Nationality, religion, skin color, gender, sexuality, or any other possible labels are always and only commercial labels, covering the rich product underneath.
Richard Rohr OFM
The root of violence is the illusion of separation—from the Ultimate Reality, from Being itself, and from being one with everyone and everything. When we don’t know we are connected, we will invariably resort to some form of violence to get the dignity and power we lack. Return to who we are, which is always beyond any nationality, religion, skin color, gender, sexuality, or any other possible labels.
In fact, we finally can see that those are always and only commercial labels, covering the rich product underneath.
When we can become little enough, naked enough, and honest enough, then we will ironically find that we are more than enough. At this place of poverty and freedom, we have nothing to prove and nothing to protect. Here we can connect with everything and everyone. Everything belongs. This cuts violence at its very roots, before there is even a basis for fear or greed—the things that usually cause us to be angry, suspicious, and violent.
To be clear, it is inconceivable that a true human would be racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic, or bigoted toward any group or individual, especially toward the poor and vulnerable, which seems to be an acceptable American prejudice. To end the cycle of violence, our actions must flow from our authentic identity as Love.
One of the reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation was to give activists some grounding in spirituality so they could continue working for social change, but from a stance much different than vengeance, ideology, or willpower pressing against willpower. Most activists I knew loved Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s teachings on nonviolence. But it became clear to me that many of them had only an intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery. The ego was still in charge, and I often saw people creating victims of others who were not like them. It was still a power game, not the science of love that Jesus taught us.
When we begin by connecting with our inner experience of communion rather than separation, our actions can become pure, clear, and firm. This kind of action, rooted in one’s True Self, comes from a deeper knowing of what is real, good, true, and beautiful, beyond labels and dualistic judgments of right or wrong. From this place, our energy is positive and has the most potential to create change for the good. This stance is precisely what we mean by “being in prayer.” We must pray “unceasingly” to maintain this posture. It is a lifelong process. Radical union with God and neighbor should be our starting place, not private perfection.
The cycle of violence mirrors the cycle of evil
Brazilian archbishop Hélder Câmara (1909–1999) was a brilliant nonviolent activist who offered a model for understanding how structural injustice leads to greater violence. He wrote: “If violence is met by violence, the world will fall into a spiral of violence” (emphasis mine). I overlay Dom Hélder’s teaching with traditional Catholic moral teaching which saw the three primary sources of evil as the world, the flesh, and the devil—in that order. When evil and institutionalized violence (structural sin) go unrecognized at the first level, the second and third levels of violence and evil are inevitable. If we don’t nip evil in the bud at the level where it is legitimated and disguised, we will have little power to fight it at the individual level.
By “world” we don’t mean creation or nature, but “the system”: how groups, cultures, institutions, and nations organize to protect themselves and maintain their power. This is the most hidden and denied level of evil and violence. We cannot see it because we’re all inside of it, and it is in our ego’s self-interest to protect this corporate deception.
Historically, organized religion has put most of its concern at the middle level of the spiral of violence, or what we called “the flesh.” Flesh in this context is individual sin, the personal mistakes that we make. Individual evil is certainly real, but the very word “flesh” has made us preoccupied with sexual sins, which Jesus rarely mentioned. When we punish or shame individuals for their sins, we are usually treating symptoms rather than the root problem or cause: the illusion of separation from God and others.
At the top of the spiral of violence sits “the devil.” This personification of evil is hard to describe because it’s so well disguised and even idealized. If “the world” is hidden structural violence, primarily through oppression and injustice, then “the devil” is sanctified, romanticized, and legitimated violence—violence deemed culturally necessary to control the other two levels: the angry flesh and the world run amuck. Any institution thought of as “too big to fail” or somehow above criticism has a strong possibility of diabolical misuse. Think of the military industrial complex, the penal system, the worldwide banking system, multinational corporations subject to no law, tax codes benefiting the wealthy, the healthcare and pharmaceutical establishments, the worldwide war economy led by my own country, or even organized religion. We need and admire these institutions all too much.
If we do not recognize the roots of violence at the first structural level (the world), we will waste time focusing exclusively on the second and individual level (the flesh), and we will seldom see those real evils which disguise themselves as angels of light (the devil). Remember, Lucifer means “Light Bearer.”As Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught, Evil only succeeds by disguising itself as good.
A Climate of Violence
We live in a whole climate of violence. There is violence in the area of economics by reason of acute fiscal crises, the repeated devaluation of our currencies, unemployment, and soaring taxes—the burden of which ultimately falls on the poor and helpless. There is violence at the political level, as our people in varying degrees are deprived of their right of self-expression and self-determination and of the exercise of their civil rights. Still more grave in many countries are human-rights violations in the form of torture, kidnappings, and murder. Violence also makes its appearance in various forms of delinquency, in drug abuse as an escape from reality, in the mistreatment of women—all tragic expressions of frustration and of the spiritual and cultural decadence of a people losing their hope in tomorrow.
