Judith Valente's Blog: Mindfulness in the Age of Twitter - Posts Tagged "peace"

I find myself once again this weekend nestled within the verdant, peaceful surroundings of the Chiara Franciscan Spirituality Center in Springfield, IL. Normally I don’t watch cable news when I am on retreat, but this time I felt compelled to look at the images of last summer’s violent protests in Charlottesville, VA.

News footage of young men carrying torches, giving the Nazi salute, fist-fighting, throwing stones, and hurtling insults at their fellow citizens flashes across the TV screen in sharp contrast with the prayerful tranquility of my surroundings. Stations continuously replay the scene of a car driven by a white supremacist plowing into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring others. Commentator after commentator comes on to condemn one side, then the other. Meanwhile, in real time, another supremacist group prepares to rally in front of the White House.

On this first anniversary of the Charlottesville tragedy, I feel I have to confront the unfolding divisions tearing at the fabric of our nation. Is there any way to prevent the rage, the violence, the mutual suspicion from spreading its poison?

I find myself returning again to the timeless wisdom of the sixth century Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict, the founder of western monasticism, well understood that human beings can and will mess up. Even in a monastic community, there could be conflict, anger, and fear of change. Benedict established a protocol for dealing with these difficulties. First, he asked people to own up to their destructive behaviors. If someone was unwilling to do so, he recommended that a trusted person – someone with standing and gravitas in the community who has perhaps struggled with the same demons – confront the other person. Benedict wasn’t so much interested in condemning or punishing, as in changing behavior, and making amends.

The way that can happen is through dialogue. There can be no fruitful dialogue without careful, respectful listening --and the willingness to confront complex questions. What is really behind the fear that makes members of white supremacist groups feel so threatened? How can those of us who come from immigrant families, or who are members of minorities express to them that this fear is unfounded?

Progress just might come when people are willing to sit in a room and have a conversation. The word conversation, after all, means to ‘turn with,’ in other words,’ to change.’ With change, there can be healing. It will not be perfect healing, but what things in this life are perfect? We must start somewhere to bind the divisions that have erupted so forcefully and publicly.

The Franciscan retreat center where I am staying is steeped in the spirituality of St. Francis of Assisi, who stressed simplicity, care for all of creation, and above all, peace. A brochure in my room bears a quote from Jesuit Father John Dear, a student of St. Francis and modern-day peace activist.

Father John Dear writes: “Francis of Assisi embodies the journey from violence to non-violence, wealth to poverty, power to powerlessness, selfishness to selfless service, pride to humility, indifference to love, cruelty to compassion, vengeance to forgiveness, revenge to reconciliation, war to peace, killing enemies to loving enemies.”

If we practiced those values, Father Dear says, “we would share the world’s resources with one another, having nothing to fear from others, and live in peace.”

Can we give ourselves the challenge of those words as move forward this week from the memory of Charlottesville?

Some of you who kindly read this column each week wrote asking why I didn’t post anything last Sunday. At this time last Sunday, I had the privilege of guiding a Renewal Day for a vibrant group of lay associates at Glastonbury Abbey outside Boston. The main reason, though, is that I was shaken by the wrenching tableau of the Kavanaugh confirmation. I needed time to process my thoughts. I wanted to examine what we all witnessed through a Benedictine lens.

I keep returning to a few lines in The Rule of St. Benedict. No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead what he judges better for someone else from Chapter 72, “The Good Zeal of Monastics.”

And these lines from Chapter 4, “The Tools for Good Works:” Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way … You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge. Rid your heart of all deceit … Speak the truth with heart and tongue.

With half the country opposed to the Kavanaugh nomination, what if the judge had withdrawn his name as a first step way toward healing? What if a majority of senators had sought to begin the process again with a new nominee, giving the country time to move on?

Instead, winning became the only thing. Now the divisions are deeper. The wound larger.
Some of our leaders continue to refer to the women who protested in Congress and at the Supreme Court as “an angry left-wing mob.” Crowds in some cities respond with chants of “Lock her up.” The women protesters – many of them sexual assault survivors – are people who felt silenced for too long. They are our fellow citizens crying to be heard.

I am convinced that had a woman shown the same amount of rancor, defensiveness and disdain that Judge Kavanaugh did in making his case, that person surely would have been disqualified as unfit for a seat on the highest court.

If Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had behaved with as much rage, she, too, likely would have been soundly criticized by the men on the Senate panel. This is the unfortunate double standard to which women are held. This is a double standard I’ve seen throughout my career in journalism working mostly for male editors.

Where do we go from here? The Rule offers a way forward for both sides. Humility isn’t a popular notion in our American culture. However, humility in a Benedictine context isn’t humiliation. The Latin root for humility means “of the earth.” We are all of this earth. Our world thrives when we remember our common bonds and need for one another.

