Walking With Sorrow
Print Friendly Version| On the Road to Peace by John Dear S.J. | Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2007 |
| Vol. 1, No. 35 |
Last month, some 80 Catholic Workers, Pax Christi folk and other activists from across the West Coast gathered for a weekend of community-building and nonviolent witness at the Nevada Test Site. Father Daniel Berrigan offered reflections under the theme, "Walking With Our Sorrow." A cogent title. I thought of it as news trickled in of the Virginia Tech massacre. It left me horrified and heartbroken. But given our culture of violence, the news failed to surprise me. I marvel that rampages explode as infrequently as they do.
Columbine and the Amish schoolhouse massacres make headlines -- and now Virginia Tech -- but killings go on every day. I lower my head at the statistics: 30,000 die each year in the U.S. by handguns. Some 300,000 assaults each year are gun-related. Nearly half of all U.S. households have a gun. That's some 200 million privately owned firearms, including 65 million handguns. And if those numbers aren't morose enough, suicide rates are highest in those states where guns are easiest to get.
Young people train with hand guns every day; just visit your local video store. And how easy it is to get a semi-automatic. To make it easier, in 2004, Congress quietly ended a 10-year federal ban on semi-automatic assault weapons, with no national or media outcry.
And now we live in a culture in which people go berserk, husbands turn violent against their wives -- and guns are reached for. Moreover, accidents happen (think of Vice President Cheney shooting his friend).
But we shouldn't despair of a solution -- the solution is to ban all guns. Period.
But it won't come easily. Handguns are promoted by the most energetic and fanatical activists in the nation, the National Rifle Association. A chilling coincidence, the NRA had just finished its annual conference in St. Louis the night before Seung-Hui Cho commenced aiming and firing and slaying his peers. But the night before in St. Louis, some 60,000 gun enthusiasts lustily cheered "the right to bear arms."
To counter them, you and I need to be as committed as they are -- only in pursuit of nonviolence and peace.
Of course, the solution defies glib policy changes; change will come, as Merton said, only through a profound metanoia among us as a people. It will entail making the connection among every type of violence -- road rage, workplace intrigues, bloody cathartic movies, domestic violence, child abuse, murder, contingency war plans, military adventurism, nuclear weapons. Metanoia entails our seeing how they're connected, how one leads to the other. And it entails our taking on the long haul of dismantling of all our weapons and the turning toward a new culture of nonviolence.
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And the linkages go on. The terror of Virginia Tech is part and parcel of the daily terror inflicted on innocent human beings everywhere in the world -- Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, Darfur and so many other tragic places. The terror of Virginia Tech is part and parcel of America's ultimate terror -- our idolatrous nuclear arsenal.
Such connections are officially forbidden, and few dare to make them. The disconnect is evident in the president's offer of condolences. He said, "No one can explain such suffering and violence." At the same time he defends and perpetrates massive suffering and violence in Iraq, and elsewhere. His condolences pale in light of his own massacres abroad -- 655,000 dead in Iraq so far.
Iraqis are, as far as America is concerned, without names, stories, faces. Recently we were told vaguely that 70 women students were killed at an Iraqi university Jan. 16. And the day after the tragedy at Virginia Tech, some 230 people died in Baghdad. "Collateral damage," to use the phrase of one former parishioner of mine.
The massacre in Iraq goes on. So do preparations for future massacres. Another round of missiles, bombers, lasers, depleted uranium, F16s, Trident Submarines. Another generation of nuclear weapons. What can they mean but to portend another round of massacres? Do we want a nation where no one is ever massacred? Then we have to work for a world safe from massacres, American-style.
I've read the great spiritual leaders of the last century, people like Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Dr. King, the Dalai Lama, John XXIII, Mother Theresa, Thich Nhat Hanh, John Paul II, Daniel Berrigan, Eileen Egan and Thomas Merton -- and I hear them calling for personal, national and global conversion to nonviolence.
