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, 

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.”

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.

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.

Sichuan Province in China has been rocked by a string of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns this year. Eleven members of the Kirti Monastery in the province have set themselves alight demanding religious freedom for Tibetans in China and the return of the Dalai Lama. Six of the demonstrators succumbed to their wounds, the latest being Palden Choesto, a nun from the monastery, who immolated herself on Thursday last week. Even exiled Tibetans have self-immolated to voice their criticism of the Chinese Communist regime. On the 5th of November, a Tibetan activist did so outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, and on the 10th of November, another activist self-immolated at Boudhanath, a Buddhist site on the outskirts of Kathmandu in Nepal. What remains to be seen, though, is whether actions like these will have any significant political effect.

Anti-government sentiments have been flaring recently in the Tibetan communities of China, which have faced the brunt of China’s internal police machinery. Since 2006, the Chinese Communist Party has been spending four times the resources to police the Tibetan communities of Kardze and Aba as compared to the rest of Sichuan. In 2008, Chinese authorities conducted a preemptive crackdown on Tibetan activists during the Beijing Olympics. Counter-protests were violently suppressed, as 10 monks from the Kirti Monastery were shot dead. Since the latest case of self-immolation, the military and paramilitary presence has further increased in the region. Telecommunications and Internet services have been restricted, and journalists have been denied permission to visit the Tibetan settlements.

The political rhetoric from the Chinese government’s public relations wing has been quick to discredit the Tibetan movement. The regime argues that Tibetans are free to practice their faith in China and accuses the Dalai Lama of “terrorism in disguise” for stirring the protests to overthrow Chinese rule in Tibet. Additionally, the Chinese government accused Kirti monks of long being engaged in acts of vandalism and self-immolation to disturb the social order of the region. According to an official document released in May this year, the regime stated that the monks “frequented places of entertainment, prostitution, alcohol and gambling, and spread pornographic CD-Roms” in the region.

Strict measures have been taken to quell the spirit of rebellion in Sichuan. Sources in Dharamsala, the capital of the exiled Tibetan government in India, have said that monks are being forcibly removed from Kirti Monastery, with their numbers slowly dwindling from 2,500 to a few hundred. The regime has planted around 200 government officials in the monastery to monitor its activities and adopted a strategy of “re-education” to tackle the religious motivation behind the protests. Local officials are enforcing laws mandating that all youths under 18 attend government school, and are fining families a hefty sum of 3,000 yuan if their children are monks or are studying at the monastery.

Tibetan political authorities, on the other hand, have been divided in their reactions to the string of self-immolations. On the one hand, during a recent trip to Japan, the Dalai Lama attributed the Chinese government’s “wrong, ruthless and illogical” policy towards Tibetans as the cause behind the suicides. Similarly, Stephanie Brigden, director of the London-based Free Tibet campaign, argued that Tibetans feel that self-immolation is the “only way that they can be heard” in China and across the globe. Both highlight a subtle support for self-immolation as a tactic to vilify the regime and highlight the plight of the Tibetans. On the other hand, the possible successor to the Dalai Lama, the 25-year-old Karmapa Lama, has appealed to his people to end the string of political suicides and find alternative means of challenging the Communist regime. “In Buddhist teaching life is precious,” he said. “To achieve anything worthwhile we need to preserve our lives. We Tibetans are few in number, so every Tibetan life is of value to the cause of Tibet.” It is a major disadvantage for the weaker power to have this kind of ideological fracture among its leaders about so costly a tactic.