Here we may not scurry for cover to empty theories or hide behind condemnations of one group by another group. The violence is here; it is a fact. Injustice exists; this is reality. We may not abide this. We may not allow ourselves to grow accustomed to evil, least of all to an evil that is daily and constant.
In a series of sermons, radio addresses, newspaper articles, and public speeches, Archbishop Óscar Romero (1917–1980) of El Salvador called the people of his church and his nation to return to gospel values, particularly those of justice and love as a way to end violence.
I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.
When the church decries revolutionary violence, it cannot forget that institutionalized violence also exists, and that the desperate violence of oppressed persons is not overcome with one-sided laws, with weapons, or with superior force… As long as there is not greater justice among us, there will always be outbreaks of revolution.
The Wrong Kind of World
Violence encourages the wrong kind of world, a world that creates conditions for violence against bodies instead of one that seeks to suture the cultural pain and create conditions for bodies to exist without the threat of violence, says Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, in Body Becoming.
Buddhist teachers Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl Giles write about conscious breathing as a practice of being present, which is an integral part of their resistance to racial violence.Recognizing our deepest feelings, we know we cannot live fully with suffering, invisibility, and dehumanization. Our resistance to oppression is our right to breathe freely, without the force of a hand or foot or knee on our throats constantly draining the life out of us. By watching Black and brown bodies die by police violence without resistance, we slowly die too… And perhaps by not resisting, we unwittingly make a choice to allow ourselves to be silenced because we are too afraid to claim and honor the most precious gift we hold: the breath. But as Black Buddhist practitioners, we intimately know the breath through mindfulness of the breath. In honor of George Floyd and countless others, we vow to breathe. We breathe for the well-being of all sentient beings.
War Is a Spiritual Problem
The nuclear myth, with its false promises of deterrence and security, gets us off almost all the hooks that the Divine Fisherman uses to draw us to deeper levels of spirituality and consciousness: our powerlessness, our essential insecurity, the desire to give one’s life for something bigger than oneself, our fear of death, our capacity for faith, trust, and forgiveness, our restless hearts that long to be united.
Once we squelch spiritual energy in the name of hard-headed intellect and will, three not-so-obvious demons will move in to take the place of Spirit: expedience, law, and propriety. I see many well-meaning people living out of this mindset, unaware that they have abandoned the marrow of the gospel of peace and love and put their hope in “enlightened” self-interest.
Let’s take expedience. It is an early stage of moral development. It is reflected in moral parents who are righteously concerned about the evils of premarital sex but, when questioned, reveal that their real concern is for family embarrassment, future marriage prospects, or setbacks caused by an unplanned pregnancy. Understandable concerns, but hardly dealing with real moral evil.
This brings us to the second false savior: law. For many people, this is what religion is all about: law and order, control, doing what we’re told, and obeying the commandments. St. Paul clearly taught the opposite: “a person is justified by faith and not by doing works prescribed by the law”. But the church got itself into the business of prioritizing good behavior instead of doing what Jesus did.
Finally, propriety. Being proper like everybody else on the block seems always to have been a substitute for real transformation. Middle-class religion loves to bless “the way everybody thinks.” It makes the Sermon on the Mount into a tidy lesson while the poor remain oppressed, the hungry unfed, and illusions maintained. From this perspective, the human spirit remains without compassion—especially among nice, proper, churchgoing folks. Self-serving behavior takes the place of other-serving love.
What does this have to do with nuclear bombs and nuclear deterrence? I am convinced, with Pope Francis, that even owning nuclear weapons is a spiritual problem. The way forward will depend on spiritual transformation at a corporate level. Yet now Ukraine and the whole world are held hostage because Russia and the United States own nuclear weapons.
Violence Begins with the Personal
Theologian Pamela Cooper-White has thought deeply about gender and sexual violence, and believes that at its heart, violence is a failure to see the other person as a person. Violence against women is connected to all other forms of violence, just as all living beings are, in reality and in spite of our forgetfulness or callous indifference, interconnected. We are confronted daily with the many forms of violence in our world. We often end up feeling that our powers are fragmented, as one worthy cause after another is lifted up… What is needed is a way for understanding how, from a personal and holistic perspective, all violence is one.
All violence begins with the personal, with the I, and with a point of decision, a crossing of a line, where each of us chooses momentarily to view another living being as an It rather than a Thou. The ultimate purpose of each act of violence, each reduction of another person from a Thou to an It, is to control the other… Our choices matter, even on what seems like a small scale. They have resonance in the universe. When we truly see another person or living being as a Thou, we cannot dominate or control them.
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