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Fire in
Our Hearts
Kim Redigan
(Yoga for
Peace Speach - July 23, 2006)
Right now the world is on fire. Fire caused by weapons
that are only a projection of hearts that have not yet learned to love.
More specifically, by hearts that are hardened by fear. The fear of the
other. The fear of not getting what one wants. The fear of losing what one
has Most of all, the fear of dying. There is no doubt that what is playing
out in our world today points to a larger existential problem - especially
in our country.
I have been asked to speak today about peace and
justice and to share stories of hope. While there are many specifics to
discuss, I think there is a fundamental issue that underlies the conflicts
and violence in which the United States is involved. I believe that the
greatest obstacle to peace in this nation is the illusory belief that
violence can bring about some sort of security when, in fact, life, by its
nature, is insecure. We cannot bring about security by acquiring things and
then building walls and missiles to protest these possessions. We cannot
insure security by bombing others before they bomb us or by designing
missile shields. No . . . at the heart of peacemaking is the acknowledgment
that life is insecure. I think once we really internalize this and accept
the fact that the only time we are guaranteed is this moment, then we are
internally free to do the work of peace.
I recall the day of September 11, 2001. I am a
teacher and was at school that day. After hearing the news, I walked into
the teachers’ lounge to see how my colleagues were doing. Everyone was in a
state of shock except for our Spanish teacher, Anna. Anna had recently
migrated to the States from a Latin American country where violence,
torture, assassinations, and death were routine. I will never forget Anna’s
words on 9/11 - spoken not out of any kind of callousness or lack of
compassion - but words that contained much truth. She simply said, “Welcome
to the rest of the world.” While the horrific attacks of 9-11 were truly
criminal, Americans seem to forget that thousands are killed everyday around
the globe as a result of negligence: food not shared, water not made
available, medicines denied. In Anna’s country, Colombia, humans rights
workers and labor organizers continue to be tortured and killed, often by
paramilitaries trained here in the United States at the School of the
Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia using weapons sold by our government.
My point is that while we were rightly outraged by the
events of 9-11, there was an opportunity buried in that tragedy to ask hard
and serious questions about our role in the world community. My prayer was
that our nation would have the maturity to engage in deep and painful
self-examination. My hope was that our nation would have the wisdom to open
its heart to grief rather than tighten its fists in retaliation. While our
country’s leaders opted for belligerence, I think that many, many people in
this nation awakened to their call as peacemakers that terrible day in a way
that was quite profound.
While most of the violence practiced by our nation
comes from its desire to keep what it has and acquire more - more
possessions and, especially, more power - much of the violence we see coming
from other parts of the world is the inevitable violence that occurs when
the world community turns a deaf ear to oppression and injustice. This is
best expressed by the poet Langston Hughes who wrote:
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore—And then run? Does it
stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over—like a syrupy sweet? Maybe
it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
In the wake of 9-11, our nation’s leaders talked a lot
about “connecting the dots,” but have we taken the time to connect the dots
of injustice - the dots of suffering - the dots of oppression - the dots of
dreams deferred? If we really want to understand the explosions that are
rocking our world, it behooves us to understand what others are trying to
say even when they speak the language of violence. This may be a hard
language to listen to, but it is a language borne of frustration and
despair.
The big question that needs to be asked in places of
violence is Why? A question seldom asked in our hurry to retaliate
and a question that holds the key to peace. Unless we listen deeply to
those we call enemies, those who hate us and even hurt us, we have no hope
for peace. Personally, I find our nation’s inability or unwillingness to
take stock of itself our saddest legacy. The presumption of superiority and
the arrogance of claiming - demanding - for itself what it is unwilling to
grant others fuels the fires of resentment and anger that many in the world
hold toward our country. If we are unwilling to look at our own weaknesses,
our own hypocrisies, our own shortcomings, it is unlikely that we will
muster the maturity to listen to the criticism of those we call “enemy.”
This is a fatal mistake. Our presumed enemies can be our greatest teachers
if we can gain the spiritual maturity to listen to what they have to say.
I have found that in the classroom it is often the
most disruptive, angry, and difficult student who has the most to teach me.