It seems the violent repression and political-cultural clampdown by the Chinese regime has cornered the Tibetan monks. The situation has driven them to use their own bodies as political weapons, a last resort to voice their long-suffered plight. On the other hand, the self-immolations have yet to provide real momentum to the Tibetan struggle. While the news of self-sacrifice may momentarily melt the hearts of the global community, it fails to deliver a pragmatic stimulus. This struggle by self-sacrifice is up against a combination of political obstacles, from the almost unassailable geopolitical position of China and the lack of a robust pro-Tibetan political movement in the mainland, to an almost indifferent international community gripped by a financial crisis. Additionally, the tactic has made it easier for the Communist regime to attack the movement’s political legitimacy by branding it as violent and irrational. It has ended up reenforcing Han chauvinism in mainland China and even justifying the government’s draconian tactics to curb the Tibetan struggle. The story of self-immolations has unfortunately failed to reach the forefront of international news, which seems to treat it as outdated in comparison to the Arab Spring.

There must be less destructive and wasteful tactics available to garner greater international support. The Chinese regime is increasingly conscious of its image abroad, and pro-Tibet organizations abroad can take advantage of this. Moreover, as the pro-democracy movement within China continues to unfold, Tibetan leaders might work to build solidarity with it to gain a wider support base for their struggle. Isn’t there a better way than suicide?

Inside my free copy of The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement—Birthright, flush with the cash of Wall Street bajillionaires like Michael Steinhardt, is very big on free—I found tables with statistics: 21% of Ivy League students are Jews, 11% of senators, 40% of NBA team owners, 31% of Forbes’ 400, 24% of Fortune‘s “25 Most Powerful People in Business,” 72% of “25 Real Estate Fortunes Among Forbes 400,” 23% of all Nobel prizes, and on and on. In every arena you could think of, Pease extolled “disproportionate Jewish achievement.”

The last time I’d been in that loft was early 2010, for a pre-trip Birthright orientation. (I wrote about my subsequent trip in The Nation.) But this time, I came with ten young Jews—a minyan—to Occupy Birthright. To liberate Birthright by repurposing its space.

It turns out that the human microphone is a powerful disruptive tool. Last Thursday, for instance, teachers in Chicago rather awesomely Occupied Scott Walker. “Mic check!” they yelled, times two, and proceeded to shut down a fancy breakfast.

“Watch out for the microphone,” Steven Pease told me as I stepped over the cable, en route to the food table. He is a kindly gray-haired man, with a pair of glasses perched atop his head. “Aren’t Jews very accomplished at everything?” I goaded him on. “I thought we were the best at not tripping.” He smiled and answered, “Basketball, the Olympics—very good.” This man apparently cannot be satirized.

I wanted to know who these people sitting around me were, what kind of jobs they work, how they feel about the occupiers laying claim to public spaces and shaping them for their own purposes. But then my friend and co-interrupter Max interrupted my schmooze plans, pointing out the chapter in Pease’s tome devoted to glorifying Lev Leviev, the blood diamond billionaire and settlement construction impresario. Leviev was once a major Birthright donor.

Generally speaking, I’m not much of a chanter. “You come from a long line of cowards and draft dodgers,” my dad has always told me. “Stand at the back.” At demonstrations against the Separation Wall in the Occupied West Bank, I’ve coughed and cried from IDF tear gas—but it was carried on the wind. I am the rear flank by default. And there is a further way to achieve a comfortable distance from experience: scribbling constantly in a notebook.

Israel-loving Jews have a special rage for disrupters. Last November, at the annual Jewish Federations of North American General Assembly in New Orleans, members of Jewish Voice for Peace—which also helped organize this Birthright interruption—stood up one by one interrupting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech. A rabbi ripped one protester’s banner with his teeth. The final interrupter was put into a chokehold after she unfurled a banner that read, “The settlements betray Jewish values.” The man who choked her turned out to be a 7th grade teacher at his synagogue.

We waited and waited for the opening mic check. Steven Pease told us about how he started using Excel spreadsheets to catalogue Jews, like some kind of pre-assimilation “who’s a Jew” throwback. It was cultural, not genetic, he explained. “There’s no reason why blacks, Germans, Jews, Hispanics—anybody—can’t do this.” If Pease said any of this down at occupied Zuccotti Park, everyone would probably lump him in with that anti-Semitic nutjob yelling, “Jews control Wall Street!”