That means, of course, a ban on all weapons, little guns and big guns. What do we do? For starters, we can become students and teachers of nonviolence. We can pass our days studying the methodology and practice of personal, interpersonal and global nonviolence. We can help build new institutions of nonviolence. We can train, we can teach nonviolence to one another. Important people aren't going to do this. We ordinary people have to do it ourselves.
And to begin we must examine our personal shadow sides, as Jung said. We must explore our inner violence, pursue our inner disarmament and healing. And we must lift up the alternative of nonviolence across the country -- a task foremost for the churches. I ascribe this responsibility to all the churches. Our burden, if we can credit our Gospel, is to teach and practice nonviolence. I believe only communities of faith and conscience can offer a clear vision of nonviolence. So we have to educate one another, including our priests, ministers and bishops who remain largely ignorant of this Gospel mandate. And every university must truly outlaw guns and preparations for massacres from their campuses by ending ROTC and cutting all military ties.
How overwhelming it all is -- the Virginia Tech massacre and America's massacres of Iraq and Afghanistan. How overwhelming is the poverty and violence of the world. But ignoring things, numbing ourselves, finding refuge in denial -- this helps no one, including ourselves. It certainly doesn't make us safer.
Sorrow is a good beginning. Grieve. Hold the sorrow. Personal, national and global healing may follow. And amidst the tears take heart. Our tears authorize each of us to play a part in that global transformation. Our broken hearts enable us to sow the seeds of nonviolence.
Notice, "Blessed are those who mourn" comes before "Blessed are the Peacemakers." Peacemaking begins with mourning, but not partisan mourning. Not mourning that bewails our side and taunts the other. Mourn the dead of Virginia Tech. Then mourn the dead of Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul, Bogotá, Port au Prince, Darfur. Mourn the dead of the whole world as you hear of it. Mourn the loss of every single sister and brother on planet earth. Mourn the loss of creatures and creation itself.
Brutal regimes like ours deflect anger and stridency every day. But mourning, walking with sorrow -- no brutal regime can long survive it. We are invited to expand our mourning, to keen and wail, to sit in sackcloth and ashes (as some of us will do once again this August in Los Alamos). Offer love and compassion to everyone. Teach nonviolence. Pursue a culture where handguns are unwelcome, unlawful, unheard of. And unwelcome, as well: bombs, poverty, weapons and war. Embracing sorrow can bring the most implacable empire to heel. It is the human response to an inhuman time.
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John Dear's new book, "Transfiguration," (Doubleday, with a foreword by Archbishop Tutu) is available from www.amazon.com or your local bookstore. For more information on banning handguns, see www.bradycampaign.org. For further info, see: www.johndear.org.
I would make a distinction
I would make a distinction between finding certain people responsible for the massacre and looking for the obstacles that stand in the way of measures that would make it more difficult for someone to act out in such a horrendous way. It will never happen that our society, or any society, will be truly nonviolent. It appears to be something that has biological roots. However, in order to be a society, this inborn tendency needs to be curbed and the opportunities to express ourselves in this way need to be minimized.
Another issue that has not been raised, but that I wonder about, is related to medication for mood disorders. I have a suspicion that when a person whose thinking is hostile is given certain medications that elevate the mood, he is more inclined to act out his distorted ideas. I do not know if this could have been the case in this instance since I do not know whether Cho was taking any medications. I wonder if anyone has encountered such a thing in experience or in things that have been written.
Finally, there is the issue of evil as an external reality rather than as a metaphor for our baser instinct. Did an actual evil force take hold of someone who was not sufficiently resistant either because he was incapacitated for some reason or because he was a willing host for it? I tell my children that nurturing hateful feelings instead of praying for oneself and the object of one's ill feelings is to make oneself hospitable to evil. Does anyone agree with me on this?
You bring up some good
You bring up some good points Marie which I did not want to get into at the time I wrote. I was trying to focus more on the commerce side of the contribution to violence.
On the issue of Meds I have read that certain medications can produce strong psychological impulses, including violence, such as anti-depressants, especially if combined with alcohol. I haven't heard anything about Cho being on any meds. I believe he refused help.
