Walter Wink, via Wikipedia.

Fifteen years ago I attended a talk by Walter Wink. Like a growing number of people who knew his work on nonviolence I was a fan, and told him so. He demurred, saying he was just a writer. “It’s the activists who are doing all the real work,” he said.

It was my turn to demure.

Walter Wink died this week. The world has lost a gifted diagnostician of the dilemmas and potential of the human condition. Though the terrain he mined for decades was Christian theology, his work offered insights potentially applicable to all of us. Why? Because his research and imagination relentlessly bore down on the mechanics of systemic violence and nonviolent transformation. While this was assiduously framed in a Christian key, his work offers clues broadly pertinent to understanding the cloying functionality of domination — and the ways we can resist it.

Wink’s universal insights, though, emerged out of his patient exhumation of the often suppressed nonviolence of Jesus. By training he was a scripture scholar whose work was to unpack and referee the conflicting meanings of ancient texts, but by inclination he was committed to discovering and teasing out a new big picture, especially an alternative to the prevailing paradigm of violence. For decades, he managed to put his considerable interpretive skills at the service of this alternative vision.

In his book Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Wink offers a series of incisive propositions. One, drawing from his studies as a theologian, is his judgment that violence is not episodic or capricious but the result of a violent belief system. Just as religious traditions are rooted in a set of beliefs, the phenomenon of violence flows from a belief in its power to save us. Wink said that the greatest religion on the planet is not Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Judaism but the pervasive faith in violence.

The contemporary epidemic of violence stems from our acknowledged or unacknowledged belief that violence ultimately is just and necessary. Wink named this “the myth of redemptive violence.” This myth — in the sense of the foundational story by which we live — permeates our consciousness and our culture. Hence our age’s greatest temptation: to cling to a belief in the effectiveness and preeminence of violence, the conviction that it is “the bottom line,” that violence is the final answer.

For Wink, nonviolent resistance is a critically important process for challenging violence, but, even more deeply, it is an embodied practice that can help to free us from our faith in violence forged in the furnaces of fear, hate, greed, ambition, resignation and capitulation. Creating nonviolent alternatives is a spiritual practice and a way of being at the service of the transformation of our selves, our communities and our world.

For Wink, this vision did not come from abstract speculation. Instead, it flowed from his wrestling with the Christian Gospels. For two thousand years, these accounts of the life and work of Jesus have nourished the convictions of a handful of peace churches like the Bretheren, the Anabaptists and the Quakers, but the vast majority of the Christian tradition have, willfully or not, watered down or stifled the message of radical nonviolence. Like a series of 20th-century scholars — including Andre Trocme, John Howard Yoder, Howard Thurman, Roland Bainton, Ched Myers, and John Dominic Crossan — Wink was unsatisfied with the centuries-old take that had muffled the nonviolent Jesus and that had left much of Christianity colluding with systems of violence, including theological justifications of war. So he turned his exegetical skill on the Gospels to see what they would reveal.

He did this in many ways, but one of the most memorable — and likely far-reaching — was his interpretation of Jesus’ saying to “turn the other cheek” and other sayings in the Gospel of Matthew:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Matthew 5:38-41, Revised Standard Version)

These exhortations has been used for 2,000 years to breed submission and complicity, especially since they were linked in the same passage to the admonition: “Do not resist an evildoer.” Wink began his research by wondering about this phrase. When he went back to the Greek text, he found that the original meaning was quite different. While the verb antistenai has been almost universally translated as “resist,” it is in fact a military term that means “resist violently or lethally.” Rather than encouraging passivity, Jesus was saying, “Don’t be a doormat. Resist violence, but not with retaliatory violence.”

Wink’s work on “turn the other cheek” helped sharpen his point. Jesus’ audience would likely have had firsthand experience with being degraded and treated as an inferior, including being cuffed with the backhand by a social superior, including the Roman soldiers occupying first century Palestine. The typical options in the face of this violence were cowering submission or violent retaliation, which likely would have been suicidal. To maintain one’s position and offer one’s left cheek creates in the cultural and political context of the time a dilemma for the oppressor. As Wink writes in The Powers That Be:

By turning the cheek, the servant makes it impossible for the master to use the backhand: his nose is in the way… The left cheek now offers a perfect target for a blow with the right fist; but only equals fought with fists, as we know from Jewish sources, and the last thing the master wishes to do is to establish this underling’s equality. This act of defiance renders the master incapable of asserting his dominance in this relationship … By turning the cheek, then, the “inferior” is saying, “I’m a human being, just like you. I refuse to be humiliated any longer. I am your equal. I won’t take it anymore.”

Wink makes a similar point about other sayings in this passage (giving up one’s cloak and going the extra mile): an active, courageous, and creative third way exists between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other.

This alternative seizes the moral initiative, explores a creative alternative to violence, asserts the dignity and humanity of all parties, seeks to break the cycle of dehumanization and faces the consequences of one’s action.

Building on these are numerous other rigorous re-readings of the Gospels. Wink offered a revealing illumination of the origins of Christianity rooted in a vision of inclusion, even as this vision has been systematically distorted and devastated by the tradition over these two millennia. Nonviolent resistance, as the examples cited above stress, is key to actualizing vision.

Wink wrote from his theological perspective and has influenced many of us working for justice and peace from that stance. But there is much in his work that illuminates the dynamics of violence and nonviolent change far beyond his particular tradition. As we engage with monumental systems of injustice, Walter Wink’s work can offer us frames that can be adapted to many contexts and settings as we struggle on for the well-being of all.

Thank you, Walter, for illuminating the power of nonviolent change for us in these times of peril and opportunity.

Spirit Affinity Group's action at Livermore National Laboratory in March, 1983. Courtesy of author.

A longtime co-worker of mine became committed to nonviolence during a demonstration he attended many years ago as the movement to end France’s brutal war in Algeria was gearing up. In the midst of a chaotic scene in Paris, he saw a man sitting contemplatively in the street as a military vehicle bore down on him. Rather than running him over — as it seemed very likely just a moment before — the vehicle came to a stop. The driver then nudged the vehicle up to the demonstrator, coaxing him to get up. But he didn’t. This went on for a while, but the protester remained in his fixed position. Finally the driver gave up and swerved around the man, leaving him in the street.

There are no guarantees with nonviolence. This scene could have ended very differently (as it did when I saw my friend, Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, run over by a Navy munitions train nearly 25 years ago during a protest against arms shipments to Central America). But this vignette from a half century ago unfolded as it did because this anonymous man in some unnamed French street had, as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, become like a mountain: centered, poised, relentless. He didn’t rant. He didn’t run. He was here. He was now. And because of this, he transformed a highly mechanistic and objective operation (a military vehicle sweeping away an obstacle in its path to establish preeminence and to reestablish order) into a highly interpersonal and intersubjective one. Despite the roles each person had been assigned in this play, they engaged with one another in a way that was no longer found in the script.

By being here and now, not only did the military vehicle relent — thus dramatizing concretely and symbolically an end to the military barrage being used by his nation to hold on to empire — it succeeded in irrevocably changing someone who was watching. Watching this simple, firm act managed to circumvent my friend’s deeply entrenched defenses and, in an instant, to reframe things. He understood for the first time that we have a power which had previously been only vague and theoretical.

In these days of accelerating movement building, it is useful to reflect on the power of action that is centered, poised and relentless. Just as this long-ago scene on a Parisian street communicated a new way of being to my friend, so all nonviolent action is a form of communication, a specific type of discourse, designed to provoke a new kind of conversation with one’s larger society.

Social movements change the world by changing the conversation. Injustice succeeds by monopolizing the chat, dominating the airways, laying down the law. Social movements rush headlong into history fueled by the conviction that such a one-way monologue is death. They are always dreaming up methods to muscle their way into the room, to pull up a chair, and to flick the discussion in a very different direction using a very different lingo.

While injustice hinges on controlling the semantic universe to manufacture consent — so that money becomes speech and corporations become people — social movements succeed by crashing the party and challenging the chatter. They do this using the most powerful language we have at our disposal: the creaky, resilient and three-dimensional profundity of the human body — whether in Selma or Cairo or a forgotten street in Paris.

Nonviolent action is about stoking a serious, jaw-dropping conversation with one’s society. As the late Bill Moyer’s book Doing Democracy stresses, the goal of a movement is not to convince the policy-maker to change. Instead, it is to alert, educate, win and mobilize the populace on whom the policy-maker depends for her or his power. The aim of nonviolent action is to spark and sustain a conversation with one’s larger society about grievances and their remedies. It seeks to pry open the doors of dialogue, so that whatever injustice we’re pitted against can be seen for what it is and we can finally all sit down and hash it out.

To do this, though, one’s action has to find a way past all the implacable guards posted to keep these doors locked: fear, cynicism, apathy, powerlessness, hate.