And then, at long last, the mic check came, and we filled the room with our voices, purging it of all the grodiness we’d just heard. We began:

We are
the Jewish 99%
and we’re calling all Jews
nationwide
to join in solidarity
with Occupy Wall Street
AND with Palestinians
who live under occupation
every day!

Let’s stand up 
to the 1%
Of the Jewish community
Birthright doesn’t represent us
We will not be fooled
by corporate CEOs
telling us 
we are the Chosen People
and reinforcing 
Jewish stereotypes.
We won’t be bribed
with free trips to Israel
that whitewash 
the occupation of Palestine.
We demand 
a redistribution of power 
in the Jewish community.
We are young
Jewish
and Proud!
Throughout history
Jews have been persecuted
as scapegoats for powerful bankers.
These memories
give us responsibility
to speak out
against corporate exploitation
and human rights violations.

We made it through a few more verses and were not exactly greeted with applause. A man behind me asked, “Are you guys anti-Semitic?” Two of the women in our crew had their mic check scripts grabbed by their seatmates, who ripped them up into shreds. A man near me corrected, “Gaza isn’t occupied.” (Tell that to the Gazans, or tell that to the activist-filled flotilla that was boarded and diverted by Israeli forces in international waters on Sunday.) There were, of course, calls for us to “get a job.”

And so, one by one, we were (gently) ejected. Liza Behrendt, a rosy-cheeked interruption co-organizer, was led to the curb by a Birthright employee who remarked somewhat mournfully, “You ate all our food.”

We did our best to continue the occupation from the sidewalk. Our voices were becoming hoarse, and we grew tired. Soon, we acquired a disgruntled passerby, an ultra-Orthodox man getting in our respective faces. He shouted down the human mic’s solo shouter, demanding a “dialogue” none of us wanted, utterly derailing the repetition by turning us into a confused clamor. In this way, the human mic is only human.

Chanting half-heartedly, we asked one another if it was time to go home. What’s the point now? Something hard and angry flashed within me as the shouting grew intolerable. As if I were watching an out-of-body experience, I saw myself jump the ultra-Orthodox man, but didn’t. Never before have I fantasized violence.

A text message arrived from an incognito friend still inside Birthright. “People are listening,” Tamar urged. “Louder.” So, reenergized, we chanted and chanted and chanted. “Occupy Wall Street! Not Palestine!”

A fresh-faced girl of about 17, apparently a neighbor, pranced into our chanting sidewalk cluster while doing a little dance, her long hair flowing behind her while she chanted in a  singsong voice, “You guys are all douchebags who don’t know shit about Israel.” Soon she was shouting and being shouted at, the rage level of the whole group rising, the crowd becoming a mob. The next thing I saw was the girl hitting a Palestinian woman named Nancy in the face, to which Nancy replied with a flurry of fists. They were pulled apart, no one hurt. I wondered if those had been the first blows between an OWS protester and counter-protester in New York to date.

Human mic speeches began, and my friends spoke eloquently about the dispossession of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—the occupation of Israel. We were joined by a crew of Palestinians from the Jenin Freedom Theater, a renowned institution in the West Bank. “Where is their Birthright?” shouted my friend Max.

After nearly two months into OWS, I had never been the solo shouter on a human mic. As the others speechified, I felt crippled with the fear of stepping up and finding myself at a loss for words. But something shifted inside me. Maybe it was the mob mentality’s capacity for good that suddenly compelled me to shout “Mic check!” with no pre-planned speech in mind. I will never watch the video, because I know it was glorious, and I don’t want to risk watching anything that might suggest otherwise.

“I am a Birthright alum,” I began.

“There is another way,” I ended. “Join us.”

Eventually the police came. A too-skinny woman with a tan in November, Birthright’s Rebecca Sugar, tried to talk the cops into arresting us. All the Birthrighers had left and the lights had been turned off. Sugar took them inside. When they emerged, her thin lips were all the more pursed in displeasure.