I am wondering if he might have been a schizophrenic? They have an awful time with hearing voices and seeing things. The onset of the disease appears in early adulthood and can be explosive. Now there are meds for that. I have a brother who suffers from that and he is doing really great now, after many years of terrible suffering. He is a walking miracle. But I cannot discount his spirituality, saying the rosary everyday, going to Mass, as major contributors to his better mental health. I cannot discount my mother and father's prayers for him either and all the love he has been shown.
Regarding the issue of evil, that is internal and I believe is something one has accepted in oneself or has worked to rid oneself of. Evil is a huge subject, which I don't have time to really write about here. I've got to run downstairs and make dinner. You are right to talk to your children when they have ill feelings toward another and tell them to pray for those who hurt them and to forgive those who have hurt them in some way. Hatred is an evil and is different than anger. Hatred is something that someone has made up their mind to keep, and therefore is being hospitable as you say to the evil. Anger is the emotion we can hold onto if we don't forgive our enemy, and don't forgive even our loved ones that can sometimes drive us crazy.....
I would tell my son to forgive the person that hurt him and that would lead to a discussion. The discussion helps to bring the tension out and one is better able to see the situation objectively and identify the good and the evil. He has turned out to be such a loving son. He graduates next week from college. God bless you and your family.
In the years I was growing
In the years I was growing up, during the forties and fifties, how often was it that a friend of a classmate or a kid in Town would fall victim to an accidental shooting? About at least once a year. The scenarion was like this: someone was "playing with a gun". "It was not loaded" (But it turned out to be.) Quite often the young person or often, the small child, was killed instantly, or maybe, if lucky, they were just blinded in one eye, or "only" wounded. We would all shake our heads, and think it was a tragedy.
When my firstborn son was about five, he came running into the house. "Joey has a gun," he said of his playmate the little boy across the street. I sighed with relief that my son had come to tell me and went to find Joey's Mom. Joey insisted on leading us into the house (turned out Mom wasn't home; I didn't realize) and showed us proudly the REAL gun inside a table drawer, which he had been showing off to my precious son. I told his Mother, who was blase. Turns out it was loaded. Needless to say, my son did not go across the street to play anymore, but I still did not sleep well until we moved about a year later. This happens all over the U.S., sometime without parents' awareness.
We had a dear and close friend. he was the Husband of my Mom's dear childhood friend and a good friend of my Dad's, he had little girls our age. We loved him second only to our Dad. When he retired, he became the exec Director of the NRA. "Now why would he do that?" I thought to myself, as I thought of all those dead and at-risk children. (I knew what a good Dad he had been, firsthand.) He himself has passed on, now. I wonder if that good man ("The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for enough good men to do nothing.") and his other "good men" buddies are looking on from "Somewhere" now in horror, to see what has happened at Columbines, at my youngest's old school, Virginia Tech, at what that isolated little skateboarder did in San Diego, at what happened at Red Lakes...
We may not be able to totally diagnose Mr. Cho, that terribly frozen, disturbed young man who finally "snapped". But we do know he was "unstable"--yes he was. UN-STABLE. If he had not been able to purchase an ASSAULT WEAPON, who knows, he might have been able to ask for help (although it appears unlikely) or perhaps someone might have found him help, like they did before. MORE TIME MIGHT HAVE BEEN BOUGHT.
The concept of "Buying time" for the troubled people is always a good one. But an assault weapon in the hands of an unstable person---there is absolutely no rhyme or reason for that. Mr. Cho was terribly, terribly ill. But the people who advocate for assault weapons in the hands of the general public are not??? Because of these so-called unthinking "responsible citizens" who advocate for things most of the Western civilized world finds horrific, uncounted human beings are in agony today.
"When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn."
I wholeheartedly agree with
I wholeheartedly agree with your view. There is a direct correlation to the amounts of shootings we hear about and the laws that are upheld, supported and advocated by the NRA.