The genius of nonviolent action is that it carries within its beating heart the capacity to slip past these defenses. Where violent action can often harden opposition and increase polarity, nonviolent action has the power to circumvent — and sometimes even to short-circuit — the willful knot of emotional and political obstacles a society erects to defend itself against transformation. No one action will create change, but each has an opportunity to advance the society-wide conversation on which change will ultimately rest.

At least three dimensions of nonviolent action help to do this: vulnerability, creativity and a commitment to the larger good. The more these are expressed, the greater the potential that a given action will reach a society’s soul, or at least its “right brain.” The language of bodies in action — vulnerable, creative and implicitly desiring the good of all — speaks to us in a peculiarly poignant and clear way.

Over the years I have seen this embodied power in action. I have seen people bring their deepest selves to critically important conversations, delivering their piece of the truth in person and in public: at federal buildings, at weapons facilities, in the streets, in the public square. Not always, but often, they have changed the atmosphere, opened possibilities that weren’t there before and extended a conversation that seemed stuck.

Sometimes creating embodied power is a conscious process: remembering to breathe, recalling why we are taking action, walking with intentionality and purpose, anchoring ourselves in our heart and our deepest longing, noticing what we are feeling. In nonviolent action trainings, I invite people to choose six words that capture why they are taking this step, a phrase to which they can return again and again during the action. Other times this power comes from the form of the action itself. For example, for many years I participated in “die-ins” to symbolize the destruction that various policies mete out. Being horizontal and silent and immobile in this way induced a focused, contemplative intentionality.

In the 1980s I took part in a die-in at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a member of Spirit Affinity Group. Some of us decided that we would not cooperate with being arrested (to symbolize our unwillingness to cooperate with the lab’s design of nuclear weapons). When I refused to get up after a police officer had placed me under arrest, he started tugging at my arm. “Don’t fool around with him!” his superior yelled from across the street. “Just break his wrist.” The officer grabbed my wrist and I suddenly felt a piercing jab of pain as he started to break it. With no premeditation, I leaned up and calmly whispered, “You don’t have to do that.” We were now looking in each other’s eyes. There was another stab of pain — then it stopped. He had decided not to go through with it. He had just given me a gift by sparing my wrist. I then decided to give him a gift by getting up and walking with him. As we trotted over to the police bus, he abruptly said, “Thank you for telling me that I didn’t have to do that. They brought someone in last week to teach us to break wrists. I didn’t feel right about this at the time, but when my commanding officer told me to break your wrist, I had to follow orders. Something about what you said woke me up. I’m glad I didn’t do it.”

As noted before, there is no guarantee that nonviolent action will always have such happy outcomes. (A police officer broke the wrist of my friend David Hartsough under similar circumstances, and of course many others have paid much more dearly than this.) But nonviolent action bears within its vision and method the potential for transforming the intractable in small and large ways, for helping to break the spell of violence and injustice, just as the two of us in front of a weapons laboratory were momentarily transformed.

Nonviolent action invites us to bring our deepest self to a heart-to-heart with those we encounter in the messy chaos of the action itself and with our larger society. And it invites us to do this through the irreducible plenitude and power of our bodies, creatively risking a little or a lot for the well being of this suffering world.

A general strike can be one of the most potent noncooperation methods in the repertoire of nonviolent resistance. It is a widespread cessation of labor in an effort to bring all economic activity to a total standstill. Although it is easy to broadcast the call for a general strike, it is exceedingly difficult to implement for the maximal impact that it potentially exerts. What’s more, a general strike must be called prudently, because it loses its effectiveness if weakly executed.

The Occupy movement’s calls for a general strike in the United States on May 1 make me think of an instance in which a general strike was brilliantly carried out and with great effect, in Czechoslovakia in 1989 — for only two hours.

For years beforehand, the sharing of subversive literature, drama and ideas against the communist regime had been occurring in Czechoslovakia, virtually unseen. In fact, historian Theodore Ziółkowski reminds us that “almost from the moment when the Soviet empire, after Yalta, swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe, the fight against Communism began.” Thousands of clandestine samizdat (Russian for self-published) publications had been manually typed on onion skin with carbon paper, read, passed from hand to hand and circulated sub rosa. Incarcerated authors and dramatists worked intensively in contemplation and planning from their prison cells. While building strong networks among these civil society organizations in formation, Czechoslovaks considered how to withdraw their cooperation from the communist party-state, and thereby bend it to the popular will.

On November 17, 1989, in Czechoslovakia’s capital, Prague, police brutally interrupted a student demonstration. In response, the Czechoslovak people undertook what came to be known as the Ten Days, as I have recounted in more detail elsewhere. Events seemed to unfold instantaneously, but anyone who has studied nonviolent struggles knows otherwise. Aided by Radio Free Europe and labor unions, Prague’s theatrical circles would become catalytic in organizing a massive national resistance, including major demonstrations against the procedures of the regime. Citizens were emboldened by listening to Radio Free Europe and reading samizdat, and were thus aware of the popular national nonviolent mobilizations already underway in Poland, Hungary and East Germany. The Czechoslovaks also benefited from a more enlightened Soviet policy than during the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. These relative advantages, and the caliber of leadership emanating from the playwrights and thinkers in theatrical circles, meant that the Czechoslovaks would be able to bring about their 1989 Velvet Revolution with astounding haste and effectiveness, a key element of which was the breadth of participation in a general strike.

Overnight on November 17 — Day One — and into November 18, students became determined to go on strike. They spread word to Prague’s Charles University and other colleges and universities. Although students were the first to call for strikes, by Saturday afternoon the denizens of Prague’s famous theaters had declared their support and were proposing a national general strike for November 27. The students straight away endorsed the proposed general strike and for six weeks would persist in striking on their own, to a great extent backed up by similar noncooperation measures by actors and dramatists. As the students published releases announcing their strikes, the theatrical managers and actors circulated theirs, while Radio Free Europe broadcast texts transmitted by telephone. Official media, having long toed the government line, condemned the officials’ violence of November 17. Employees at television stations denounced biased coverage and disputed untruthful news reports. Broadcasts of the first photographic images of the Prague demonstrations proved to be critical because they disclosed to thousands what was happening in their own country.

On Day Three — Sunday, November 19 — a crowd of 200,000 gathered in Prague for a demonstration to protest the police brutality against the students. That night a citizens’ pro-democracy organization called the Civic Forum (Občanské Fórum) emerged, many of whose members had been persistent critics of the party-state. Over the following three days, throngs occupied Prague. Tens of thousands of young people and students took over Wenceslas Square, carrying flags and chanting slogans: “Freedom,” “Resign,” “Now’s the Time” and “This Is It.”

With playwright Václav Havel as the guiding light, Prague’s Magic Lantern Theater became the nerve center of the Civic Forum, in part because of its proximity to Wenceslas Square. Its wardrobes and changing rooms were assigned to committees, and Havel became the author and mediator for the Civic Forum’s statements and positions. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, the forum would act as the speaker for the Czechoslovak people, while coordinating the collective nonviolent actions of the broad opposition. The Civic Forum encompassed most perspectives and sentiments of opposition, and included some reform-minded communists. A Slovak group, Public Against Violence, acted as partner to the forum.

Prague’s theaters were perfect for hearty political debate. Instead of the curtain rising on productions, the actors would lead audiences in discussions of the situation. Signs instantly appeared in theaters across the country reading “We Strike” or “On Strike,” rousing unity because of the popular esteem for the dramatic arts. Theaters in Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava went on strike the next day. Wherever actors and dramatists gathered, they joined the noncooperation.

On Tuesday, November 21 — Day Five — the Civic Forum and student representatives met officially with Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec, who guaranteed that no violence would be administered against Czechoslovak citizens. The government announced that “socialism was not up for discussion,” but no one missed the meaning of such a meeting in the midst of mounting popular defiance. In Wenceslas Square in Prague and in Hviedoslav Square in Bratislava, mass demonstrations ratified calls for a general strike on November 27. Václav Havel addressed the multitude as the exemplar of the Civic Forum, his speech blunter and less courtly than usual. When he and the respected banned priest Václav Malý spoke, the crowd could hear every word, because rock groups had lent huge amplifiers. A message from the Roman Catholic František Cardinal Tomášek declared, “We cannot wait any more,” stressing that Czechoslovakia was surrounded by countries that “had broken the back of totalitarianism,” referring to Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. Bells rang. One journalist reported 200,000 sets of key rings unforgettably jangling. Throngs chanted “Today Prague, tomorrow the whole country!” and “Time’s up!” Striking students held sit-ins at institutions of higher learning throughout Prague.

On Wednesday, November 22 — Day Six — the Civic Forum formally announced a two-hour general strike for Monday, November 27. The forum and its partner, Public Against Violence, sought an incapacitating general strike with the participation of virtually every citizen to exert sufficient pressure on the government to accelerate a rapid, nonviolent transition of power. A general strike could reduce the threat of reprisals among large numbers of participants, yet many were ambivalent about hurting an already stagnating economy. By limiting the strike to two hours, the effect of a general strike would be wielded while minimizing harm to the economy.