“Next time you do this at an event like this,” the cops told us, “there’s going to be a police barrier.” We laughed. One woman retorted, “What are you going to do—barricade this whole city?”

The cops slammed their cruiser doors. “You guys are behaving like children,” they said with irritation. We cheered: a collective thorn in the side of the powerful.

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PSR) recently answered this absurd question with the obvious and embarrassing answer: when it’s a corporation. According to PSR’s statement, in case anyone is confused, a human being:

is a complex organism with capacities for joy and pain, reflection, and the compassionate appreciation of others. Mature persons are expected to display reasoned judgment, and are personally responsible for their own actions (our emphasis).  Human beings live, breath, think, experience emotions, and internalize values such as empathy and caring for others. Like all sentient beings, they suffer, and die.

Corporations possess none of these functions, which make being human sacred, valuable and worthy of dignity. As the Occupy movements grow in remarkably inspiring ways, they have a unique opportunity to raise the human image from the slander and propaganda of the corporate media—where our capacity for consumption defines us and our desire for wealth drives us—to a more promising, and far more accurate conception of what makes us truly human: our capacity for nonviolence, motivated by our most precious desire for freedom. As Gandhi put it, “Non-violence is the law of the humans…”

It is clear in these movements that we are not fighting against a dictator who has been in power for longer than his share of time; we are fighting a new form of colonialism. It is time to take Gandhi more seriously than ever, as he led a campaign against colonialism for more than 30 years before laying down his life for the movement that we are now called on to continue bravely. Overcoming the juggernaut of corporate personhood through our highest ideals and desires is by no means a painless and rapid process. By its very nature, nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the most rewarding course that we can take. The benefits of what we receive in the process will certainly outweigh any short term sacrifices we may be required to make, even if that means our very bodies.

In order to do it we may have to be prepared to sacrifice everything, but never our humanity—or that of anyone. Resorting to violence would inevitably break the spirit of the movement, and our spirit is what we have in our favor—indeed, it is the whole issue. Violence is inhumanity itself. The admirable nonviolence that has characterized the actions of the protestors so far will have to be maintained as the movement morphs and grows and we find ourselves in situations where how to maintain it is not as obvious. But maintain it we must, since to use violence in the cause of humanity—and nothing less is really at issue here—would destroy the very thing we are fighting for.

Man’s inhumanity to man is as old as humanity itself. How we created a system to perpetuate this ultimate form of inhumanity, declaring that abstract entities are ‘persons,’ is not as obvious. Perhaps it was a cracked system from the beginning; perhaps it was the genocide we raised in the name of personal economic gain, or slavery, or war. Did anyone else notice the cruel irony when we dropped bombs on the “targets” over Japan, that were named “Fat Boy,” and “Little Man”? When Dr. King said that we have “guided missiles and misguided men” was he not referring to the horror where cities consisting of human beings became dehumanized while the machines built to kill them were given human names? Yet he believed that we could overcome that steady violence of dehumanization to guide us toward “beloved community,” not the cemetery of vengeance and destruction. A human being—any human being—must be held worthy of redemption from even our most grievous misdeeds, not because we have faith in a celestial father figure who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, but because we have faith in people.

There are at least two projects, to our knowledge, that seek to recall the giveaway of our precious humanity to abstract corporations through Constitutional amendment: Move to Amend and the Environmental and Social Rights Amendment, shepherded by Rabbi Michael Lerner and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Let them be the constitutional ‘arm’ of the movement. And it would be well for all of us to draw attention to a basic fact, that corporations, as we know them, are by their very definition what PSR calls “a misleading and highly dangerous fiction” when they pretend to sequester human beings from their “personal responsibility for their own actions.”  Even “B-“ style corporations that dethrone the profit motive and observe the “triple bottom line” of person, profit, and planet” do not always avoid this dangerous fiction.

What began in imitation of a wave of political freedom struggles in the Middle East, some nonviolent and some not, has become a critical struggle for the dignity of humanity itself. And for that, nonviolence is the only option.