I have noticed a considerable increase to these incidents of gun violence in nice middle and upper class neighborhoods in suburbia USA. It is no longer just a city problem. Recently, very near to where I live, a man shot and killed his wife in a shopping center parking lot, because she filed for divorce from him. He then shot himself and died. They had two children in their teens that are now orphans. And in a very wealthy neighborhood a man shot his ex-business partner and partner's wife and father in their gorgeous mansion over money and what he thought was a bad business deal that he lost in court.
This gun violence is all too close to home and is increasingly dangerous to allow so many weapons to be in the hands of the general public, let alone someone deemed to be mentally ill, such as Cho.
The statistics in Fr. John Dear's article are:
* "30,000 die each year in the U.S. by handguns.
* 300,000 assaults each yr. in U.S-are gun-related
* Nearly half of all households have a gun
* 200 million privately owned firearms
* 65 million handguns"
It is a very sad situation when a huge portion of a nation's people decides that it is best to own a gun. And when children find those guns and start to play with those guns and get hurt or killed, even sadder still.
I don't know when they will ever learn.
I grew up in the 1950's and 60's. A violent time indeed. It was a time when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. As if that was not bad enough, then Robert Kennedy was shot and killed, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. I saw Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald on TV. Television shows and western movies popular during that time elevated gun toters like John Wayne to hero status. That is the "culture" we are up against.
Now we have politicians who last night in a Republican Presidential Candidate's Debate say to us all and the younger generation that justice means killing, revenge.
Romney commented: "It's more than Osama bin Laden. But he is going to pay and he will die."
McCain said "bin Laden's responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans. We will do whatever is necessary. We will track him down. We will catch him. We will bring him to justice and I'll follow him to the gates of hell," he said.
McCain acts like he is in a Wild West movie, wearing the white hat he believes, to go after the bad guys and will "follow (binLaden) to the gates of hell." That is exactly where he will be taking the American people and the military if he is elected, right to the gates of hell, when he pursues this type of "justice."
As Christians, we are to follow Jesus Christ, not BinLaden or someone else that we want to kill. "Vengeance is mine" said the Lord. If we believe and have faith, let go and let the Lord. "We neither have to toil or spin" said the Lord. He will provide for all of our needs. Faith in God is the answer. Love for your enemy is the answer the Lord has given us. Yet these politicians show no true faith in God, but they show faith in their own power, their own form of justice, which is not God's justice.
I don't know when they will ever learn. But I know that Jesus said that he has conquered the world, he has conquered evil, he has conquered death. I will follow Jesus to the gates of heaven, and try to lead others to the gates of heaven, while those Wild West folks with all their guns reach for the gates of hell.
"As Christians, we are to
"As Christians, we are to follow Jesus Christ, not BinLaden or someone else that we want to kill."
I like how you phrased that. Too bad you weren't part of that debate.
Irene, I have complete faith
Irene, I have complete faith that you and your family members would never shoot me with your handgun. However, there is a scholarship honoring Sr. John Clement Hungerman, who formerly taught at Marygrove College in Detroit. She was killed by a handgun stolen from a suburban home of a family on vacation. I pray that your handgun never finds its way into the wrong hands. For many reasons including this terribly sad example, I will not own a handgun.
Mark D.
Mark, I also do not own a
Mark,
I also do not own a handgun, or any gun, for that matter.
Consider, though, that this only prevents our personally being involved in a gun crime using a gun that we own.
The tragic example you provide and all the other examples we can find of murder using a gun are ultimately the fault of the murderer, not the gun. Instead of shootings, these could have been deaths due to beatings or stabbings.
However, there is another type of killing that is neither personal to the victim or accidental. This is what happened in Virginia.
It would have been prevented if certain types of guns had not been available for sale.
These types of guns are only available because the NRA is such a strong voting block and its members have been convinced by politicians that their freedom to own any kind of gun is in danger. Politicians have done this in order to assure themselves of a ready cache of voters, and it has been working.