Coal miners in northern Bohemia announced that they would join the work stoppage, but no one knew to what extent laborers in the country’s smokestack industries would join the growing noncooperation action. By Thursday, November 23 — Day Seven — Wenceslas Square saw more than 300,000 marching. The party-state started to split and divide. The ministry of defense that day announced that the Czechoslovak military forces would not be deployed against Czech and Slovak peoples. The Civic Forum issued a statement renewing commitment to a Czechoslovak tradition: “We are against violence and do not seek revenge.”

Striking students insistent on free elections and a change in government then sent hundreds of their numbers into the countryside to visit industrial plants and talk with workers, enlisting their involvement in the general strike. The government raised calamitous warnings of economic breakdown and tried in other ways to frighten the workforce not to join the general strike. Reporters who traveled to machinery works encountered busloads of communist militia members blocking the students from contacting the laborers and sharing handouts. The Reverend Václav Malý, now a spokesperson for the Civic Forum, proclaimed that workers at more than 500 enterprises had pledged to strike.

On Saturday, November 25 — Day Nine — the Civic Forum pronounced the upcoming national general strike as a “referendum” on communist rule. In Prague, 800,000 marched; in Bratislava 100,000 demonstrated. On national television, with Havel announcing that the planned November 27 national general strike would proceed, the forum had become the rudder for the nationwide preparations for the two-hour strike action. The forum encompassed virtually the entire Czechoslovak opposition to the party-state, served as the representative for the Czechoslovak public, coordinated the opposition’s civil resistance and had become a national voice. Comporting itself in a sensible, ethical and deliberately open manner — if a slightly chaotic one — the Civic Forum called its program “What We Want” and concentrated on civil and human rights, a free and independent judiciary, multiparty electoral democracy and political pluralism, economic and free-market reforms, and alterations to the nation’s environmental and foreign policies.

Roughly 6,000 strike committees were at work preparing to bring all economic activity to a halt. As midday approached on Monday, November 27, the population stopped functioning as church bells rang. Minutes before noon, a television broadcaster stated that he was joining the strike and would go off the air. Taxi drivers aligned themselves so as to block Prague’s ring road with a two-mile succession of cabs. This elegantly executed national noncooperation action lasted from noon until two o’clock — during lunchtime, so as not to endanger jobs. The colossal industrial strike reflected no divisions between classes, as laborers, workers of all skills, intellectuals, academicians, students, artist and theatrical personnel together orchestrated the nationwide general strike.

This countrywide, successful act of noncooperation brought the Civic Forum and the government into discussions that would soon lead to a peaceful democratic transition of power. The party-state began to yield. The Civic Forum and the government began discussions. The “leading role” of the communist party, protected in a constitutional clause, was formally rescinded. On December 29, 1989, the Federal Assembly, the communist-dominated national legislature, unanimously elected Havel as president.

The artists, playwrights, academicians, priests and activist intellectuals wanted genuinely revolutionary change that would transform Czechoslovakia permanently and construct a resilient democracy. Years of prudently building the strength of civil society had culminated in the ability to mount a memorable and effective national general strike. With the united voices of the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, the people had brought about an expeditious transition of power. Czech educator Jan Urban explains the logic of those who were coordinating Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution: “[F]rom the first moment, we wanted to be aggressively nonviolent in our stance — to make a power of our lack of weapons.” He summarized, “In the course of one week, in November 1989, Winter blossomed into Spring in Czechoslovakia. A nonviolent mass movement … triumphed … in transition from the negation of the old to the building of the new.”

In central San Salvador this morning, members of three organizations representing veterans of the historic FMLN guerrilla forces and labor rights leaders handed over the Metropolitan Cathedral after three months of occupation, in exchange for assurances that sincere dialogue addressing the groups’ demands with the Salvadoran government will begin immediately. Their struggle will continue at the negotiation table, mediated by a permanent commission promised this morning by the director general of human rights for the Salvadoran government, Oscar Luna, who will serve as a mediator along with representatives of civic and faith-based organizations.

While in El Salvador last month on an election observation mission arranged by the Episcopal Church, I hardly expected to find myself sitting across the table from three former guerrilla fighters in the crypt where Archbishop Oscar Romero lies entombed. I had wanted to visit the tomb during my first trip to the country, but I soon learned that the Metropolitan Cathedral had been nonviolently “taken” in January by a group of former FMLN combatants and labor rights activists, and they were not permitting the public to enter the grounds. Days after learning of the occupation, though, I was invited to hear their story.

I arrived with a small group at the locked gates early in the afternoon and was greeted by one of the occupiers dressed in camouflage and dark sunglasses, looking much like I had imagined a guerrilla soldier might — intimidating. But he smiled and greeted us with small talk and the offer of a place to sit in the shade, a reprieve from the scorching sun. When the introductions were through, I was led down a cool, dark stairway to the foot of the bronze shrine to the man responsible for making the Metropolitan Cathedral “the people’s house”: Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated while celebrating mass in 1980, and remains for El Salvador a symbol of justice and struggle for equality. Beside his tomb was a table and chairs, which would be our meeting place for the next two hours.

In those weighty surroundings, we discussed the ongoing struggle for justice in the country, 20 years after the 1992 peace accords. All the while, their camouflage and berets kept causing my mind to see visions of machine guns and child soldiers. But their message that day was one of nonviolent struggle — the guerrillas are fighting with new weapons.

For years, this resistance movement has been evolving. While 14 different organizations in the country represent veterans’ interests, leaders of the groups which occupied the cathedral these months say too many of their comrades have died in poverty waiting for government action, and they decided it was time to take more drastic measures to force the government to address continued marginalization of former veterans. Collectively, veterans’ rights groups FUNDELIDDI and AVERSAL, and members of the labor organization SITRAL are seeking benefits for disabled former FMLN veterans and their families, the reinstatement of former FMLN police officers who were dismissed for allegedly political purposes, the reinstatement of a labor leader who was arbitrarily dismissed and the recognition of their labor organization. To make their voices heard, the organizations’ weapons of choice have included public demonstrations, marches, letters of denouncement, calls for negotiation, hunger strikes and finally, the occupation of this sacred space.

The organizers say that approximately 3,000 police officers, all former FMLN combatants, have been dismissed from the Civil National Police (PNC) for political purposes, in clear violation of the ’92 peace accords, which required demilitarization of the police and fair representation of both sides of the armed conflict in a newly-formed civilian police force. The officers were allegedly dismissed without due process or respect for union policy. Under the current president, Mauricio Funes, a former military general has been named director of the PNC — another step, the organizers claim, toward the remilitarization of the police force. Luis Ortega, secretary general of the Legislative Assembly Union, was dismissed in what occupiers call an attempt to undermine the strength of labor unions by means that violate international labor standards. Ortega says the denouncement of his dismissal from the International Labor Organization in Switzerland has fallen on deaf ears. Proponents of the struggle insist that the stance of the current administration, including the president and the FMLN party deputies, has been anti-union and must change.

Former FMLN combatants currently claim a pension of as little as $98 per month. This has resulted in increased marginalization of former FMLN combatants and their families, and high rates of cyclical poverty. Families of fallen veterans of the armed conflict have been denied dignified benefits by the government, resulting in extreme poverty and even death due to malnutrition and lacking the means to purchase necessary medication. While pensions have increased in the years since the peace accords, which the protesters say required “dignified compensation” for disabled and fallen FMLN veterans and their families, benefits still fall short of national minimum wage standards and are far below the poverty line.

In January, the government announced an agreement with the occupiers which included meeting some of their demands and making others a priority on the legislative agenda. In exchange, the occupiers left the cathedral on January 8, as agreed. Three days following the announcement, though, the occupiers returned to the cathedral, claiming that the government had broken its promises as outlined in the agreement. Until this morning, the cathedral remained closed to parishioners and the public, and tensions and fear of potential forced removal of the occupiers grew as people were unable to worship there during Holy Week.

As recently as last week, mediators claimed they were not making much headway with the government, which has recently sent only low-level representatives to the discussion. Occupiers claimed the government has ignored their cause and in failing to comply with agreements reached in January, are responsible for the extended occupation. FMLN deputies had claimed it was the occupiers who refused to collaborate and were exacerbating the conflict by continuing to lock people out of their cathedral. With today’s agreement, the veterans groups are hopeful that their continued struggle will end in justice for their comrades, but they say that continued pressure from the public and international community is essential to keep the process moving forward.

The proponents of this struggle with whom I met have committed themselves to nonviolent tactics, transforming El Salvador’s history of violent conflict to one of more responsible civic engagement. So far, this has been a local movement that has yet to attract the attention of outsiders, but we should all be watching. Serious labor and human rights concerns are at stake, and a truly nonviolent campaign has achieved the first step toward success. The failure of governments anywhere to recognize and respond to rights violations with due process has broad implications, potentially undermining struggles throughout the world if we choose not to engage. Write a letter, blog about this important movement and show support for continued commitment to nonviolent resolution by staying informed. This is how peace and justice are won.

