It Starts In Our Own Heart.....

Debra on our Emerging Universalist yahoo group posted the following quote the other day:

To know peace in our world, we must become peace in our lives. from the quantum perspective, it makes little sense to shove people impatiently out of the way to get to our parked vehicle, then dart in and out of traffic rudely cutting off other drivers as we race across town to a rally supporting global peace.

I have been reading through a series I found on “Every Church a Peace Church” called The Class of Nonviolence. The morning she posted the quote, I read an article that dealt with the very same theme. Following is a brief description of the class which can be found at

http://www.salsa.net/peace/conv/index.html

Solutions to Violence is an eight session class developed by Colman McCarthy, founder of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. It uses classics in peace and justice literature to teach peacemaking. This course can change your life and you can change the world.

I have these grand plans of reading through the articles in all eight sections (which seem to be grouped by categories) and posting my “review” and summary of each section. Nothing lengthy (as if that’s going to happen) but just an overview with quotes from the articles that I considered noteworthy or profound. I am using Mozilla scrapbook to save the articles and “mark them” electronically. I was using a program called diigo for this sort of thing but there were some quirks I didn’t like about it. (Digressing here) So anyway…..Debra posted the quote above which points out the irony of having violence in our own lives while promoting peace on a global scale. Easier to focus on world peace than to focus on our own violent action of flipping off the guy who takes our turn at a four way stop.

A situation like that will live in infamy in my family, when one day someone purposely took my turn at Confusion Corner (a 6 way intersection…5 stop signs) and I, with a car full of kids, totally stressed out for many reasons, flipped him off out the window….and provided a loud, vocal explanation of the gesture….just in case he missed it. I was enraged. My kids have not let me forget this…..ever….and I am duly ashamed of myself. So I know from close up and personal that it is much easier to focus on why we should not have the death penalty in our country than to focus on what is in my own heart that would cause me to do such a thing. Following are some excerpts from the article in the series called Axioms of Nonviolence by Lanzo del Vasto.


The first thing to learn and understand what it is; the second, to try it out for oneself. But it cannot be learned like arithmetic or grammar. Learning and understanding nonviolence are done from within. So the first steps are self-recollection, reflection on the principles, and conversion, that is to say, turning back against the common current.

For if the purpose of your action is to make the adversary change his mind without forcing him to, how can you do so unless you yourself are converted? If the purpose is to wrest the enemy from his hatred and his evil by touching his conscience, how can you do so if you have not freed yourself from hatred, evil, and lack of conscience? You want to bring peace into the world, which is very generous of you; peace to the uttermost ends of the earth, for you are great-hearted, but do you know how to bring peace into your own house? Is there peace in your heart? Can one give what one does not possess?

As for justice, can you establish it between yourself and others, even those who are strangers and hostile to you, if you cannot succeed with your nearest and dearest? And what is more, if you cannot establish it between you and yourself?
Much more than going into the street, distributing tracts, speaking to crowds, knocking on doors, leading walks and campaigns, invading bomb factories, undertaking public fasts, braving the police, being beaten and jailed (all of which is good on occasion and which we gladly do), the most efficient action and the most significant testimony in favor of nonviolence and truth is living: living a life that is one, where everything goes in the same sense, from prayer and meditation to laboring for our daily bread, from the teaching of the doctrine to the making of manure, from cooking to singing and dancing around the fire; living a life in which there is no violence or unfairness, nor illegal unfairness. What matters is to show that such a life is possible and even not more difficult than a life of gain, nor more unpleasant than a life of pleasure, nor less natural than an "ordinary" life. What matters is to find the nonviolent answer to all the questions man is faced with today, as at all epochs, to formulate the answer clearly and to do our utmost to carry it into effect. What matters is to discover whether there is such a thing as a nonviolent economy, free of all forms of pressure and closed to all forms of unfairness; whether there is such a thing as nonviolent authority, independent of force and carrying no privileges; whether there is such a thing as nonviolent justice, justice without punishment, and punishment without violence; such things as nonviolent farming, nonviolent medicine, nonviolent psychiatry, nonviolent diet.And to begin with, what matters is to make sure that all violence, even of speech, even of thought, even hidden and disguised, has been weeded out of our religious life.

"The training ground for nonviolence is a man's heart"

Is that NOT the truth!!! The training ground for nonviolence is a man’s heart….and home (and in the incident I mentioned above….one’s own car, filled with one’s own children and a few of their friends) How we treat the guy who sneaks in line in front of us with 20 items in the 15 or less line at the grocery store. How we treat our own spouse when they hurt our feelings in an argument…..or when they wrong us (in reality or in our perception of reality). Our co-worker who is so very annoying….a parent who has not parented us the way we think they should….our children when they fail algebra (or biology) when we know darn right well they should have passed. I am not saying we need to ignore these situations (although sometimes letting something go makes the most sense) but to react “nonviolently”. Easier said than done….and I am so “not at that place” but an awareness of what is in our own heart is the first step toward changing it…..with the help of our loving Father, the example of Jesus (the expressed image of the invisible God) and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.