Celebrating John Dear’s New Venture

Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial.

Nonviolence is the birthright of all humanity. As Gandhi said, it is as old as the hills.  If we had not discovered the power of nonviolence at the beginning of our human adventure, we likely would have destroyed ourselves long ago.  Violence retaliates and escalates.  Nonviolence breaks the cycle of violence and nourishes transformation, healing, and unity. 

What’s been missing, though, has been a clear recognition of this alternative power at the core of our being, which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the love that does justice.” 

Violence, being more dramatic and traumatic, stays lodged in our consciousness.  History becomes the history of violence.  It gets the press, and is regarded as the default.  Systems of domination emerge, feeding on what the theologian Walter Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence.”  The transformative energy of nonviolence is ignored, forgotten, trivialized, suppressed.  

Because this is the case, we lose sight of the paradigm of the fullness of life which offers us a way out of the paralyzing “us versus them” spiral of hate, greed, and fear that fuels the culture of violence.  

Thanks to Gandhi, we have begun to recover a clear sense of the nonviolent alternative.  Not only did he unleash this revolutionary power for the liberation of India, he helped the world see that this revolutionary power is at the core of what it means to be human.  Not only is the universal ethic of nonviolence at the heart of who we are, there are concrete ways we can live our lives – and organize our societies – to embody this ethic of nonviolent conflict and reconciliation.

Gandhi handed us a formidable toolbox for change – and, at the same time, a lens for seeing what has been there all along.  We began to rediscover the startling history of nonviolence that has been with us all along.

One of these has been a dramatic rediscovery of the nonviolence of Jesus. 

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus combines a rejection of violence with the prophetic power of unconditional love.  He called his followers to reject violence and killing, to love their enemies, to return good for evil, to heal divisions, to seek justice for the poor and outcast, and to put sacrificial love into action.  The modern term “nonviolence” (that comes to us from Gandhi’s English translation of the ancient Hindu term “ahimsa”) captures the comprehensiveness of Jesus’ way of love in action.  It illuminates in a startling way the depth and power of Jesus’ life and mission. 

John Dear in South Africa.

In the 20th century, theologians and change-makers began to illuminate in profound ways Jesus’ nonviolence, beginning with Howard Thurman and Andre Trocmé, Bernard Haring and James W. Douglass, Ched Myers and John Dominic Crossan, Angie O’Gorman and Terrence Rynne, Thomas Merton and Dr. King.

Amid this illustrious lineage is Rev. John Dear.

The Beatitudes Center

My friend and colleague John Dear today launched his next initiative: The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus.  We at Pace e Bene are excited to see this next step in John’s journey, which will be an opportunity for him to focus even more fully on his life-long project: illuminating the centrality of active and liberating nonviolence to the Gospel and to the Christian life. 

The new organization’s mission will be, as he puts it, “To teach and promote the Gospel message that Jesus was totally nonviolent, and that all his followers are called to be totally nonviolent.”  

More specifically, “We strive to help Christians study and live Jesus’ Gospel teachings of nonviolence, especially in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7), so that more and more people will practice creative Gospel nonviolence, like Gandhi, Dorothy Day and Dr. King, and work for the abolition of racism, poverty, war, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction, and for the coming of a new culture of justice and nonviolence. We use Pope Francis’ Jan. 1, 2017 World Day of Peace Message, “Nonviolence—A Style of Politics for Peace,” as a guidepost. We offer online and in person workshops, retreats and conferences, podcasts, videos, books, articles and consultation to help fulfill our mission.”  

With this new organization, John will build on the dozens of books he has published on nonviolence and the innumerable efforts he has made over four decades to move this universal ethic from the margins of Christianity to the center.

I would hazard to say that this new venture is both a culmination of a lifetime’s work but also a dramatic new beginning.

One could even say that everything that has gone before was simply an initial preparation, a prologue, a kind of preliminary training for this now even more substantial and comprehensive program for advancing the power and potential of Christian nonviolence.

John Dear and Ken Butigan at St. Peter’s Basilica during a Catholic Nonviolence Initiative meeting in Rome.

The energy of this new adventure resounds in the plethora of workshops John is offering.  This, I suspect, is only the beginning as John moves forward into the mystery and possibility of revealing even more clearly Gospel nonviolence in our time. 

To get a potential taste of this, I would like to share the following from a recent unpublished manuscript of John’s:

“Gospel nonviolence is not simply a subtopic in the field of ethics or a significant tactic in the politics of peace and revolution. Nonviolence may be regarded as a hermeneutical lens which brings all the traditional topics of theology, spirituality and politics into a new focus for our age of global violence. Nor is nonviolence some new value to be imposed on the gospel. Quite the contrary, nonviolence is a way of talking about the essential mystery of God as revealed and embodied in Jesus Christ and about God’s active transformation of humanity into God’s nonviolent reign of peace and justice. It simply applies the ancient religious term “ahimsa,” “nonviolence,” to our modern global predicament and the gospel itself to reclaim Jesus’ original message, and a new transforming theology, spirituality and discipleship for our times.

“Gospel nonviolence is much more than a political strategy; it is a spiritual principle from which we can understand life in all its dimensions. Nonviolence does not mean passivity, nor does it mean simply a cessation of killing (though that is a clear starting point). It defines active peacemaking, persistent reconciliation and steadfast resistance to evil through a suffering love as embodied by Jesus that speaks the truth in a global struggle for justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability. It is a political methodology toward national, international and global conflict resolution that refuses to resort to violence or killing, but ends the violence and transforms cultures of violence into new cultures of peace and nonviolence.”

This robust understanding and practice of nonviolence is needed now more than ever.  I am grateful for the new phase of John Dear’s pilgrimage, which will benefit the global Christian community as it takes on the work of building a more just, peaceful and healed world nonviolently.

Blessings on this new venture!

John Dear celebrating mass at the Saint Francis Basilica in Assisi, Italy during Pace e Bene’s June 2019 pilgrimage of nonviolence.