I’ve often heard it stated flatly at Occupy Wall Street meetings, sometimes with a touch of exasperation, that “occupation is just a tactic.” This can be a hard idea to come to terms with in a movement called “Occupy.” But, to get technical about it, “nonviolent occupation” is #173 on Gene Sharp’s 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action, just before “establishing new social patterns.” As the + Brigades and the Singing Foreclosure Auction Blockades have been showing with aplomb, a whole litany of interesting tactics are available to the movement beyond the now-familiar one of occupying space.

On Wednesday, members of the group Occupy Faith unfurled their first “Parable of an Immoral Budget” in an action that combined a “pray-in” (Sharp’s #167) with “nonviolent obstruction” (Sharp’s #172).

Outside of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office in midtown Manhattan, Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy used the human microphone to decry homelessness. They called for higher taxes on rich corporations, the closing of tax loopholes and respect among decision makers for the value of human life. Next, as this video shows, Michael Ellick of Judson Church led protestors across the street. (It is illegal to protest directly outside the Governor’s office.) At that point, lay and ordained people obstructed the building’s entrance with cots symbolizing the basic right to shelter, which for so many is not being met. They sang and prayed over their neatly-made beds before the police took them away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, a crowd gathered on the street to watch and office workers peered out.

There are seeds of something big in Occupy Wall Street’s early spring actions. To be sure, occupying space can be a useful method. It gives protestors public visibility and a central location from which to plan other actions. In my view, however, a push to retake public spaces, while perhaps offering some benefits, carries a surplus of risks in the form of confrontational showdowns with police, negative media attention and the loss of public sympathy. If there is a need for outdoor places where people could wander in, pick up some materials, talk to protesters and begin to get involved, then weekly Sunday afternoon assemblies in Central Park, or regular gatherings in parks around the country, would more than meet that need without the tents or the threat of arrests.

Rather than more encampments, what now seems to be needed most are purposeful actions, like Wednesday’s pray-in, that have a well-researched message and the capacity to recruit and retain newcomers into organized units. Actions like Occupy Faith’s “Parable” cost the movement little, while making a compelling moral argument. Faith leaders — whose dress added to their credibility — presented clear policy demands and used symbols and rhetoric onlookers could easily understand.

Let me offer a cautionary tale from South Africa to illustrate my point. In the drought-stricken Eastern Cape in 1921, a few thousand Xhosa-speaking Christians occupied land in expectation of deliverance. They were called the “Israelites” because they particularly identified with the Old Testament. After their annual Passover gathering, they refused to leave the site. Instead, they built a new state there reflective of their beliefs. Their leader was Enoch Mgijima, a preacher recently excommunicated from the U.S.-based Church of God and Saints of Christ for refusing to renounce his prophetic visions. In what were desperate times for black South Africans, Mgijima’s breakaway group found peace and hope in their encampment. They could escape punishing laws and look forward to the apocalypse that would be the prelude to a wholesale restoration of society.

The Israelites toiled to become self-sufficient. They built sturdy brick structures. They had their own craftsmen and builders. They organized a nursing brigade, a police force, and a judiciary. According to historian Robert R. Edgar, “Church elders governed village life with a court to try people for religious violations.” Children went to a special Bible school. Members prayed together four times a day and sang hymns such as Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon … We cannot sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In this place, the poor became rich and the marginalized sanctified. Simultaneously, the Israelites withheld taxes and refused to heed government orders. Convinced that the end of the world was coming and it was the only way they would be saved, they clung to what had become their sacred ground.

Several factors contributed to the violence that followed. A fast-growing black labor movement was throwing the state’s control into question. Editorialists urged the government to make an example of this lunatic fringe by air-bombing the encampment, if necessary, to show that flouting the government’s rules would not tolerated. For their part, the Israelites declared they were following God’s law. Both sides dug in. At his wit’s end, a white official asked Mgijima to provide the names of all the occupiers. The preacher refused, saying, “Our names are written in God’s book.” Africans had recently been stripped of major land rights. Only a few Africans could vote. Still, government supporters saw the Israelites not as victims of precariousness and exclusion, but the embodiment of all that was wrong with the “native mind.” Unable to see the other side, the state felt compelled to use force.

After several failed attempts at negotiation, including one attempt by African clergy, armed troops were deployed. Israelite men shielded their women and children. After a standoff subsequently reported on in conflicting accounts, government forces killed at least 183 Israelites by machine gun fire. Another hundred were wounded. All the casualties were on the Israelite side, except for one policeman who received a stab wound. The group’s prophet-leader was arrested and the occupiers were evicted.

The end of the physical violence did not quell the psychological frustrations that motivated this movement, though. A prominent white politician admitted that a new “spirit” had arisen in the people. “By ignoring that spirit they would not kill it; they would merely strengthen it,” said National Party leader J.B.M. Hertzog. “The native had come to a consciousness of independence … to a consciousness of himself that no authority would ever be able to suppress.” Moreover, like other religious movements, the “Bulhoek Massacre” had powerful aftereffects. When weighing matters of tactics, African National Congress leaders in future generations remembered the state’s brutal reaction to poorly-armed men praying to be free. They took that lesson to heart and looked to other tactics.

Occupy is a movement about an idea — valuing people over profits — not any one place. By keeping this vision in view, by maximizing pressure on lawmakers standing in the way of a society that puts people over profits, and by minimizing the blows dealt to the movement, Occupy can win meaningful gains. As Judith Butler writes in the recent issue of the movement journal Tidal, Occupy can advance episodically and retain the trans-issue coherence that has distinguished it from other movements. By appearing here and there, by shedding light on the student debt crisis one week and mass incarceration the next, Occupy can continue to question the legitimacy of the existing social and governmental order. It can keep pressing forward with the claim that today’s urgent social ills are connected at the nodes where money corrupts democracy, human life is violated and greed goes unchecked. And, it can keep awakening people’s imaginations by insisting that equality and freedom are not outlandish formulations but possible states of being.

All of this can be attempted without claiming spaces at a high cost to the movement.

If peaceful resisters do manage to occupy new public spaces this spring, and if their legal rights to assembly are violated by government repression, over-reaction by the state may give Americans the distinct impression that their government relies on violence to silence dissent. Perhaps some spectators will feel an increased sympathy with the movement. However, the O-tactic could easily backfire, especially if protesters get into more skirmishes with the police and the movement begins to look like a smattering of pointless street battles. I’m not the first to make this point. But the point is worth repeating. The stakes are high. There are at least 197 other methods of nonviolent resistance to choose from. Why look back to September? It’s time for Occupy to spring forward.

A protest sign at an anti-Gandhi rally in San Diego last year reveals the tensions that still exist between India's independence leader and minority groups.

When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?

Last month, while I was in India teaching Nonviolent Communication to 120 people, including a significant number of Dalits, I had the opportunity to explore this question further. During a session called “Gandhian Principles for Everyday Living,” a topic about which I have written at length, one of the 60 people present expressed anguish, pain and anger towards Gandhi. He was a Buddhist, like many other Dalits who had chosen to follow the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in leaving behind centuries of mistreatment under Hinduism.

I dedicated much of the two-hour session to hearing and understanding his experience. I learned more about the power of deep empathic reflection than about the issue itself. With the presence and active attention of an entire group, he experienced a profound shift in his perception. In the end he said: “Perhaps it’s personal pain from my childhood and all the experiences I had that I just attached to Gandhi.” He didn’t actually know the details of what Gandhi was held accountable for. Nor did I.

After the training ended, I went on a personal pilgrimage to Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state and the birthplace of the Salt March. I met with the editor of a Gandhian journal in Gujarati, who told me that he believed Dr. Ambedkar saw things more accurately than Gandhi, and that his followers have something to teach the Gandhians. Slowly, the details emerged.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar

The bitter dispute originated in the 1930s, when Gandhi mounted a “fast-unto-death” in response to a British proposal, based on Ambedkar’s recommendations, to award the “depressed classes” (the Dalits) a separate electorate in the Indian parliament. Frantic negotiations under pressure of saving Gandhi’s life resulted in the Poona Pact which substituted a guaranteed number of seats in the parliament for the separate electorate. Although the pact was signed by Ambedkar, his followers, and many of Gandhi’s followers, the complex provisions elaborated in it appeared to many to deny the Dalits any real access to power.

Despite what Ambedkar said at the time to Gandhi and others, he later said he signed under immense pressure and claimed that Gandhi was actually against equality for the Dalits. Ambedkar suggested in a 1955 interview that Gandhi didn’t truly “deserve” the title of Mahatma (great soul). And yet, a close look at Gandhi’s own words leads me to conclude that his position was based on a deep commitment to fully eradicating untouchability from Hinduism.

I have no difficulty understanding and even sympathizing with Gandhi’s reasoning. Gandhi didn’t see political solutions per se as fundamental and lasting. He sought, instead, moral and spiritual paths. He called on Hindus to atone for and redeem the sin of untouchability. He was concerned that being politically separated from the issue would leave Hindus without the motivation to create the necessary change of heart. He believed that his willingness to die would awaken Hindus to the poison of untouchability. Indeed, following his great fast, scores of communities removed barriers to “untouchables” attending temples and drinking water and eating with others.