• Thousands of Malaysian protesters rallied on Sunday against plans by an Australian mining company to open a rare earth processing plant in an eastern resort town, saying they fear it will harm the environment.

• In one of the largest rallies in years in Mogadishu, thousands of Somalis packed into a stadium on Sunday to denounce the Shabab Islamist group for the suicide bombing last week that killed scores of people, many of them students.

• More than 2,000 people protesting potential cuts to the national health care system staged a sit-in on Westminster Bridge in London on Sunday afternoon, blocking traffic on one of the city’s busiest bridges.

• Dozens of preachers from mosques across Morocco protested Monday in the capital over tight controls on their preaching, the first time such a demonstration has been allowed to go forward.

• Bulgarian protesters marched on the nation’s capital, Sofia, on Sunday, chanting slogans against the government’s plans to start exploiting shale natural gas deposits.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and socialite Jemima Khan led a protest in London Saturday against the start of the 10th year of war in Afghanistan. Organizers of the Stop The War Coalition claimed 5,000 people attended the protest in central London’s historic Trafalgar Square.

• Thousands of women gathered in the southern Yemeni city to celebrate Tawakkol Karman, the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Demonstrators also called on the international community to support a revolution in Yemen. At least 38 women were injured by rocks and batons when pro-government gangs attacked Sunday’s march.

Trocmé was no armchair scholar. Nor was he an easily swayed follower of cultural trends. He is best known for his remarkable work as pastor of Le Chambon, a French village, in the early 1940s.

Jewish people in France – including those who had escaped from other parts of Europe – found themselves in mortal danger when the Vichy regime agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany. “The duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences,” he and his fellow-pastor Edouard Theis urged their Protestant congregation. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel.”

Under the leadership of Trocmé and his wife Magda, the villagers saved the lives of thousands of refugees, hiding them and smuggling some to safety across the Swiss border. He was arrested and held for some weeks, after which he went into hiding, and his cousin Daniel died in a concentration camp. But the villagers continued to shelter those in danger, despite the risk to themselves.

This incredible story, which is perhaps the most powerful example of how nonviolence could work even against the Nazis, is recounted in a wonderful book called Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed that I couldn’t recommend more. Hensman also mentions one of Trocmé’s own books, Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution, which is also a must-read and can actually be downloaded for free here.

WNV contributor Mary King pointed out to me yesterday that Irene’s name might not be quite appropriate for a hurricane. It is derived from the Greek εἰρήνη (eiréné), which means “peace.” It turns out, therefore, that so much of what we do on this site is actually “irenology”—the study of peace.

Eirene and Ploutos. Roman marble copy of bronze votive statue by Cephisodotus the Elder, now in the Glyptothek, Munich.

Eirene, the goddess of peace, was among the three Horai, along with Eunomia (Order) and Dike (Justice), and statues of her normally depict her holding the baby Ploutos (Wealth)—the peace dividend. She also represented the season of Spring. The playwright Euripides, in The Suppliants, speaks of her this way:

How far peace outweighs war in benefits to man; Eirene (Irene, Peace), the chief friend and cherisher of the Mousai (Muses); Eirene (Peace), the enemy of revenge, lover of families and children, patroness of wealth. Yet these blessings we viciously neglect, embrace wars; man with man, city with city fights, the strong enslaves the weak.

And Aeschylus:

Then Eirene (Irene, Peace) is … ((lacuna)) for mortals. And I praise this goddess; for she honours a city that reposes in a life of quiet, and augments the admired beauty of its houses, so that they surpass in prosperity the neighbours who are their rivals), nor yet to engender it. And they earnestly desire land for ploughing, abandoning the martial trumpet.

Reading some about how the Greeks thought of Eirene, I’m reminded of how backwards so many modern societies have it these days. Too often, war is thought of as a means to prosperity, a better investment than health care, or care for the environment, or infrastructure. We let our economies become addicted to building weapons, and, when the system begins to crash, we wonder what happened to our wealth.

The Greeks knew better.