Remembering Alain Richard, Pace e Bene co-founder and relentless nonviolence advocate
https://www.la-croix.com/Religion/Mort-franciscain-Alain-Richard-fondateur-Cercles-silence-2021-06-24-1201163005
In 1992 Fr. Alain Richard, OFM and I designed the first week-long nonviolence training at Pace e Bene. Nonviolence, for Alain, included an ongoing encounter with our woundedness and sacredness. In this spirit, we decided to create an environment where participants could choose, at whatever level that was comfortable for them, to reflect on their own experience of violence. This personal reflection could then serve as a basis for exploring more general realities of violence and nonviolence.
This seven-day experience, which was held in a school in Las Vegas that was closed for the summer, opened with a centering ritual, after which we made agreements to foster safe space among the 35 of us.
Then we invited people to share on their experience of violence.
There was a noticeable reluctance to do this and, as the minutes of silence dragged on in the summer heat, Alain and I found ourselves wondering if our design was fatally flawed.
Then, just as we were about to pull the plug on this segment, a man raised his hand. He explained that he was a police officer and that he was attending the workshop with his son, who had encouraged him to come. With great emotion, he began to share with the group the violence he had perpetrated as a cop and his own, bottled up, painful feelings about it. The entire room grew silent and focused. Then, one by one, people spontaneously began to share their own personal experiences, which sparked a powerful exploration of our culture of violence and what a culture of active and liberating nonviolence might look like.
We learned a great deal from that initial training – including creating much more sensitive ways to invite individuals and groups to reflect carefully on their own history of violence—but it was Alain’s intuition that the path of nonviolence requires us to engage with the woundedness of our lives and of our society that was most dramatically illuminated by this experience.
Alain died on June 24 in Avignon, France at the age of 96. We at Pace e Bene are grateful for all he brought to our organization and to the larger movement for nonviolence.
Born on October 4, 1924 in France, Alain joined the Franciscan order in 1947, taking his final vows in 1953. In 1973, he arrived in the United States, where he first lived in Chicago before serving as a priest associated with the St. Barbara province of the Franciscan Friars located in the Western US, working in Oakland, California and then in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he and Louis Vitale, Sr. Rosemary Lynch, Peter Ediger and Julia Occhiogrosso founded Pace e Bene in 1989. He returned to France in 1998.
I arrived at Pace e Bene in 1990, and over my first years there Alain and I worked on many projects together. Occasionally he would open a window on what had moved him to become such a fiery promoter and practitioner of active nonviolence. His brother’s death in World War II was a profound shock which, he indicated to me, crystalized a personal commitment against violence. This, and his formation as a Franciscan, with its spirituality of the peacemaking Francis of Assisi, took deep root in him. (Years later, after coming to Pace e Bene, Alain published a booklet on the Franciscan tradition and active nonviolence.)
But perhaps the single most impactful event took place during a demonstration in Paris he attended against the brutal French war waged against Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. In the midst of the chaos of this particular protest, as French troops clashed with the protesters, Alain saw a man sit down in front of a tank in a composed and centered way. This simple action changed the whole atmosphere, and led to a de-escalation of the situation, so that the protest could continue in a peaceful but determined way.
Alain spoke movingly of the power of this action and the effect it had on him. It convinced him of the power each of us has to challenge and transform violence and oppression using our vulnerable and unarmed bodies. This action showed him how to put into practice St. Francis’ vision in a contemporary context, leading him to a series of “experiments in truth,” as Gandhi called nonviolence in action.
For example, he served as a long-term volunteer with Peace Brigades International (PBI) in Guatemala, accompanying human rights activists who were perennially threatened by death squads and the military. PBI and other third-party intervention organizations had found that accompaniment increased the chance of keeping change-makers alive in repressive countries. Alain had seen this success up close. All it took was being vulnerable and unarmed—and willing to give one’s life for another.