Nonetheless, I see Gandhi as having made a serious mistake in pressing the point, and am not surprised that his strong opposition to granting rights to a despised minority has been seen as lack of interest in their equality and empowerment.

Knowing people’s dedication to him, Gandhi used the moral force of his person to call on people to live up to a vision that was not yet possible. In other instances, he accepted purely political and less-than-ideal solutions to work with practical realities. This is what Ambedkar was proposing, and what the Civil Rights movement in the US was able to press for: despite a lack of true change of heart, legal-political solutions can make a tangible difference in the lived experience of disadvantaged groups. The vision of a united Hindu society was so dear to Gandhi that he wasn’t willing to accept a partial solution. This error is one of the reasons why Gandhi ultimately failed. The moral force of a person is not sustainable. The partial gains made at the time of his fast were short lived.

Once Gandhi died, all that remained was what people had internalized and integrated. A true change of heart happened only to a few. The legacy of separation, endemic to most of our human cultures, took hold again, and violence swept the country. Instead of the unity and transformation Gandhi sought, and the empowerment and freedom that Ambedkar stood for, India remains saddled with the weight of untouchability, which is still widely
practiced despite being proscribed since 1950, and the Dalit community is splintered into several religions and still separate from the rest of Hindu society. As the Dalit Freedom Network tells us “In 70% of India’s villages…non-Dalits will not eat or drink with Dalits” who also “constitute the largest number of people categorized as victims of human trafficking and human enslavement in any single nation on earth.”

I struggle with similar dilemmas today, albeit with far smaller ramifications. Hardly anything possible in the present would ever align sufficiently with my large vision for me to support it. I nonetheless know that to remain relevant and respected I need to balance vision with practical reality.

No easy answers, ever. Working for a true change of heart may well be an unaffordable luxury when urgent action is required, such as when global planetary resources as well as social, political, and economic institutions are collapsing. And yet, no matter the urgency, if we want to create sustainable long-term change and establish relationships, structures, and systems that serve all life, we need to augment political and structural arrangements with ongoing efforts to transform how we approach social change work. Gandhi’s fundamental lessons still stand. There is no substitute for an inclusive vision and actions based on love.

“Joy and growth come from following our deepest impulses, however foolish they may seem to some, or dangerous, and even though the apparent outcome may be defeat.” – A.J. Muste, dubbed “Number One U.S. Pacifist” by Time Magazine in 1939

It seems apocryphal. An old man well-dressed and undoubtedly erect and respectable, a raging war in a distant land, a relentless rainstorm that made the peace vigil a solitary witness, and an inquiring journalist ready with question, pen and pad: “Mr. Muste, do you really think you can change the world standing here alone in the rain?” (or something to that effect). And the quick and unforgettable reply: “I am not here to change the world; I am here so the world won’t change me.”

Ahhh. Wow. It is an exchange upon which I often meditate.

The world: our consumer culture, the 24-hour “news” cycle, racism, sexism, xenophobia, the cult of war… all these forces and more conspire to change us, to strip us of our humanity and our innate compunction to reach out to neighbor and make the world better. All these forces would like to see us cynical, fearful and compliant. Abraham Johannes Muste does not have to say all that. He just simply uttered a few words and we know all the rest.

I never met the man. He died 45 years ago this month (February 11th to be exact). But from stories and the recollections of others, he seems some sort of pacifist knight. He was born in Holland and came to the United States when he was a small boy. His family settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan. From there he went on to study theology and eventually became a minister with a church in New York City, married Anna Huizenga and had three children.

According to Jo Ann Robinson, author of Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J. Muste, he looked at the world as it was and could not ignore it. He became preoccupied with “how to apply Christian precepts to political corruption and class conflict in America” and that was added to a “new struggle over how to come to terms with massive suffering and dying caused by the Great War.” In a series of essays for Liberation Magazine, Muste wrote:

I had to face—not academically but existentially, as it were—the question of whether I could reconcile what I had been preaching out of the Gospel and passages like 1 Corinthians, 13, from the Epistles, with participation in war.

For those of you who don’t have a searchable Bible in your head, that passage is often read at weddings: love is patient, love is kind… love never fails. But it goes on to say that while there are prophesies and knowledge, they do not last and concludes by asserting, “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

These ponderings made Muste change; he grew more and more interested in the faith and practice of the Quakers, and eventually became a Friend. After that giant step, Muste was involved in many peace and justice struggles. He counseled men seeking conscientious objector status during World War I; he worked with striking workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts and then came to work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. From that post, Muste helped to bring a deeply religious but ecumenical flavor to ongoing work for peace and justice—from war tax resistance and anti-nuclear organizing to the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. These few sentences can hardly do justice to a life so fully lived, but besides the books already mentioned, there are numerous biographical articles online—here, here and here are a good start.

Jo Ann Robinson sums up this unsummable man like this:

A. J. Muste became “Number One U.S. Pacifist” by virtue of his keen insight into the nature of violence and his unquenchable faith in the power of love. His reputation for political acuity and non-conformist activism revolved around his insight. But the prime and sustaining factor was his faith. It lent his political predictions the power of prophetic warning, enriched his pragmatic analyses of society with timeless wisdom about the human condition, and transformed bold confrontations with the state into “holy disobedience.”

Sounds pretty awesome right?

I say, let’s learn more about this man, especially now that there is this new wave of activism and outrage and radicalism springing forth in the United States through “Occupy” and other fronts. I think it all needs a little Muste flavor.

February is a tough month, still very much winter but holding the promise of spring in the offing. It contains a strange collection of holidays and remembrances: Black History Month, so often scattershot and condescending; Valentine’s Day, the international flower, diamond and candy cartel’s brilliant invention; and of course President’s Day, now the official realm of shrill hawkers of furniture and cars wearing tall beaver hats or powdered wigs. A.J. Muste died on February 11, 1967 at the age of 82. Perhaps we can inaugurate a new holiday in the shortest of months—A.J. Muste Day.

Last weekend, Pax Christi Metro NYC honored Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ as part of its Peacemaking Through the Arts Winter Benefit. Outside, the weather was icy, but, inside, friends gathered from as far away as Montreal, Canada, to celebrate Dan. I was invited to give a “testimonial” about a man I had known since birth. It was a tough assignment, but I thought I would share it with the Waging Nonviolence community. I did not really talk about all his many accomplishments; those are well documented in many places, including his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace. Here is what I said.

It is hard to sum up a life in a few sentences, especially when the man living that life so boldly and so fully is sitting in the front row and is smiling wryly and with tolerance. This assignment makes me think about retirement—it brings up a lot of iconic images, doesn’t it? You know; the gold watch for years of dedicated service, the gilded plaque etched with platitudes, the break room or Elk Lodge or church hall party. And then the life afterwards: golf, fishing, carnival cruises, and a fun and stimulating hobby like carving duck decoys or learning French.

Some people never retire. Dan Berrigan has never retired. And we are here to say thank you and thank God for that.

Everywhere I go I meet people who express to me overwhelming love and admiration for my uncle. They mention his poetry, his prose, his bold activism… but most of all they talk about his time. Many of you know this and have experienced the gift of my uncle’s time and attention.

Uncle Dan, you spend so much time with people. And I know the delight you take in their accomplishments. You meet their sorrows and disappointments with empathy and compassion. You give gentle advice without judgment or hector. Your advice has literally shaped the lives—and for the better—of so many people.

Uncle Dan, for so many people, you are a critical link, a life link to a church that has disappointed and alienated so many. An institution that has forgotten or dismissed the man we are taught to follow, the man who prayed and thought and acted on his feet and with his friends, who made a poem out of his life and always had time for children, for women, for the sick and the disabled, for the disenfranchised, for the castigated and the cast-asides. You keep the gospels alive in a cynical time. You bring us back to Jesus, to that man. And you bring the church out of the darkness and the pomp, you free our brother Jesus from its clutches and you bring the sacraments out to us: to the soup kitchen, the picket line, the occupied block, the AIDS clinic, you bring the church to where people are.

I revel—in a slightly awkward sort of way—at these encounters, basking in the refracted glory of my Uncle Dan, agreeing wholeheartedly with how awesome he is and recalling all of our own far-reaching, hilarious, profound and life-altering discussions.

“Well, we solved it all, haven’t we?” he’ll sum up. Or, sometimes, “Come on, we’ve been good long enough,” he’ll quip, and we pour a drink.

I stand here on behalf of  my family—but really on behalf of all these people who celebrate you Dan—far too many to be in this room. And on behalf of all of them, I say: thank you for leading, thank you for listening, thank you for loving.

I would love to give you a gold watch and a holiday cruise to honor your ongoing non-retirement. But instead, I will share the gift of my own poetry. Yep, you heard it here first: Dan Berrigan is not the only Berrigan kissed by Calliope.

