Witnessing as a sacred trust and vocation |
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A note on liberation theology & nonviolence
By Wes Rehberg Nonviolent Ways Project It’s an easy cynicism that dismisses nonviolence as the way to peace with justice, seeing only partial gains in the efforts of liberation from oppressive structures and practices. The response: What gains have violence ensured and secured? And at what cost to sensibility, the planet, life, systems and structures, to human economy and ecology? Or, to spirituality? Nonviolent activism leaves a much lighter footprint in its advocacy for justice and truth. Whether one approaches nonviolence practice and theory from a secular or spiritual perspective, one can’t help at some point in the journey to cross the spiritual paths of persons such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sister Diana Ortíz, the Dalai Lama, Sojourner Truth, Bishop Desmond Tutu. The spiritual side of nonviolence is rich in practitioner-thinkers, it is definitively interconnected with reflection on liberation, and it has influenced and inspired innumerable nonviolent practices and movements. This is a side I revere. To reflect on the spiritual side is to do liberation theology. Liberation and radical suffering Liberation, most basically here, addresses the conditions of radical suffering caused by human injustice and indifference. Nonviolence seeks to come to terms with the human role in radical suffering, to see violence as perpetuating that role, and to see nonviolent practices as alternatives that reduce the causes of radical suffering and perhaps lead to the marked reduction of violent causes, justly. Nonviolent practices always work with a person or persons in view, the “subjects” of the syndromes of suffering, the ones who seek justice or prevent it. To amplify briefly the understanding of justice I’m working with, it may be helpful to suggest categories used in Catholic social teachings: commutative justice, distributive justice and social justice. “Commutative justice” is described as rooted in the equality of persons in the sphere of private, mutual interactions in which the dignity of persons is upheld in a mutuality based on equality in all relationships and agreements. “Distributive justice” suggests the public claims all individuals have to a share of social or public goods, a participation by all in the common good. “Social justice” is interpreted as concerned with institutionalized patterns of mutual interactions necessary to distributive justice. Problematic for me in these categories is the separation of public and private spheres that impedes distributive justice. For me, “social justice” also includes the mutual interactions between public and private spheres that allow dominating forces and complicit actors to hide in the private sphere or that allow the private sphere to corruptly influence the public sphere, particularly the “powers” of government – courts, legislatures, executive branches, the military. This corruption is too familiar. The “subject” of liberation and nonviolence This is to underscore still that however liberation, justice, or oppression work, they work with a “subject,” a person particularly, who often becomes a mere “object” in the dynamics of struggle. Nonviolence thought stresses that the subject of nonviolent liberation is both oppressor and oppressed – both of them — plus whatever ambiguities exist between them. From the spiritual perspective, not only is there a material interconnection, there is also an interconnection beyond what we may call life, infinite and eternal yet present and extremely difficult to describe in words, even to approach that way. Both subjects need to be “liberated” – a really difficult dynamic. One liberation theologian, Francisco Romero, speaks of the critical step of giving oneself to the other as a move from nature to spirit, as a move from an individualized subjectivity, which is necessary, to a “we” as an act of superior intentionality. This is where reflection gets difficult and abstruse. In this, for Romero, there is a conjoint subjectivity, not effacing the individual but yet enlarging the sphere of freedom, because one gives up the subjective return of the act, which is also the engagement of absolute freedom – which can be interpreted spiritually as in the divine. I see this subjectivity as inextricably shared and intertwined, not in an objective state of absolute freedom, but as integrally subjective – absolute freedom may exist in the beyond, but not in the world of injustice. Though we are interconnected, the important stress has to be on the “not effacing the individual” – the oppressed often get effaced, left without the dignity of a person, left as an object to be manipulated or discarded, which is an act of violence, certainly. Chung Hyun Kyung describes the divine as an all-inclusive reality in everything, a co-subject. She holds it as life-giving power that offers women the opportunity to trust “personal power” in “naturally personified” liberation. In suffering, women meet God, who discloses their divine image, full participants in community, equal in life. Rebecca Chopp describes the subject of liberation as becoming awakened to its situation in conciousness and conscience, an act of “concientización,” in which it has realized it has been left out of history. Drawing on the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, God acts in history, salvation is a historical act, mediated through history in an “irruption” of the oppressed and abased subject. For me, and to avoid language particular to one religion, the divine is unfolding from the beyond in its entire integrity, unfolding in relationships that reciprocate this integrity in life, and within life, unfolding fully at risk within the context of the contaminations and catastrophes that make that risk real. There’s a potential for life to be “crucified” by Rome. But I am unwilling to suggest that death is “absolute annihilation.” Maybe Kant and his ideas of the limits of thought help here, the limits of thought shaped in the cognitive processes. Like Kant, I accept that the cognitive processes are regulative and not constitutive, and that the sublimity of the divine is beyond this cognitive process. “Death” is a cognitive understanding of the end of human life; “absolute annihilation” is also; something of the divine cannot be measured in cognitive terms. The divine, the sacred, though actively present, is something else. There is a resurrection, but we got to work at it. The work of grace in liberation A word sometimes used to describe the expression of divine in the context of liberation and nonviolence is grace. For me, grace is the active gift of divine which is ever present and offered freely in its givingness. It is also political, that is, “political grace,” when it “favors” people under abasing domination and oppression to reflect on their condition politically and to seek actively a political solution to their subjugation and oppression. In liberation theology, this spiritual expression is called the “preferential option.” Grace, like nonviolence, is a relationship with the divine, which, when accepted and acknowledged and put to use, transforms a human, and as well, human