Gandhi and Dr. King used the word nonviolence every hour; they didn’t use the word love. King uses the word love, but he’s really saying, “I don’t mean this or that by it. I mean agape, but we don’t have agape.” —John Dear, Learning How to See
In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) insists that agape love is the path to justice and peace:
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality….
Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.
I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives….
When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros[romantic love] nor philia [reciprocal love of friends]; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all people. Only by following this way and responding with this type of love are we able to be children of our Father who is in heaven. [1]
In the Learning How to See podcast, CAC dean of faculty Brian McLaren invites longtime peace activist, priest, and author John Dear to explore the deep connection between love and nonviolence. Dear has worked on many movements for peace in the tradition of Gandhi and Dr. King to abolish war, racism, poverty, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. Dear identifies agape love as the source of his commitment to nonviolence:
Nonviolence to me means active love, pursuing its common truth, this basic truth of reality, which is that we’re all one. That we’re already united, that we’re already reconciled, that we’re all children … of a God of universal love. Therefore, we can’t kill anybody, much less sit by if someone’s hurting. We killed 100 million people in the last century. There are forty wars happening today. We are on track to blow up the planet and destroy the planet through catastrophic climate change. So, there’s nothing passive about love. Love is active, creative, daring, public nonviolence that resists all the forces of death.
=============
| Hey CO few. ,I had a different newsletter planned for this week — but then ICE showed up in the parking lot of my workplace. It was early in the morning on Thursday and they showed up in four unmarked cars, planning to use the space to stage an operation in the neighborhood. For context, my office is centered in the middle of a neighborhood with a high immigrant population, and is within walking distance of at least three schools.Their presence was a sign that our neighborhood community members were in danger. And so, seeing them pull up, our head of HR (one of the only people in the building that morning) quickly convened with two colleagues and called in a local immigration lawyer. Along with reporting ICE’s presence to the immigration hotline, they were dedicated to getting them off the property. She was scared, but focused. Together, they marched out and confronted the ICE agents and, after clearly articulating they were not welcome to use the space, ICE hopped back in their cars and drove off. We don’t know where their operation was planned; we don’t know where they went next. Our full assumption is that harm was still committed. But in that moment, she did what she knew she was able to do.As we face the everyday effects of rising fascism in the United States, we all have a question to grapple with: what is safe enough for me to do right now? Not what is safe…but what is safe enough. On Thursday, the head of HR at our nonprofit assessed the situation, checked with herself internally, gathered power in numbers, and did what was safe enough for her to do.When actions are “safe”…We are maintaining our sense of comfort; these actions don’t challenge our status quo; they are almost entirely risk-free for us, at least in this moment. Often, but not always, these are performative actions without much influence or impact. (In many cases, not taking action fits into this category as a “safe” action.)It’s important to note: our bodies tend to know when we’re staying too safe for too long. We can feel a sense of guilt or restlessness that we’re not doing enough, as if we’re complacent, or even complicit. While I invite us to hold ourselves gently in this, I also believe these feelings are clear flags for us, waving us (inviting us) toward a different way of acting and living.When actions are “not safe, currently”…These actions threaten us in ways we are not willing to subscribe to in this current moment. As things change, these actions might filter into another sphere, but for now, these are the actions on our “I’m not going to do that” or “I just can’t get myself to do that” lists.It takes a lot of support to do these – and if we do, we will very possibly find ourselves outside our window of tolerance, experiencing intense body responses, such as muscular tension, freeze, or extreme sweating, or interacting with trauma responses based on our life’s experiences. When actions are “safe enough”…These are the actions to hone in on: the actions available to us that are just a bit uncomfortable, that invite a bit of risk for us, that are difficult and require learning or experiencing something new, but are doable. These are the ones that stretch us, challenge us to grow, and push us into becoming someone new, even if it’s ever-so-slightly at first.Communal and societal change happens when a critical mass of folks lean into taking “safe enough” action in the face of injustice and harm. |