Beneath the surface, such students often have serious needs, concerns, hurts
that are crying to be attended to. Am I going to use violence against such
a student or am I going to humble myself and listen deeply to his
grievances? If we take the time to listen to those we perhaps find most
threatening, we open the door to real peacemaking that contains within it
the power of radical transformation. Martin Luther King expressed it
well when he said: Compassion and nonviolence help us to see the
enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of
ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our
own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from
the wisdom of those who are called the opposition.
To speak of peace without also looking at injustice
rings hollow. While we all know the utter importance of inner peace and
recognize the need to create a peaceful environment for ourselves and our
families, we must take it farther. The cultivation of inner peace must
reach outward to the furthermost corners of our neighborhoods, cities, and
world to help heal the injustices of our brothers and sisters. Can I really
have peace when my neighbor is oppressed? Can I seek serenity for myself
without sharing the struggle of those around the world who are crying out -
sometimes violently - to have their grievances heard? For Martin Luther
King, the answer is no. We are a world community, completely
interdependent. It is impossible to create a peaceful bubble for ourselves
that excludes the pain of others. As King says: As long as there is
poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars.
As long as diseases run rampant and millions of people in this world cannot
expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be
totally healthy even if I just got a good check-up at the Mayo Clinic. I
can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is
the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting
of being independent. We are interdependent.
That we could recognize the truth of these words! I
can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be! We are
interdependent. This means that the struggles of our brothers and sisters
are our struggles as well. It means that in cases of injustice and
inequality, we must take a position. Earlier in my life I believed that a
detached neutrality was at the heart of peacemaking. A philosophy in which
I could stand outside the dirty world of politics and wrap myself in a
spiritual blanket of my own making. Once upon a time I thought that
choosing sides was the antithesis of peacemaking, but I have grown into a
new understanding. Bishop Desmond Tutu, a deeply spiritual man who was
engaged in the struggle against apartheid in his country of South Africa
expresses perfectly why neutrality cannot be a basis for peacemaking. He
says: If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the
side of the oppressor. If an elephant has his foot on the tail of a mouse
and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your
neutrality.
As my understanding of peacemaking has grown, I have
embraced fully Bishop Tutu’s position. As a person deeply committed to
nonviolence that means that I must take certain risks for justice if I am to
really be a woman of peace in situations of injustice and oppression.
Unless those of us who condemn violence are willing to risk our own lives
fighting for justice using nonviolent means, we cannot in good conscience
condemn others who resort to violence in their struggles. How often I
wonder is the violence we see in our world today simply the consequence of
cowardice and indifference on the part of those of us who say we want
peace. We cannot have a soft, easy peace in which we shield our eyes from
the very real injustices suffered by our brothers and sisters. Many are
surprised that Mahatma Gandhi himself said, “I believe that where there is
only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.”
These are hard words coming from Gandhi, but they are at the heart of what
it means to be a peacemaker in the real world.
Ultimately, in the face of oppression and injustice,
we have only three options: The first is acquiescence, which means
accepting the injustice, doing nothing, cowering under the boot of the
oppressor. This is the option that both Gandhi and King condemned as the
coward’s way.
The second and most popular option in our world is the
option of retaliation. The old “eye for an eye” scenario that we know all
too well. This is the way of death. The false belief that violence is
somehow redemptive and can bring about peace. This option fails to
recognize the fact that if you plant the seeds of violence you are not going
to get a peace plant and that violent means never lead to a peaceful ends.
This way never works as we finding out so tragically in our world today.
The third option - and the road less traveled - but a
road that more and more people are choosing to walk - is the path of
nonviolent resistance. This means not acquiescing, not striking back, but
rather, consciously choosing to stand up to one’s oppressor nonviolently.
This is the only option that preserves the dignity of both the oppressor and
the oppressed and that paves the way for real reconciliation. Listen, once
again, to a rather long quote by Martin Luther King. This is what real
peacemaking looks like:
I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself,
and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many White
Citizens Councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate,
myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden
to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter
opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our
capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul
force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in
good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system,
because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is
cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you.
Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we
will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our
communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and
leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your
propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit,
culturally and otherwise, for integration, but we’ll still love you. But be
assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we
will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will
so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process,
and our victory will be a double victory.”
