A whirlwind of violence:

...It is not simply a conflict between the forces of evil and the forces of good...

...To discern its meaning, it is good, but not enough, to meditate on the most obviously relevant gospel sayings ("Love your enemies," "Remember, they also persecuted me," "It will be given you by the Spirit what to say and what to do...

...Fear is a powerful, gripping, twisting emotion that is not easily kept under the control of mind or will...

...in this context the Eucharist takes on a broader sacramental, communitarian effectiveness...

...But we visit the tortured and we welcome them to share their stories with us...

...By 1989 the violence had spread all through the center of Peru, like a groundfire out of control...

...The ultimate norm [of a Christian spirituality] is the following of Christ as proposed in the Gospel...

...Yet a real presence- active, personal, committed-is basic...

...The Peru of today is in continuity with the situation I described four years ago ("Under the Peruvian Volcano," Commonweal, February 14,1986...

...And so we live inserted into the real history of our people, even when history becomes absurdly self-destructive and violent...

...In Jesus, the word of God made flesh, God has identified himself with the human family...

...as in many other parts of the world (Colombia, the Near East), people live an existential nightmare of utter absurdity...

...In the statistics of Amnesty International, how would the imprisonment and death of Jesus be classified...

...No one can know with certainty how she or he will react in the face of mortal danger, but there are some simple group dynamics that can help us anticipate some of our probable reactions...

...The presence of the military only brought more deaths...

...Rome's puppet rulers followed the imperial style...

...I had studied, taught, and written about the practice of nonviolence in an academic setting...

...What of martyrdom...

...Judging this record by the new hermeneutic, we see that the nonviolence of Jesus was not a strategy to gain specific aims...

...Under whatever regime, whether Maoist or consumer capitalist, whether dominated by drug lords, various kinds of mafias, or a military dictator, we must denounce every form of evil, be it greed, revenge, hatred, or the violence they breed...

...Our need here is to define not just any way of following Christ but one that will justify and support Christians living in situations of active violence...

...In this secularist age, public authorities do not persecute religious beliefs as such...

...For me, the question had a personal dimension...

...In this situation a deliberate group effort was initiated to answer the question: How are we to follow Christ in situations of violence...

...In Peru (and I suspect in many parts of the world) the great majority of church people present in areas of violence are women religious...

...Jesus knew distinct groups of revolutionaries such as the Zealots, who insistently searched for new ways to mount insurrections against Rome...

...Superiors are becoming very sensitive and doubly considerate when dealing with subjects suffering under such stresses...

...No one looks upon physical death as an end in itself: Our God is a God of life...

...Within the Religious Conference we ask each institute to restudy the charism of its founders and its own history...

...The following of Christ," says Perfectae caritatis, the Vatican II document on religious life, "is the supreme rule...

...We were left with a common collective experience of what it is like to live, at least temporarily, under the "limit" situation of violence...

...During armed bus strikes, walking the streets with the people creates a wonderful sense of solidarity...

...But in concrete terms, Christian spirituality has to become realized in everyday reality...

...We will not defend or construct a church of privilege, with titles and riches...

...We know what forms military retaliation will take...

...Jesus understood well the violence of his own times...

...Our nonviolence is not an escape to the desert far from the world's problems...

...What follows is an effort, which draws upon a number of retreats and conferences with religious from all over Peru, to extract from this experience what I hope will be valid for a spirituality of nonviolence for Christians in similar situations elsewhere...

...Times of violence force us to rediscover the richness of these traditions...

...The following of [the nonviolent] Christ is the supreme rule...

...Four times a year groups of from fifteen to twenty missionaries were carefully prepared and sent off, and on their return were debriefed...

...we choose to stay with our people and share with them their sufferings...

...Jesus lived in this environment...

...The last temptation of Jesus, up to his arrest in the garden, was to take up arms in defense of his own life and of the Kingdom...

...The content of such prayers is faith-filled angst...

...Slowly we come to what we call "the spirituality of presence...

...But as the science of hermeneutics teaches us, when the observer's whole world changes, the very objects of observation also change...