relationships. It is considered a gift of the spirit of life, truth, justice, love, and can open what I interpret as a Sabbath clearing, a holy “site of resistance.” This Sabbath clearing occurs with the sense of wild risk that one may experience at a site of resistance, a “wild clearing.” This is a movement into unchartered space and time, and also can be considered an opening into the dimension which humans can’t describe or even “cognify,” if I may, but know as something beyond their faculty to reproduce without help from beyond. Nonviolence practitioners like those mentioned above reveal its contours in the site of resistance in both their actions and words, together. Those who counter-resist help define the contours as well in the struggle, often violently. Resistance, obviously then, is a key theme in liberation theology. The praxis of liberation includes acts of resistance that need theoretical and practical reflection — practices of liberation both in daily ways in day-to-day life and in larger political and economic realms that bear on the circumstances of the oppressed and the systems of oppression. Theoretical reflection is put to test in resistance practices and practices are then reflected upon again vis-a-vis the theoretical. Nonviolence advocacy also employs resistance and reflection, practice and thought. So, this side of the Nonviolent Ways Project will explore the theological dimension too. In this space, it can grow little by little with links and references to the rich and broad range of work in liberation theology that applies specifically to nonviolence. © 2003 Wes Rehberg December 27, 2003 Going towards God Going towards God isn't linear only, moving through time as a progression. It's going in all directions, the same directions God comes from: forward, backward, inward, outward, up, down, all the lateral directions, radiating out and in, settling and sending, going and coming -- with the inclination that fits the moment So it's to speak of an omnidirectional journey, and also a rejourneying, still with time in mind, but also connecting with the other directions in which we are situated. Age makes me aware of time's passing, the seasons here in northern North America. Yet there's a "within" point from which I can't move, and though as some suggest, the perception of a point in time is always a beat beyond that actual instant, the intuition of it is constant. So within and without conjoin and are made apparent to perception in consciousness, a simple truism. The conjunction is also a constant, the one direction, within, appearing eternal and infinite, the other, without, appearing transient yet also eternal and infinite, spacebound and timebound, yet beyond that as well. The question I ask, then, is: From where comes the notion of nonviolence? What settles within a person or a community that draws each to recognition, and then its power? The answer, to me, is that inhabits all the directions, and that the "going toward God, omnidirectional as well, is eased by the presence of the condition of nonviolence. If one resolves to do no harm, one eases the journey's pathway. If one resolves to be true, true to justice, to right relationships with others, creator and creation, and honest, one eases the journey's pathway. If one resolves to be less concerned with self and more with others, to yield self to the settling in of nonviolence, one eases the journey's pathway. The negative energies are transformed. The pathway is power as well. I've just recently spent four days with friends from Michigan Peace Team, and others from various nonviolent activist organizations at a Training for Change workshop in Philadelphia titled: Opening Space for Democracy: Third Party Nonviolent Intervention Advanced Training for Trainers. The workshop was well-designed, no question, and the participants highly experienced in training and deciding about long-term placement of people in fields such as those in Indonesia, Colombia, Palestine, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. For me, and for the project I've been involved with, the engagement was humbling. We've been small, by design, and basically unfunded, personal and local, part-time and somewhat anarchistic. This doesn't mean there is a lack of experience, or thoughtfulness, or mindfulness, or a sense of presence within the whole effort that nonviolent activism represents. It's been our belief that small presences like ours are integral to the whole, and that paths of nonviolence, however they may be manifested, are legitimated by the call to nonviolent lifestyles and activism. Following the course of the workshop, and engaging with others, and with the designers -- George Lakey and Daniel Hunter, with Winnie ? assisting -- the course illuminated in ways I know will remain and will yet surface realizations. Hopelessly right-brained, the sequentialism was daunting for me, as it is in any engagement. I was also the oldest person there, at age 67, so felt "late" in context of time and future, even in realization. Peter Dougherty of Michigan Peace Team, and George Lakey are peers in age, but have been full-time dedicated to the work, whereas my activism was shared in recent years with work as a pastor (where this activism was not always kindly greeted) and with a two-year series of treatment for prostate cancer. Yet this notion guides the idea of staying small as a project -- it will be the proliferation of such projects at this scale that will be critically significant for transformation -- nonviolent "cells" that radiate in local contexts the power that the call to nonviolence opens. Movements from central agencies are most important, but "situatedness" geographically is the critical key to what all of us engaged in nonviolence activism hope will be revolutionary transformation of violent attitudes and practices. The center is wherever we are, the contact point between within and without the juncture where power becomes intention, the intention lived out in local streets, local spaces, local engagements, named and given a personal face, represented by a recognizable presence, identified and identifiable. This presence, local, has no less a connection with the infinite and eternal, with God, as has any project of any magnitude. I like to think of this in terms of the Eucharist, local bread broken open to eat, local wine to drink (even in this age of globalization and mega-marketing). The communion is local, shared hand to hand, consecrated in a local space, connected locally yet through the call to nonviolence, to the whole. © Wes Rehberg 2003, all rights reserved~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ POLITICAL GRACE: THE GIFT OF RESISTANCE (e-book on liberation theology - pdf format) © 1995, 2004 Wes Rehberg Title: Political Grace: The Gift of Resistance Introduction: The subject of liberation Chapter 1: The Holocaust of Necro-economics: The Struggle for Hope Chapter 2: Second-hand, third-class, a view from the white underclass Chapter 3: Decolonization of the mind, the spirit, the flesh: Outcasts gaze back Chapter 4: Oppression, the daily life of resistance, and political grace Bibliography: * * * INTERNAL LINKS: Nonviolence advocacy guidelines and principles CD training guide -- drawn form ACTUP-NY and WRL |