A little background. Every Christmas, members of the Jesuit community choose a secret Santa. In addition to a small gift, the men write each other limericks. They are often read in Don Moore’s inimitable cadence. I love this tradition. Limericks unleash the poet inside each of us, and so, to close, I offer my own limerick:

Uncle Dan, you are inspiring
For peace, synapses are firing
Your words are so kind
Brilliant is your mind
So please, no thoughts of retiring.

And because one limerick is never enough, here is another (and I promise it is the last):

Berrigan, you’re second to none
The struggles for justice are won
Love, all for the least
You’re more than a priest
We are all your daughters and son.

That’s it. After Liz McAlister (my mom) and Bishop Tom Gumbleton both spoke, Uncle Dan got up and read a real poem. He wrote it soon after September 11, 2001. I had never heard it before. Far cry from limerick, but good (nonetheless).

Parable

Once on a time
the heart, a sure compass
voyaged
by torrid demarche, portage, storm

to the Land of Basilisks, Neros
tarnished Judges, Dementia
enthroned, Commissars born
thumbs down.

Heart
crossed the border surreptitiously—
was shortly seized.
Crime; “Demeaning
the peoples’ and the state’s integrity,
displaying
for public viewing
a decadent artifact.”

“Honor, the accused was apprehended
distributing in a public place
a drawing entitled ‘Self Portrait,’
portraying
a human frame naked, arms outstretched
a bird suspended from each palm

and in blank mid rib cage
a curious organ
otherwise unknown.”

The demand was resoundingly clear: “We want them back alive.”

During Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which the military government assassinated thousands of citizens, a group of determined women who had lost their sons and daughters to this tsunami of political repression stood up. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo did what few others were willing to: publicly defy this state-sponsored reign of terror by breaking the silence and challenging the chilling paralysis that kept it stolidly in place. They did this by using the most powerful symbol at their disposal, their own vulnerable bodies, as they marched over and over again for years at great risk in front of the presidential palace with their implacable message: “You took them away alive—we want them returned alive.”

Governments quite easily take life. No government, however, has yet discovered how to return it.

The mothers named this state-sponsored killing “assassinations” and the killers “assassins.” The murders were politically motivated, carried out in secret, and covered up. In addition, they bore another important connotation of “assassination”: prominence. To their mothers, these women and men were as eminent and distinguished as any public figure—and only grew more so in death.

This immense violence is unspeakable. This is true not only because words fail to convey the horror of this particular case of terrorism, but also in the sense that theologian and activist James W. Douglass (drawing on the American monk Thomas Merton’s notion of The Unspeakable) means: “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe… a systemic evil that defies speech.”

Since the mid-1990s, Douglass has peered clearly into the void of The Unspeakable by making a protracted study of assassination and its meaning. His raft of books on the power of nonviolent action that preceded this focus—including Resistance and Contemplation and The Nonviolent Coming of God— prepared him to unearth the place of premeditated, targeted killing in the maintenance of the state; in the reinforcement of a culture rooted in the saving power of violence; and (as Douglass brilliantly and soberly illuminates) in the attempt by systems of domination to suppress and extinguish the nonviolent option.  For fifteen years he has been engaged in a long-term research and publishing project focused on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy.

The first book that appeared was JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. This carefully researched study, published in 2008, tracks President Kennedy’s gradual shift from a traditional Cold Warrior to a covert peacemaker who was engaging with his putative enemies to defuse volatile international crises and to attempt to build a more enduring peace on the major fronts of his day, including Vietnam, Berlin, Indonesia, Cuba, and the barreling nuclear arms race. Douglass assembles convincing evidence that Kennedy was assassinated because of this pursuit of the nonviolent alternative.

Before completing his next projects on King and Malcolm X, though, Douglass began researching the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi. As he explained in a 2011 talk at Marquette University, it increasingly became evident to him that what he was discovering about Gandhi’s assassination could shed light on the dynamics of the assassinations that took place in the U.S. in the 1960s.

This week—as we marked the sixty-fourth anniversary of Gandhi’s death on January 30—Douglass published the fruit of this research: Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth (Orbis Books). This summary highlights Douglass’s findings:

While researching [the Kennedy assassination], Douglass learned from Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Indian liberation leader, that his grandfather had been killed by a conspiracy involving powerful nationalist forces within the Indian government—not a lone gunman. This led to Douglass’s rigorously investigating thousands of documents on Gandhi’s 1948 murder. He now provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why. “Gandhi’s murder, followed by the repression of its truth,” writes Douglass, “forms a paradigm of killing and deceitful cover-up that U.S. citizens would soon have to confront in our own government.” No other contemporary writer is exposing the mechanics of assassination as methodically and bravely as Douglass. But because he is a Catholic independent scholar and activist most well-known for his writings on nonviolence and suffering, this book is more than a fresh look at historical circumstances: it’s spiritual spelunking into the depravity of unchecked political power.

Douglass has devoted his life to illuminating the potential of nonviolent action to create options in a world caught in a web of violent and unjust forces—especially by engaging with, having faith in, and loving the enemy. He has done this through his writing, but even more importantly, he has done this by pursuing his own Gandhian experiments with truth. Here are two examples.

In 1979 Douglass, Rosemary Powers and John Clark engaged in nonviolent action at Naval Submarine Base Bangor, the Pacific homeport for the U.S. Navy’s Trident submarine fleet in Washington State. They scrambled over a security fence with the hope of making their way to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC), a nuclear weapons storage area at the center of the base. As Douglass wrote in “Pilgrimage to Ground Zero” in Sojourners magazine (March 1980):

Our plan was to walk through Bangor’s woods, crossing six roads patrolled by naval security, and eventually climb over SWFPAC’s two high security fences in order to pray at “the physical site of an evil we all refuse to see, and thus refuse to take responsibility for”—as we put it in our advance leaflet to the Marines, passed out at the base three weeks earlier.

In the course of our pilgrimage to SWFPAC we spent 12 hours undetected on the base, continuously pursued by helicopters, civilian security guards, the Naval Intelligence Service, and hundreds of Marines as we climbed fences and crawled through the brush… We were finally arrested near a conventional weapons site just short of the high-security fences of SWFPAC.

In meditating on this anti-nuclear pilgrimage, Douglass noted the urgency of finding a way to “break the hypnotic spell nuclear weapons have over America.” He explained that:

After reflecting on the absurdity of the situation—what does one do in the presence of an H-bomb?—we decided that the only thing we could do was to go to SWFPAC, in a pilgrimage to that point of responsibility. Once there, we could only ask God’s forgiveness and mercy for our responsibility in creating such weapons, and pray for the power to be transformed in our collective conscience to a responsible, loving people capable of disarmament.

The following year—on January 6, 1980, the Feast of the Epiphany—Douglass and Clark again made their way inside the base. After not being detected on the grounds of the 7,000 acre facility the first day, they spent an all-night vigil in the woods in preparation for the next day’s events:

The next morning we used stepping stools and rug remnants to climb over the 12 foot-high double security fences enclosing SWFPAC… We walked alone and unimpeded to the first nuclear bunker. It was like a tomb—huge sliding concrete slabs shut under a small mountain of earth. We stood in silence for several minutes on the concrete entry, joined hands, and said aloud the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then we walked on to the next bunker, and prayed there in the same way. We continued our nuclear Stations of the Cross for six bunkers before we were arrested.

The spirit of this Gandhian nonviolence is also conveyed in the text of the leaflet distributed to the Marines at the base beforehand:

We know that it is your responsibility to guard these nuclear sites. We ask you to consider carefully in advance our attempt to join you there. We know that by government regulations you are “authorized to use deadly force” in protecting nuclear weapons. Brothers, we ask instead that you lay down your arms, for the sake of all our lives. We know that you are good people, and that you love and respect life.

Like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—whose courageous vulnerability contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina—James W. Douglass in these and many other actions has communicated his hope for profound social transformation in his own vulnerable body. And like Gandhi—whose vision and embodiment of soul-force continues to challenge and change our world—his hope has been enduringly vested in a transformed relationship with the enemy.

In this time of a growing national security state which increasingly depends on the proliferation of “targeted killings”—one of the faces of The Unspeakable today—may each of us be inspired by Douglass’s words and deeds to take nonviolent action to transform our lives and our world.

Fifty years ago Thomas Merton was doing everything in his power to sound the alarm about the peril of nuclear apocalypse.

Merton, a Catholic monk best known at the time for his many books of contemplative spirituality, poetry, and compelling autobiographical reflection, had suddenly taken the full measure of the atomic threat in 1961. Between October 1961 and October 1962 he penned a flurry of letters to friends, activists, artists, and intellectuals vigorously and prophetically urging a new way forward. These 111 “Cold War Letters”—supported by numerous essays and poems he also produced at the time on this subject—were part of an effort by Merton to create (as theologian and activist James W. Douglass put it in the foreword to this collection that was finally published in 2006) “a spiritual chain reaction counter to the Bomb.”