In King’s words, we hear echoes from the beatitudes:
Blessed are the peaceMAKERs. Not the peaceLOVERS. Not the peaceSEEKERS. No
. . . the peaceMAKERS. This suggests that the road to peace involves active
engagement and participation. Getting our hands dirty. Our great teachers,
including King and Gandhi, teach us that peace is anything but passive and
cowardly. As one of my favorite tee shirts reads, Peace Takes Guts. I am
convinced that until those of us who desire peace are willing to take the
same risks as those who believe in the efficacy of violence we will only see
the violence in our world escalate.
Currently, I am on a thirty-day fast in solidarity with
friends who are walking this third road - the road of nonviolent resistance
- in a small village in the West Bank called Bil’in. Just over a year ago,
I spent time in this small Palestinian village where over half the village’s
land has been stolen so that the Israeli government can build a towering
wall and on the other side a large settlement. This land theft and
construction of the wall on Palestinian land is illegal under international
law, but the world community has remained mute.
Facing this gross injustice, the people of Bil’in have
only three options: roll over and acquiesce, respond violently, or resist
nonviolently. Led by a young man of the village, Mohammed Kuttab, the
people of Bil’in organized a popular committee and are opting to walk in the
footsteps of Gandhi and King. They are resisting this injustice with all
their might, but they are resisting nonviolently. Like Gandhi, like King,
they are paying dearly for their resistance, but they carry on.
It is hard to describe what life under occupation is
like: road closures, checkpoints, arrests without due process, home
demolitions, collective punishment, beatings, and torture. The Israeli
human rights organization, B’Tselem meticulously documents abuses in the
territories. It is not a pretty picture. Hence, for a village to resist
nonviolently in the face of such power requires a great deal of courage and
creativity.
Each week the people of Bil’in hold a Friday protest at
the site of the wall usually with a specific theme. One week protestors
chained themselves to the olive trees that were about to be bulldozed,
another week, the protesters marched with mirrors on which were written
messages of both love and resistance that then reflected on the shields
carried by the soldiers who confronted them. Another week, a renowned
concert pianist and Holocaust survivor from Holland had a large piano
shipped to this tiny village and held a concert at the wall’s construction
site as an act of resistance. Just last Friday, our friend Mansour from the
neighboring village of Biddu, got married at the site although the wedding
was disrupted when Israeli soldiers broke up the celebration with tear gas,
sound grenades, and rubber bullets. Three summers ago, Mansour, a
nonviolent trainer with the International Solidarity Movement, witnessed the
killing of six protestors from his own village during its own nonviolent
campaign against the wall.
What makes the story of Bil’in, and other Palestinian
villages like it, such a sign of hope is that their struggle has attracted
the attention of many peacemakers from around the world, including Israel.
These Palestinians are joined each Friday by Israelis and internationals who
are willing to take a stand for the kind of justice that leads to real
peace. One night when the Army drove into town to arrest those who had
organized the demonstration earlier in the day, the people of Bil’in and
their supporters greeted the Jeeps and soldiers with a midnight volleyball
game in the middle of the road. Last December, the village built a peace
camp at the site of the wall and invited settlers to come down from the
settlements and get to know their neighbors.
This kind of nonviolent resistance provokes a crisis,
as King said it would, but also wears down the oppressor. In fact, the
response to nonviolent resistance often becomes even more harsh and violent
as those resisting hold firm because those holding the guns simply do not
know what to do with a group of people who refuse to back down despite the
punishment meted out. Mohammed and many others in the village as well as
Israeli and international activists have been beaten, shot at, arrested, and
interrogated, yet they do not back down. This is exactly the kind of
noncooperation of which King spoke.
Does it work? Last autumn an Israeli soldier stepped
out of line and stood with the protesters. Others have refused military
service in the territories. Over time, one’s conscience cannot remain
unaffected watching others suffer for the sake of justice. The way of
nonviolence is not the way of expediency and fast results, but rather the
slow and often painful route of wearing down one’s opponent by appealing to
his conscience.
Sadly, this story and others like it receive little
coverage in our papers. Our textbooks are full of tales of war but contain
so little on peace. It is a shame that high school students know the names
of generals but know little about Gandhi. I am fasting, in part, to draw
attention to this nonviolent struggle in the village of Bil’in, or, as I
call it, the Birmingham of Palestine. As peacemakers, we must pass these
stories on to others since they give us sustenance and strength and hope.
