Reflections by Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Perhaps the deepest imperative within the entire moral life is that of being non-violent. It undergirds everything else: Thou shalt not violate others!
So reads the most basic of all commandments. But, for all its importance, it is a certain moral minimum. Beyond being non-violent, we are asked to be, positively, peace-makers. However, all efforts at peace-making must be predicated on non-violence. Violent efforts that try for peace are themselves part of the problem.
Let me paraphrase Jim Wallis – who draws these principles from such great peace-makers as Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and William Stringfellow. Wallis suggests that if our efforts at peace-making are to be fruitful, both within the intimate circles of our primary communities as well as in the wider circles of social justice, we must truly remain non-violent. That implies the following:
- All our actions for peace must be rooted in the power of love and the power of truth and must be done for the purpose of making that power known and not for making ourselves known. Our motivation must always be to open people to the truth and not to show ourselves as right and them as wrong.
- Our best actions are those which admit our complicity and are marked by a spirit of genuine repentance and humility. Our worst actions are those that seek to demonstrate our own righteousness, our purity, and our moral distance from the violence we are protesting. Whenever our pride overtakes our protest, we are simply repeating in a political form the self-righteousness judgement of the fundamentalist: “I’m saved, and you are not!”
- Patience is central to non-violence. Non-violence is based upon the kind of patience that the bible speaks of as “enduring all things”. Thomas Merton taught that the root of war is fear. If that is true, then we must become much more understanding of the fears that people have.
The most effective peace-makers are those who can understand the fears of others.
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