In any decision-making process, The Rule calls for all community members to have a chance to express their views. But there is a right and wrong way to do it. They are to “express their opinions with all humility, and not presume to defend their own views obstinately.” In other words, forget going lower when the other side strikes a low blow. That’s just a prescription for additional chaos, and ultimate disaster.

Listen to one another, The Rule says. Do everything with counsel and you will not be sorry afterward, Benedict writes. Do not repay one bad turn with another.

This is not to say be passive or lose hope. Rather, it’s a plea to work peacefully and with dignity for the things we believe in. When I was graduating from college, the great peace activist Father Daniel Berrigan gave a commencement address in which he noted one of the most destructive tendencies is to divide the world between winners and losers.

One of Berrigan’s proteges, the spirituality writer Jim Forest, said something similar when I interviewed him last year. Though he had participated in many anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam era, he said he thought angry protests in these times will provoke little change. Instead, they give one’s opponents ammunition to deride an otherwise just cause.

“It is time for prayer,” Forest told me. “It is not a time to get out into the streets and create a climate of greater rage. That adds to the polarization which is one of our major problems.” Then he asked, “Do we want to participate in a process that facilitates dialogue and understanding?”

That is the question I will be asking myself this week, and I suspect for weeks to come. I am just as disappointed as millions of Americans in the outcome of the Kavanaugh confirmation. I refuse to cave into to anger or despair. Forest, in my interview with him, also talked about “Learning to walk more slowly. Learning to breathe more mindfully, taking unwelcome tasks and making them into sacramental events, praying instead of grumbling.”

Advice the could have come directly from The Rule. Each of us, Forest says, has the capacity to become “a kind of island of peace.” A worthy aim in these chaotic times. How can we each become “an island of peace” wherever we are?

I think I just discovered the most peaceful place in America. It is a monastery tucked within the rolling hills of northwest Missouri. Here, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration make their home. The only sound in the open field where the monastery stands is the whir of wind through trees, and an occasional thrum of a cricket. Stepping inside the monastery offers a profound encounter with silence. The sign, in colored glass, that greets visitors says, “Peace.”

I stopped in Clyde, Missouri, en route to guiding a retreat at Conception Abbey, a men’s Benedictine monastery just down the road. The visit couldn’t have come at a better time. Throughout the six-hour drive from my home in Illinois to Missouri, I listened to NPR on the car radio, feeling increasing despair. A “mystery” neurological disease has been attacking children. It was revealed that Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers had been chopped off during the torture he endured before his death. How better to prevent a journalist from writing negative stories?

Then there was the caravan of families with children fleeing the violence in central America marching toward our southern border to seek asylum, along with the U.S. President’s threats amid cheering crowds to call out the Army to stop them.
(All of this talk about protecting the sovereignty of the U.S. is interesting since we snatched the state of Texas from Mexico and showed no respect for Indian tribal boundaries in our country’s early drive westward. But hey, that’s history, this is now).

I prayed at noon with the sisters in their magnificent chapel filled with ornate wooden prayer stalls, vibrant mosaics and life-size statues. (If this were Europe, busloads of tourists would be arriving daily to see the admire the beautiful architecture and art work in this chapel, as well as the Basilica at Conception Abbey down the road). The sisters support themselves by making communion hosts (including a gluten-free host they patented), as well as handmade soaps, balms and lotions, and a variety of artifacts. But make no mistake: prayer is their main work.

Sitting beside the sisters, listening to them sing the words of the Psalms at Mid-day Prayer, I recalled something the spiritual writer Thomas Merton wrote in his journal after his first visit to the Abbey of Gethsemani, “Now I know what has been holding the world together and keeping it from cracking into pieces. It is the prayers of this monastery and others.”

My friend Brother Paul Quenon of Gethsemani Abbey recently published a memoir of his 60-plus years in monastic life. Its subtitle is, “In Praise of the Useless Life.” It’s easy to dismiss monastic life as a hopeless throwback to the past. And yes, by the world’s standards dedicating one’s life to prayer can seem like a useless, even lazy endeavor compared to building bridges, developing a new treatment for cancer, educating the young, or piloting a rocket to the moon.

I applaud the sisters at Clyde and other monastics for their chosen work: sending prayer into the cosmos for our increasingly fragmented world. In previous times, the connotation of being a sister of “perpetual adoration” meant someone from the monastery was present at all hours of the day to pray before the Blessed Sacrament – the Eucharist -- which Catholics believe represents the presence of Christ. I was impressed by something Sister Dawn Annette Mills, the general prioress of the Clyde monastery, said about how the sisters now interpret “perpetual adoration.”

It is not just a 24-hour prayer program, she said, but a way of life. “Each sister is called to be a perpetual adorer … to recognize Christ present in every moment of every day, in each encounter and experience. In that awareness, every moment becomes an experience of adoring perpetually the Christ that is before us.”

I left the sisters in Clyde with renewed hope. Hope that good is at work even in these stressful times. Can each of us this week become “a perpetual adorer,” recognizing Christ in every moment, encounter and experience?