As peacemakers, we must also do our homework. Like
King, I too have a dream and my dream is that every American would really
study widely, deeply, seriously the later writings of Dr. King. The Dr.
King who named the real axis of evil in our world: militarism, consumerism,
and racism. The King who told us to get on the right side of the world
revolution, and who urged us to shift from a thing-oriented to a
person-oriented society. The King who declared that a nation that continues
to spend more time year after year on military defense than on programs of
social justice is approaching spiritual death. Read King’s speech, “A Time
to Break Silence,” delivered exactly one year before his death and
substitute the word Vietnam with Iraq. It is one of my greatest heartbreaks
that the radical, prophetic Martin Luther King has been reduced to a kind
man who had a dream. His spirituality, his analysis, and his critique of
where our country is headed is more timely now than ever.
I know that many of you here today are spiritual people
grounded in meditation, prayer, breathing. This is the other side of action
and the wellspring of our work. All peacemakers start their work from a
place of contemplation. When we ground this work in contemplation, however
you define it, we come to understand that we are indeed interdependent and
part of the same human family. Through our spiritual practices, whatever
they may be, we slow down enough to look deeply at our world, allowing our
hearts to be broken. The French philosopher, Simone Weil, said “It is
looking that saves,” and she was right. Looking closely at our world, our
brothers and sisters, ourselves saves us from selfishness, from greed, from
violence. When we look upon our wounded planet, we allow our hearts to be
broken and wounded themselves. To look is to suffer, and to suffer is to
know compassion, the root of all real peacemaking.
So today, I invite you to look closely. Look at what
is going on in the Middle East. Look at what is happening to our beloved
planet. Look deeply at our communities, our schools, and our families. If
we look long enough to allow our hearts to be broken, we will find that our
lives are really not our own. We will discover that it is not about our
personal survival, our reputations, or our possessions. Rather, as all the
world’s spiritual traditions teach, it’s bout letting go of our own agendas
and making ourselves available to our human family with all the passion and
compassion our hearts can hold.
I opened this talk by saying the world is on fire - and
it is. Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and many other places.
There is another kind of fire, however, that is raging
through our world - a fire that you will never see on CNN News or Fox TV. A
fire that has far more power than any weapon that humans can devise. We saw
the flames of this fire on February 15, 2003 when millions around the world
turned out to say NO! to war and it was announced that this movement
constituted the world’s second superpower. Each time an individual or a
group breathes, speaks, or acts for peace this fire is fanned.
I think we find that when we allow our hearts to be
broken, they become big enough to hold the holy fire of compassion that
burns away the fear and indifference that hold us back from acting for peace
and justice and freedom and reconciliation.
I would like to close with the words of a woman who
allowed her heart to be both broken and filled with this holy fire, Sophie
Scholl. Sophie was part of the White Rose movement that resisted the Nazi
Party. In February 1943, 21-year-old Sophie was arrested, sentenced to
death, and beheaded. These are her words.
The real damage is done by those millions who want
to “survive.” The honest men (and women) who just want to be left in
peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger
than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take
measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness.
Those who don’t like to make waves - or enemies. Those for whom
freedom, honor, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live
small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if
you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any
noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they
die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as
to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow
streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns
itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.
May all of us choose to burn with a desire to work for
peace, justice, and healing in our world.
May we become flaming torches in a world looking for
light! |
going to take life lying down. Isn’t it true that some people are not
about peace simply because they know that they could never be a pacifist?
Wouldn’t you agree that on some level there’s an association with peace
and pacifism? The thesaurus accessed through this program I’m using to
write this list peacekeeper, peace lover, and conscientious objector.
Let’s face it, pacifist seem to be pretty peaceful. At least until they
explode. Which brings us back to my point about this country being pretty
peaceful, or at least a majority of pacifists. Now before you take
offense, let me include myself in the microcosm of the macrocosm seeming
to be a pretty peaceful pacifist. I haven’t been much more of a sometimes
angry pacifist for the majority of my forty plus years. But yoga awakened
something within me that makes me observe the world through a new set of
eyes. I might have written before that Gandhi, an extreme example of one
living a yogic lifestyle in living the words of scripture including
Christian, Muslim, and Hindu taught, that we should live peacefully and to
do that we must always fight evil. We American’s are living pretty
peacefully. Only our government and our children are engaged in war.
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