With Merton’s birthday approaching (had he lived, he would have turned 97 next Tuesday, January 31), it seems an appropriate time to remember—but also to learn from—this pilgrim for peace and how he “waged nonviolence.”

At the far end of the 1950s, Merton began to reframe his understanding of his identity and vocation as a monk. Casting off an earlier separation from humanity that he had avidly and pietistically embraced when he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani south of Louisville, Kentucky in 1941, he came to see that, not only was he part of the world, he was called to love it. This stance did not mean, though, uncritically accepting the world as it is. Indeed, it meant prophetically challenging systems and patterns of violence and injustice that prevent the fullness of love from flourishing. Part of loving the world included critiquing it.

This took many forms. He wrote a series of books and articles against war, beginning with an essay published in The Catholic Worker newspaper entitled, “The Roots of War.” He wrote widely against racism and in support of the Civil Rights movement. He published a book on Gandhi, and supported and endorsed numerous peace initiatives, including the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

He, like many other advocates for peace and justice before and since, was also being tracked by the government. Several years ago I received a copy of files kept on Merton, which had been obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request made by Robert G. Grip, a reporter at a television station in Mobile, Alabama. The collection of documents that was declassified and released is slim but illustrative:

The United States federal agencies queried were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) main headquarters and Louisville office, and the U.S. State Department’s offices of Passport Services and the Central Foreign Policy Records. The request yielded a letter intercepted by the CIA from Merton to [Nobel laureate] Boris Pasternak in 1958 while covertly monitoring letters between the United States and the Soviet Union… The FBI offices revealed information kept on Merton in regards to his involvement with the peace movement (mainly the Catholic Peace Fellowship) and in helping conscientious objector Joseph T. Mulloy.

In support of Mulloy’s application for CO status, Merton wrote a letter dated February 19, 1968 (at the height of the Vietnam War) to Local Draft Board 47 in Louisville, Kentucky, which found its way into the file:

As spiritual advisor, I have been consulted by Joseph Mulloy, who is seeking to follow his conscience in opposition to war. I believe he has every right to do so & also believe that his rights are being denied him. Consequently, doing my simple duty as a priest, I have given him encouragement & support in his fight for his right. I would like to make clear that such support is a religious matter and is not to be construed as an illegal act, nor is it political. It is essential for the preservation of American democratic values that the rights of conscience be respected even, indeed especially, in matters involving violence and war.

This activity probably prompted one of the more intriguing pages in the file. A May 1968 document from the Kentucky State Un-American Activities Committee argues that “a closer look should be taken at the questionable activity within the Roman Catholic Church of Louisville and Kentucky,” based on some “findings” passed along by a group named Catholic Concerned Citizens. Most of the document is blacked out (apparently to protect the privacy of those named), but at the top of the list there is a paragraph on Merton, which concludes “he is of an undesirable element and should be considered the #1 target of your committee.”

Many things likely motivated such vitriol, but, coming just a couple of months after the anti-draft demonstration, it probably is rooted in the conviction that religion and politics don’t mix, especially politics of the progressive variety. But, as Merton indicates in his letter supporting Mulloy, he sees the matter differently. Not so much that religion and politics “mix” as there is a deeper unity they share. This is rooted in one of Merton’s fundamental spiritual tenets, articulated in his prose-poem “Hagia Sophia”:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

The profound indivisibility of reality calls us not only to become aware of the sacredness of every being but also to recognize that a step taken to heal the torn or frayed web of life is not primarily a political tactic but a deeply spiritual act.

As the 1960s progressed, Merton functioned as a spiritual advisor not simply to individuals like Joseph Mulloy but to a growing global network and even to peace and justice movements. (Many years ago, a theologian I met in graduate school told me that during the Civil Rights movement, which he actively participated in, he would occasionally take a long drive to Merton’s monastery. For a few hours, Merton would go AWOL and they would drive the back roads of the area and talk strategy and spirituality.)

But this unique form of spiritual direction (most of which we would call “distance learning” today, since he rarely left the monastery) grew out of his 1961 encounter with the horror of war and its preeminent modern symbol: nuclear weapons. He intuited the logic and trajectory of this latest, technologized version of the myth of redemptive violence. Hence he wrote his Cold War Letters, which Douglass called “a form of praying in the darkness, a search for light with the companions he addressed, a night of the spirit when everything seemed lost.” Douglass frames the crisis Merton was wrestling with:

As he wrote these letters…in the year leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, Merton saw clearly what was at stake in the Cold war. It was the survival of the human race—survival not only physically, from inconceivably destructive weapons, but also spiritually from the ways in which we made the weapons our gods and obeyed their commands….

In a letter to Archbishop T. D. Roberts in London, he feared the situation “amounts in reality to a moral collapse, in which the policy of the nation is more or less frankly oriented toward a war of extermination…step by step we come closer to it because the country commits itself more and more to policies which, but for a miracle, will make it inevitable.

And, as Douglass sketches in his foreword (and illuminates in stunning detail in his comprehensive book, JFK and the Unspeakable) the miracle briefly came to pass. President Kennedy rejected the Pentagon’s plan to launch nuclear war over Cuba and worked with his enemy, Nikita Khrushchev, to defuse the crisis. (Douglass’s book goes on to copiously document how this peacemaking between enemies continued, often in secret, with regard to Berlin, Indonesia, and the achievement of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty until Kennedy’s death.)

But Douglass does not leave it there. He draws the parallels between the crisis of the nuclear arms race of the 1960s and the current war on terror. Like Merton, we are faced today with a monumental crisis: endless war with physical and spiritual death and destruction for millions.

With the increasingly reckless saber-rattling concerning Iran of late, the horrific prospect of a new and even more lethal war has every chance of gaining virtually unstoppable momentum. And so we, like Merton, face a choice: More of the same or a “Great Turning”?

As Merton wrote in one of the Cold War Letters to activist Jim Forest: “Really we have to pray for a total and profound change in the mentality of the whole world.” At this late hour, we are each called to this “total and profound change”—which, like Hagia Sophia/Holy Wisdom, discerns the “hidden wholeness” by which we are all connected—and, in turn, called to put this transformation into concrete, visible and profoundly nonviolent action.

Happy birthday, Tom. Thank you for your life and your enduring light.

In the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh a conflict has been escalating in recent weeks, as ultra-Orthodox men have moved to segregate and exclude women from public spaces, having created men-only sidewalks and seperate seating on buses for women.

In response to an incident in December, where an 8-year-old schoolgirl was taunted and spat on by ultra-Orthodox men for dressing “immodestly,” thousands of Israelis came out to protest this rising extremism.

Ten days later, some 250 women in Beit Shemesh decided to voice their dissent in a more creative way. They organized a flash mob dance to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” that has taken off on YouTube—racking up close to 150,000 views in less than two weeks.

Despite receiving overwhelmingly positive coverage in numerous media outlets inside Israel and around the world, +972 writer Roee Rutenberg called the dance “both antagonistic and counter-productive.” Since there is nothing in the religion that forbids women dancing with women, he argues that had they really wanted to make a statement, there:

Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself.  A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

Last month, TLC debuted a new reality show called All-American Muslim that follows the daily lives of five families in Dearborn, Michigan–home to the largest mosque in the United States. According to the show’s website, “Each episode offers an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”

Within weeks of its premiere, TLC got a taste for itself of such misconceptions and conflicts, as a right-wing attack, led by a Christian group in Florida, pressured 65 of the 67 companies they targeted to pull ads from the show. One of these companies is the home-improvement giant Lowe’s, which is now being petitioned by a coalition of activist and faith-based groups–including Faithful America, Change.org, CREDO, Sum of Us and Groundswell–to apologize and reinstate advertisements. The national chain has also been facing the prospect of store protests and a boycott.

Yet Lowe’s seems unswayed. After a meeting today with a group of interfaith clergy–who hand-delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the company’s headquarters in Mooresville, North Carolina–Lowe’s stated that the decision to pull its ads was internally-based and not influenced by the Christian group. “We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the company maintained, adding, “and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment.”

While the future of the show remains uncertain, cast members have spoken up about the controversy to say how much it has actually helped their community. In a Youtube video posted by USA Today, Nawal Aoude says, “Honestly, I just want to thank this Florida Family Association for doing this because I think what they were trying to do has totally backfired big-time.”

Most Christians—and all who celebrate the shop-til-you-drop version of Christmas—are in the final week of hubbub and to-do lists before the big day where Santa drops through the chimney with a bag full of plastic toys made of toxic petro-chemicals that were imported from China. Is that a tad too cynical? As the holiday season is upon us and folks celebrate (which I, too, enjoy) by generously giving to their favorite charities, baking homemade treats for neighbors, sipping eggnog with family, making foolish decisions at the work holiday party, my thoughts—as a Catholic Worker—inevitably turn to peace.