He also was an advisor for the 1983 International Fast for Life, a powerful, open-ended fast undertaken by spiritually-grounded fasters seeking an end to the nuclear arm race.
Engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, Alain was arrested about thirty times, with a special focus on nuclear weapons, the defense of the working poor, and the fight against war and the market economy.
Pace e Bene
Eventually he came to Las Vegas and helped found Pace e Bene.
The Nevada Desert Experience was organized in the 1980s with the audacious dream of ending nuclear testing at the U.S. government’s 1350 square-mile top-secret Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas. Fr. Louie Vitale and a handful of others had started wandering out to the desert to pray for peace. Within a year or two, a movement had emerged, which saw hundreds, and then thousands, journeying to the Nevada desert to protest and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. During this campaign, the idea of establishing Pace e Bene emerged. It would be a center in Las Vegas that would support NDE but also seek to analyze, and respond to, the deep structure of the dominant culture. Alain was part of these discussions, and eventually relocated to Las Vegas to help Pace e Bene take root. This fledgling effort began to offer workshops and retreats on culture, nonviolence, and the integrity of creation.
When I arrived in 1990 after having spent years as a peace and justice organizer, Alain and I worked on workshops, a program we called Transformation Groups Project, and publications. We had many fruitful collaborations, but there were conflicts, as well. He called himself the “Gray Wolf,” and sometimes I found the Wolf irascible — and, I suppose, he saw me that way, too. At one point we decided to do a conflict resolution process together in which, sitting across from each other, we shared our concerns one at a time for fifteen minutes without interruption. It was revelatory. I felt I really heard Alain, maybe for the first time. And it seems like he heard me as well. We shared our feelings as well as our issues. And with no cross-talk, we felt free to say what needed to be said. It cleared the air and made for a much better working relationship.
Years later, Pace e Bene published a book entitled, Living with the Wolf: Walking the Way of Nonviolence. This title could have as easily applied to those years when Alain and I—and everyone at Pace e Bene—were trying to learn something about living the nonviolent life even as we were preaching it. Of course, it did not go unnoticed that this was a reference to St. Francis’ paradigmatic encounter with a wolf, all those centuries ago.
Even though he could be prickly, Alain at the same time could be generous and light-hearted. He also loved nature, and he and I made many memorable trips out into the desert north of Las Vegas and sometimes further afield, like the time we led a nonviolence training together in a wind-blown tent far out in the desert for a group of “peace bicyclists” who were crossing the country for nuclear disarmament. What a great time that was!
Returning to France
After twenty-five years in the United States, Alain returned to France, first being part of the Franciscan community in Toulouse and then in Avignon. We would occasionally exchange email, and sometimes we would hear about him from someone who had run across him there. “Oh, he is Mr. Nonviolence in France,” they would invariably say.
In 2007 he started the Circle of Silence, a European movement designed to denounce the imprisonment of undocumented foreigners. I saw this comment on Flickr about the campaign, from Agnes Livingstone: “[Silent circle] demonstrators gather together once a month, in a public place, and build a circle with their bodies. They do not speak, but there is always a [banner]…to be easy to read by passer-by. This protest movement has been initiated by the Franciscan friar Alain Richard.” More than 150 circles of silence spread across Europe. (Alain was interviewed about the Circle of Silence on this French television program. There is also a wonderful short video on Alain embedded in this article published when he moved from Toulouse to Avignon.)
Alain wrote many books on renouncing violence and embracing active nonviolence, and was tirelessly creating new venues for people from all walks of life to see that we are called to the nonviolent life. Despite everything we see in our traumatized world, I believe that a culture of active and liberating nonviolence is possible. If we see such a thing one day, it will because of the efforts of Alain Richard and many other known and unknown agents of change who have pointed us in this direction.
Merci beaucoup, dear brother Alain.
Photo: https://www.sources-vivre-relie.org/centre/fraternite-franciscaine-de-toulouse/122.aspx