The Beloved Community

Nonviolence educator Kazu Haga writes that a commitment to nonviolence requires us to heal any division between ourselves and those we consider “other”: 

When we talk about building a world where all people can achieve justice and fulfill our potential as human beings, we really mean all people. That is Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s vision of “Beloved Community,” where all people can live in peace. Beloved Community is an acknowledgment that the only way for a peace to ever be sustainable, the only way that our people can always be safe, is if all people are free.… 

Building Beloved Community is not about loving the people who are easy to love. It is about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. Those people over there. The others. Those who root for the Los Angeles Lakers [DM team: Haga is a passionate Boston Celtics fan]. The people who voted for that guy. The people who work in the very systems that are destroying our communities. The corrupt corporate CEO. The foreign dictator responsible for countless deaths.  

If you are not struggling to love people, if you are not trying to build understanding with those you disagree with, then you are not really doing the work of building Beloved Community. The work of building Beloved Community is understanding that we’re not trying to win over people, but to win people over. Historically, winning a war has meant defeating the opponent. There is a clear winner and a clear loser…. But in nonviolence, there is no real victory until everyone is on the same side.  

Dr. King once wrote, “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” [1] While violence may be effective in temporarily keeping us safe from harm, it can never create relationships. Violence can never heal the harm that has been done. Violence can never bring about reconciliation. Violence can never create Beloved Community. Only love can do that. [2] 

Father Thomas Keating (1923–2018) saw love and peacemaking as inextricable from one another and from God.  

We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. Love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Love is all; not [love as] sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest. 

This is also marvelously exemplified in Gandhi’s life and work. He never tried to win anything. He just tried to show love, and that’s what ahimsa really means. It’s not just a negative. Nonviolence doesn’t capture its meaning. It means to show love tirelessly, no matter what happens. That’s the meaning of turning the other cheek. Once in a while you have to defend somebody, but it means you’re always willing to suffer first for the cause—that is to say, for communion with your enemies. If you overcome your enemies, you’ve failed. If you make your enemies your partners, God has succeeded. [3] 

This is from a book that might be helpful

This movement is bold, red, spray-painted letters prophetically confronting the Church’s infatuation with separation and retribution, a beautifully obnoxious sign declaring, “Wake up! Wake up to the image and likeness of God with us, God within us. Repent!” We are in the midst of a great repentance, a re-forming, a de-, and re-construction, a changing of the way we think, a re-aligning with the kindness of God revealed through Christ’s reconciling work of the cross. This movement is a messy, passionate, obnoxious, authentic search for certainty; for the Greater Love Cornerstone so many within the church have rejected. It’s a crude, impudent, and offensive declaration that there is no death love hasn’t defeated, no hell love hasn’t invaded, no delusion love hasn’t infiltrated, no darkness love hasn’t illuminated—there is nothing that separates us from reconciling love. Dear church, this 2000-year-old Deconstruction Movement is part of the reformation we’ve longed for, the revival we’ve prayed for, the billion-soul harvest the church has prophesied, a people in search of Kindness. It’s a repentance movement full of sons and daughters growing sure in love—and fathers and mothers growing confident in reconciliation. Dear church, welcome to the revolution.

Clark, Jason. Leaving and Finding Jesus (p. 65). A Family Story. Kindle Edition.

Inclusive Love Heals All

Franciscan sister Nancy Schreck locates Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence in God’s unconditional and inclusive love. 

The starting place is Jesus’ vision of and commitment to the inclusive love of God that welcomes all to the one table and creates a worldview that critiques any kind of exclusion as a form of violence. One of the radical nonviolent actions of Jesus therefore is to eat with “sinners” and “tax collectors” and all those others which the society of that time excluded. Sharing a common table is nonviolent resistance to the violence of division. In Jesus’ vision, we are all part of one body held in God’s all embracing love. This embrace makes each one a sister and brother and thus makes nonviolence possible. One might say therefore that nonviolence is only possible in community.  

True community creates an aversion to the roots of violence which define another person as “other,” that is, as outside the circle of care. True community roots out violence by dismantling the motive behind so much violence, that the other is not valued…. The person convicted of a crime as well as the victim of that crime are both members of the one body embraced by God’s inclusive love. This kind of love rescues and heals the enemy from violence and hatred [and] … incorporates as a member of the community the one from whom we might be experiencing violence.  

Schreck points to healing as a natural consequence of belonging:  

If the starting place for exploring the nonviolence of Jesus is in his vison of the all embracing love of God, our reflection is furthered by his vision of universal healing. This approach to life includes hope for the basic well-being of the other. This was Jesus’ deepest wish for each person he encountered. In the gospel we see him moving among so many kept outside the circle of well-being by institutional violence which claimed that healing and well-being belonged to some and not to others. Jesus always found those who had been pushed outside the circle of care and invited them back into the community through the door of healing. He taught the community that its well-being was tied to the well-being of each member.  

Jesus also taught that illness is not the result or fault of personal sin. Rather, the focus should be on the sinful assertion that healing is available to some and not to others—with these “others” most often being poor people and those excluded from the one table. Jesus extends healing, holy power, to the rejected and untouchable of the world. In so doing he demonstrates that no one is outside the circle of well-being. In the life of Jesus bodily healing functions as a social metaphor for another kind of healing….  

The kind of radical love Jesus knows in God creates an awareness that human life is not about appeasing a vengeful God, but about responding in love. This is a spirituality purified of violence at its very roots.