The argument against my position is that Cho could have strapped on a bomb and taken out a large number of people that way. However, those of us who are not defensive of gun rights believe that it still would not have been so deadly as that assault was, while those who feel threatened by gun control imagine that Cho would have developed a nuclear weapon.
Rather than letting this incident at Virginia Tech become yet another point of contention to be exploited at election time, it would be best to approach the issue by reassuring sportsmen and those who live in circumstances in which a gun is needed for protection.
Katharine Mourn the
Katharine
Mourn the suffering of planet earth. Praise the attempts of God and nature to continue to give us time and opportunity to heal, time to do better.
I was deeply moved by the
I was deeply moved by the trailer for the film and the writing Walking With Sorrow by Fr. John Dear, SJ. I was moved to sorrow as I watched the images of detonated nuclear bombs, the shooting in the head of what appeared just young children in their teens by military personnel who were "just following orders" in what I believe is from the bloody archives of the Vietnam War.
I was moved to sorrow by the statistics of gun owners and the 60,000 NRA members cheering for their "right to bear arms" whose "right" seems more selfish and foolish and wrong for our time now and going forward.
I was moved to sorrow and horrified at the gun killings at Virginia Tech. Moved to sorrow and horrified over the killings by gunmen taking revenge on former employers and/or fellow employees that seems to go on more frequently now. Moved to sorrow and horrified over the gun killing going on all over our country every day on the streets, in homes, in grade schools, middle schools, high schools, and now universities and offices. When will it end? How will it end? Where will it end? It has to end with us. It is first an individual decision.
I was moved to sorrow and horrified upon hearing of 280 Iraqi deaths by three suicide bombing attacks in Bagdad on Tuesday. There were no pictures of the Iraqi dead victims on any of the news television networks. They are nameless and faceless in the military leaders jargon of "collateral damage" dogma, but whose victims are no less human, no less loved or grieved by their families than anyone who was killed at Virginia Tech. We are brought to our knees here in sorrow on our own shores by the same death and destruction caused by a culture of violence that allows just about anyone to walk into a gun store and buy whatever kind of gun they want, to go on a rampage, kill their wife or children, or commit any act of violence, even on themselves, with the sanction and blessing of a misguided law that allows it: "the right to bear arms."
How horrified I was to see the hypocrite George W. Bush up there on the podium at Virginia Tech, appearing so concerned and so full of condolences, yet everyday he commits more soldiers to the War in Iraq to subject them to violence, and subject the Iraqi people to more violence than Sadaam Hussein was responsible for. Is he so blind that he can not see that the escalation on his part has brought about an escalation of violence upon our own troops? This esclation of violence upon our troops is a result of, and in retaliation of the escalation of violence. They are all victims of the culture of violence that allows it to continue. There has not been one cease-fire that I know of in this war. Not a mention of any peace talks. There has been only the escalation of killing, maiming and destruction from both sides.
How sorrowful and horrified I was to hear of 8 more killed soldiers and 20 or more wounded soldiers in Iraq yesterday. As a nation, the President does not even let our nation mourn the death of these soldiers as he does not permit any pictures to be taken of all the coffins sent home. He'd rather we not be bothered by that image of flag draped coffins that he himself helped to create by his policies of violence.
Were it not for the peaceful presence of such courageous people such as Fr. John Dear SJ, leading the way with the light of Jesus Christ's teachings and example of non-violence, the powers of darkness would appear to be winning. Were it not for the light of truth in the writings of Thomas Merton, the example of non-violent resistance by Gandhi, the Civil Rights peaceful marches of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the message and courage of PaxChristi, the lovely voice and peaceful messages of Joan Baez, and so many others who practice and teach non-violence, the powers of darkness would surely have its say and way.
"But we shouldn't despair of a solution -- the solution is to ban all guns. Period" We can begin banning them from our homes. We can choose to not buy guns and put the gun shops out of business. I will not allow guns into my home. We should not allow students now on university campuses to bear arms. This is how we can practice non-violence. Get the ROTC off of campuses. This is how we can practice non-violence.