“What do you want for Christmas?” asks my mother. “World Peace.” I’ve made the joke so many times that it is no longer funny—was it ever? Nonetheless, I slug through the commercialized, state/religious-authority approved versions of Jesus that bear no reference to the poor, to social justice, or to the radical teachings of sharing, inclusivity, and nonviolence that the “Prince of Peace” spoke. “Nothing political,” my mother warns me before any family dinner. Each year, my immediate family gathers with our friends of over 20 years from across the street for games, drinks and a Christmas skit. The Olzen family script is in the works but I’ll give a little teaser for this year’s theme: “Occupy North Pole.” Again my mother forewarns as her eyes settle squarely on me, “but we don’t want to get too political.”

While Easter is, theologically speaking, the most important holy day for the Christian church, it probably enjoys more public specter around Christmas as it has deep roots in American consumer culture. Still, many people will head to church on Christmas who may not any other day of the year. Church leadership, choosing not to alienate its congregations, will steer clear of anything resembling close to a political statement. Christmas Mass—for Catholics—will predictably be a sing-song of beautiful carols and elaborately decorated altars and nativities. We will be urged to give thanks for what we have. Pray for what we don’t have and asked to be generous to our less fortunate neighbors. So long as decorum is kept, controversy kept at bay, and sides are not drawn, it will be a good Christmas… and totally misses the point about Jesus, Christianity, and the state of society.

Lines have been drawn and tipping points reached. The economy continues to falter, the cost of living goes up, social support networks disappear, and war spending, environmental costs, and corporate profits skyrocket. As Occupy Wall Street seeks sanctuary, somewhat controversially, at Trinity Wall Street—an episcopal church—I wonder at how long most churches can avoid the politics of economic, environmental, and social justice? Of course, this is not a new pondering as tomes, dissertations and Glenn Beck have tackled the issue in a myriad of ways. But this Christmas seems different. The politics are different. The possibilities are different. World peace is more than a Christmas wish. There are U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq. There are glimmers of hope—US negotiations with Taliban, a 2014 deadline to end the occupation—that the Afghan war has an end in sight. And where are the churches preaching that good news, even if it is not perfect?

During the civil rights movement, churches—particularly African American ones under the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—played a significant role not just in raising awareness but in organizing and training people in nonviolent activism. To be sure, there are plenty of churches involved in nonviolent struggle today. The Sanctuary movement of the 1980s was largely a Christian church movement and many of those churches are now leaders in immigrant rights work. St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. has long opened its door to activists descending on the nation’s capital for protest. Programs like JustFaith and Advent Conspiracy are trying to get Christian church people connected to social justice and get them involved in social action both globally and locally. It is a good thing and powerfully transforms people’s lives, but there is a little bit of Dickens’ Scrooge in me. I want more. I think we can do better.

So what do I want for Christmas… besides a new soil thermometer? All I want for Christmas is for churches to become the agents and leaders for social change that their creeds profess. All I want for Christmas is for Christians to choose to nonviolently struggle for the love, justice and peace that their faith in Jesus promises. All I want for Christmas is that the 1 percent leadership of political, economic, and religious institutions make the choices that work for all—and that the 99 percent will help them do it through creative and courageous nonviolent action. This Christmas, I want ordinary folks to realize that there is no Christmas without the elves; that Santa relies on their cooperation to make it happen. It is because of the elves—through their hard work, their obedience, and their adherence to the status quo—that Santa gets the milk and cookies. Where are our milk and cookies this Christmas? Well, I guess it’s time to get organized, to get trained. With the late Howard Zinn reminding us “that we can’t be neutral on a moving train,” it’s time for the churches to get moving.

As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

The imperative for the day was to “Re-Occupy”—specifically, to occupy the empty lot next to Duarte, owned by Trinity Wall Street, which is one of the oldest churches in Manhattan and one of the city’s largest property owners. This was also the place where the occupiers had come the morning after the surprise eviction on November 15, only to be promptly ejected by riot police. Now, after a 15-day hunger strike, failed negotiations with Trinity, and even a letter from Desmond Tutu calling on the church to let the occupiers use the lot (followed by another one denouncing protester trespassing), they were back. They wanted a place to build a new encampment, a new headquarters for the movement. Trinity, for its part, gave no sign of budging. And some in the movement weren’t sure it made sense to keep pushing.

“When it comes to space, Trinity has been pretty good to us,” one organizer told me. The church, after all, has already allowed occupiers to use its indoor spaces downtown for meetings, WiFi, bathrooms, and breaks from the cold.

I repeated this to Father Paul Mayer, a Catholic priest and longtime radical. “No, Trinity hasn’t done enough,” he replied. When people are crying out in need, he explained, churches can’t go with business as usual. I asked how he thinks the Catholic Church would respond to a demand like this from occupiers. “It would be worse, of course.”

In the days leading up to so-called D12, as the demands upon Trinity’s benevolence mounted, the occupiers’ request sounded more desperate than strategic: sanctuary. (“#Sanctuary” was even one of the hashtags used for the day, along with “#D12,” on Twitter.) Trinity Church, they seemed to be saying, act like a church!

For the last few months, Occupy Wall Street has given an enormous jolt of energy to the political imaginations and actions of people across the United States and around the world. But now, after more than a month without Zuccotti Park as a home base, the movement has lost its center; meetings often go nowhere, and those who’ve given themselves to activism full-time, without escape or enough rest, are showing signs of wear. As the initial euphoria of the movement wears off, its crisis is in no small part a spiritual one.

By mid-afternoon, I and a thousand others watched as retired Episcopal Bishop (and Vietnam veteran) George Packard, dressed in a purple cassock, was the first to mount a festive yellow ladder over the fence around Trinity’s lot, climb up, and jump down—a trespasser on the land of his own church. Father Mayer soon followed, as did Sister Susan Wilcox, along with a handful of other clergy and several dozen occupiers, who then called on others to join, to come in, to climb the fence and give them strength in numbers. Some did. But soon, the police were in there with them too, arresting everyone inside, clergy and all. As usual, the crowd reacted angrily against police officers—“Shame!” “Who do you serve?”—and some outside of the fence began rocking it back and forth, trying to bring it down. This caused the police to charge, to push people back, to clear the area around the perimeter. The protesters retreated back to Duarte Square, where a dance party was already starting. As they did, they cried a chant often heard in the occupation’s uneasy first days: “This is just a practice!”

Walking around the fenced-in lot, I found Astra Taylor, who had recently articulated her doubts about this action in the third “OWS-Inspired Gazette” produced by the literary magazine n+1. Despite a few moments of excitement as the ladder went up and the bishop went over, her fears were confirmed by what took place. “What is this going to look like?” she asked. To her mind, it wasn’t clear that the movement is strong enough to be targeting its lukewarm friends. She and I watched as police took Bishop Packard away in plastic cuffs, and as protesters ran by, shouting. Citing the silent vigil that followed the pepper-spray attack on UC Davis protesters, she added, “Sometimes restraint is a good thing.”

One can’t help but imagine that, as publicity stunts go, there are more straightforwardly nefarious targets imaginable than a church—even an especially well-endowed and Wall Street-friendly church—whose holdings go to fund outreach and charity, not executive bonuses or political candidates. For a movement that still struggles to make its goals clear to the public, putting the focus on this church, rather than a bank or a lobby or an appendage of government, will further muddy the message and provide kindling to critics.

What would appear to be a strategic faux pas, however, has a certain strategic logic nonetheless—even if a not very articulate one. The movement has lent American society so much energy, rage, and creativity, and it has made a rupture. It has broken a spell. But now it needs the very institutions that have been the mortar of complacency to follow suit, to take risks. It’s not enough to simply applaud the movement and then keep keeping on. The unions need to endanger their comfortable pacts with politicians and big business, to be willing to actually shut down the engines of an unjust economy. The non-profits need to mobilize their resources and knowledge in new, more radical ways. And the religious communities need to offer their spaces, their networks, their moral leadership. Perhaps most of all, their spiritual resources are needed—the wells of hope, the rubrics of ritual, the songs, the techniques of perseverance. These were keys to the success, for instance, of the civil rights movement.

If Occupy Wall Street is in some sense, as Adbusters’ initial call to “Occupy” stated, “a Tahrir moment,” consider Egypt as well. There, the major days of action were Fridays, fueled by the gatherings in the mosques, even despite restrictions imposed on the speeches of state-controlled imams. Protesters prayed en masse before advancing police vehicles. Unions were eventually the decisive force, threatening to halt the country’s economy on the movement’s behalf. After Mubarak’s fall, the revolution’s future depends on those resurgent political organizations strong enough to rally people against the military’s bid to retain its hold on power.

“Sanctuary for Assembly,” reads one of the banners that protesters carried on D17. “Assembly,” of course, is the movement’s insistence that it needs physical, in-person, public, outdoor spaces to conduct its experiments in direct democracy. This is the method by which Occupy has caught fire in communities throughout the country. It’s familiar. But the word “Sanctuary” is something new, with winter just a few days away. It’s a cry, a plea, for the institutions which uphold the way of things to no longer stand aside, but to join in making the rupture grow—to radicalize, and to occupy.