Ever Elusive Peace?

I subscribe to several blogs, but am usually so back-logged by events at the parish and hospital that I usually fail keep up with them. And usually when I do read them, I start with the most out-of-date items, which guarantees that I'll always be behind. But today, I opened my most recent item from the National Catholic Reporter, a baptismal homily by Bishop Gumblelton of Detroit, which actually dealt with the topic of peace. You can view the whole homily here, but here are a couple of choice excerpts:

….We are followers of Jesus, the one who rejects all violence for any reason whatsoever. How many of us would even remember that today, January 16th, is the 20th anniversary of a great tragedy in the world, when we went to war against Iraq, 20 years ago today.

For six weeks -- 42 days and 42 nights -- we bombed Iraq so that we destroyed all of their water purifications systems, their sewage treatment plants, so that they no longer would have clean water. We did that deliberately.

Besides killing thousands of people in those bombings, we destroyed their access to what is necessary for life. We destroyed the whole infrastructure of that country and for 12 1/2 years afterwards, we imposed an embargo that prevented them from ever rebuilding.

Then again, we went to war again in 2003, and we’re still at war 20 years later. Where has been the Christian cry denouncing that war? How many of us have cried out against it and demanded that it end?

…Right after that first Persian Gulf War -- that war lasted only 12 weeks and yet did such terrible devastation -- in March of 1991, John Paul II published an encyclical letter called Centesimus Annus, a letter that was a recounting of 100 years of Catholic social teaching about justice, about peace and how to bring justice and peace into our world.

In the document, John Paul says: “I myself, on the occasion of the recent tragic war in the Persian Gulf repeated the cry, ‘Never again war. No, never again war.’” He was repeating the cry of Pope Paul VI that Paul made at the United Nations in 1965 imploring the nations of the world to reject war. “Never again war,” John Paul says, “I repeated that cry because war destroys the lives of innocent people,” and we refuse to even number those innocent people who have been killed through this war in Iraq, and now this war in Afghanistan.

Innocent people in the hundreds of thousands have been killed during these past 20 years by that war, but then, John Paul also says, “It throws into upheaval the lives of those who do the killing.” …. You can’t learn to kill unless you do something to yourself to dehumanize yourself. That’s how you do it, but you’re not healed from that easily.

So, we have failed, it seems to me, to be the light of Christ. Each of us must take some responsibility for what has gone on for 20 years now and continues to go on and we must, it seems to me, if we really want to follow Jesus, to be a light to the nations. We must say no to this war and to every war to follow Jesus.

I can’t tell you exactly what you must do. I have to keep on thinking about what I must do, but all of us somehow -- if we’re going to be the light to the nations that Jesus calls us to be.

“As God sent Me, I send you,” Jesus said. “Receive the Holy Spirit so that you can carry on My work.” Each of us has to determine how I will more faithfully follow the way of Jesus, to work against violence and war, and to bring peace to our world. …

I spent a few days last week listening to portions of several speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., including one on nonviolence given to the American Jewish Committee. I've also begun a new book, Jesus and Nonviolence, A Third Way, by Walter Wink, which our JustFaith group will be studying soon. This short review of Wink's book by Jon Pahl summarizes his thoughts well:

Wink avoids apocalyptic doom and succinctly traces the biblical, theological, and practical contours of militant Christian nonviolence. Nonviolence, according to Wink, is an alternative to either of the "natural" responses to evil--fight or flight. Jesus' "third way," as Wink sketches it, neither mirrors the violence of power as domination nor flees the scene in passive submission. The third way seeks rather to engage the "powers and principalities" with imaginative forms of civil disobedience, community organizing, and public ritual. These nonviolent means seek not simply to replace power with power but to move closer to the democratic ideal of the rule of law in which justice is built into the fabric of human arrangements, and where human flourishing is structurally insured for the greatest number possible.

"Nonviolence" is such an inadaquate-sounding word for a difficult yet dynamic force. As Wink's book points out in its first pages, "There have been some remarkable success stories of nonviolent struggle around the world recently." After citing Corazon Aquino in the Phillipines, the Solidarity movement in Poland, nonviolent general strikes overthrowing seven different Latin American dictators, and 14 different nonviolent revolutions in 1989-90 alone, he states: "These revolutions involved 1.7 billion people. If we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful. And yet there are still people that insist that nonviolence doesn't work!"

I wish our own U.S. government could get that message. What kind of force do we want to be in the world?