For those who work at such places like Los Alamos, peaceful resistance means finding a livlihood that will not bear the bad fruit of destruction to so many lives in the event of its use or an accident.
In the Vietnam War era we said or would often hear "Hell no, we won't go." For our time now with a volunteer army, mothers and fathers please pray for your children and encourage them to say "Hell no, I won't go."
As a lifelong (more exactly,
As a lifelong (more exactly, ages 6-72) pacifist I can only applaud most of this essay.
But I must pick one nit. You stated "the solution defies glib policy changes". Yet you propose "ban all guns. Period." Is that not the glibbest of policy changes?
Let me illustrate with personal anecdote. This particular lifelong pacifist comes from a family that has provided clergy to the church since the fourth century. In other words, we are committed. Yet I own both a hand gun (45 auto) and a long gun. From time to time, I shoot them both. And at age 6 (already a pacifist) it was a clergy uncle who taught me to shoot. My pacifist wife and pacifist son also own guns and also shoot occasionally.
Pacifist gun owners -- a contradiction, an oxymoron, a paradox? You yourself resolved the paradox in the next line: Merton's metanoia. Until each individual person truly and concretely takes up his cross and follows Jesus, until each one sincerely observes the letter of the Sermon on the Mount, there will be no ceasing of the violence. The guns simply are not the point.
Peace be with you!
-- Irene
Irene, I agree with you. It
Irene, I agree with you. It does no good to ban all guns, if for no other reason than that it galvanizes opposition to any gun control. It gives support to the equally glib response that "guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Target shooting and hunting are sports that peaceable people pursue with guns. Hunting with a rifle is a good way of providing food from nature and controlling the overpopulation of certain species to prevent the development of diseases and prevent suffering in animals and humans.
What Fr. Dear should be advocating is outlawing the possession of weapons of mass destruction (automatic weapons) by private individuals. Doing so would not violate any interpretation of the second amendment and would not antagonize those who support the military.
Speaking of the nuclear
Speaking of the nuclear weapons, it did my heart some good to read in my local Montana paper that our Strategic Air Command Wing is preparing for the dismantling of 50 of our 200 ICBM's.
In my youth, when I would have to plow close to some of these things, it brought about a lot of very worrisome thinking. Now if only the Navy would start dismantling 25% or more of their Trident submarine force.
True, the "NRA is a strong
True, the "NRA is a strong voting block" and if the "types of guns that Cho used were not available," consider that Monday's Massacre on April 16th at Virginia Tech might not have even taken place - were it not for the NRA. That could be true as well.
In considering this, doesn't that make the NRA responsible for that massacre? Or should we consider blaming it on some politicians? How about the manufacturers of such guns? How about the metal company that sells the metal to the manufacturer? How about the company that transports the weapons to the dealers? How about the bullet & magazine makers? How about the store owner and the law that allows the sale of these weapons? How about the designers, makers, promoters, advertisers of violent video games for children and adults that helps one practice shooting and killing others in a computer? Is it just the murderer or mass-murderer who must be considered for all the blame when we truthfully take a look at the reality of all the things that came together which aided and abeted the murderer and the violence to take place?
The theory that it is not the gun that kills, but the person with the gun that is fully responsible does not answer the other crucial questions that come to mind when we take the violent subject in its entirety into account.
To glance at this violent subject too quickly leads to answers that are too simplistic and do not give it the true justice that such an issue requires.
Without also including the questions of enabling factors that are blatantly there for all to see, one can create a picture of reality and answers that are essentially distorted and untrue because it is incomplete. Aren't we complicit and responsible in some way if we support the laws that allow the law that promotes the sale of such guns? These are all valid questions that cry out for answers.
In connecting the dots to this violent issue with scrutiny and objectivity, the picture that arises reveals to me that all these questions lead to an enabling culture which can be best described as a "culture of violence." It is this entire culture in commerce which makes it possible for this type of violence to take place. It is a culture that does not make these important connections and distinctions, that denies their own accountability and responsibility in contributing to the violence that exists in our world today.