often result in further cruelty and injustice. Numerous experiences have led me to see the power and possibility of the “nonviolent option.”
What is your message to the youth of the world?
You have more power than you think.
© Ken Butigan
