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, peacemakers. However, all efforts at peace-making must be predicated on non-violence. Violent efforts that try for peace are themselves part of the problem.
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.
Action done in public always carries with it the great danger of presumption. Hence it should always be done in the spirit of humility and invitation. Judgement, arrogance, and exclusiveness, which so often mark our protest, are signs of spiritual immaturity and protest characterized by such things will have the effect of hardening hearts and cementing people in their present opinions.
Genuine peacemaking springs from genuine hope. 1960’s and 70’s peace activist, Bill Stringfellow, once scolded a peace group by telling them something to this effect: “I notice in your conversations a drastic omission, the resurrection. The victory of God over death is already assured and our modest task in peace-making is simply to live in a way that reveals that fact. We do not have to triumph over death by our own inspiration, efforts, and strategy. We do not have to defeat death all over again. Psalm 58 tells us: ‘Surely there is God who rules over the earth!’ We must never forget that. That hope, and not anger, must direct protest. Moreover, that hope, belief in the resurrection, is not a feeling or a mood, it is a necessary choice for survival.”[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s, “Some Rules for Peacemaking” October 1994]