...Our pastoral neighbors, the Jesuits, worked unflaggingly for twelve years on complex projects for the social, human, religious betterment of some eighteen peasant communities...

...No one can be coerced- not even by religious obedience-to live nonviolently in situations of extreme violence...

...First, we ask ourselves negatively: If we leave now during moments of violence, what would this mean for our people...

...The ordinary tactics of active nonviolence are simply out of place...

...We may not be able to denounce cases of torture and the like to the public authorities (who may be the very culprits), or to protest such acts by subversive groups, or even to report them to the media, since such accounts can be distorted and manipulated by irresponsible elements...

...And in Peru, where I live, that means coming to terms with paralyzing, life-threatening violence...

...Violent subversion by the Maoist Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path") continues unabated, but over the years a Castro-type group called the Revolutionary Movement Tupac Amaru (MRTA) is also a major force, along with drug lords, death squads, and sundry groups of common criminals...

...This is the context of the retreat/encounters being conducted within the Religious Conference of Peru in quest of a Christian spirituality of nonviolence...

...There is no love greater than this, to give one's life for one's friends...

...Participants comb the Scriptures hungrily with their very special need of trying to remain loyal to Jesus, to themselves, and to their people in these times of violence...

...These women have a special capacity to be sacrament of God by showing the motherly, tender face of God during times of violence...

...In our Catholic tradition we remember the acts of the martyrs and the story of the sons of the Maccabees, who answered their persecutors with stirring words: "Killer, you take from us the present life, but the King of the World....will give us eternal life...

...Mary is a sign of hope in the midst of the evil power which envelops her son...

...During intense liturgies and during social hours of fun-sharing, the joyful and grateful enthusiasm of participants is a sign of the presence of the Spirit supporting their willingness to remain present to their people...

...The hireling flees and runs because the flock is not his...

...The spirituality of presence is in agreement with the recent Latin American spirituality of incarnation and insertion...

...After times of actual violence, the return to a normal life is very important for the health of the people, and for the psychological and spiritual health of the pastoral team itself...

...Blessed are those who mourn" does not mean that people will never again have reason to mourn...

...Yet our experience in Peru has been different...

...he would not live by the sword or be ruled by blind emotion...

...Where is the Kingdom...

...At times we Christians, in spite of our professed faith, are still very much pagans, or at best Pelagians, trusting in our own works or thinking that economic or social advances are major criteria of the Kingdom of Heaven...

...Tempted in the desert by Satan with the proffer of political power, he rejected it...

...A Christian spirituality must build upon solid health of mind and body...

...There is not even common consensus over human rights, fundamental values, even the value of human life...

...Christian witness is always witness to a greater truth but also to everyday fact...

...When we say we have nothing to do, our presence is a concrete form of political/ historical praxis...

...A WHIRLWIND OF VIOLENCE FOLLOWING CHRIST IN PERU ERNEST W.RANLY In abstract terms, Christian spirituality is a process of transforming one's life in accord with the values and principles of Christianity...

...Not martyrdom but service, if only the service of presence, is the purpose...

...We avoid specific suggestions or formulas for action...

...As we have seen, Jesus understood in detail who his enemies were and what kind of death was in store for him...

...very soon after the birth of Jesus, King Herod, for political reasons, ordered the killing of children less than two years old born in Bethlehem and its surrounding areas...

...Jesus wept repeatedly, yet his Father remained lovingly faithful to him through his prayer of agony and on the cross...

...But most of all they need a new way of following Christ...

...Yet, according to what is prudently possible, we have discovered that the lives of the faith communities ought to follow their customary rhythms: Masses, sacraments, catechetics, religious feasts...

...We study the violence itself, its various protagonists, its manifestations in different areas or at distinct phases of the revolutionary process...

...three times he announced in detail the manner of his own death...

...From 1986 through 1989 the Religious Conference of Peru sent intercongregational teams to the most abandoned and violent areas of the high mountains...

...fear of the unknown, in contrast, is paralyzing and more easily becomes pathological...

...So it is for us in Peru: we now read and study and pray over the life of Jesus from a new perspective, and the result is that we find objective elements in the story that we never saw before...

...Yet the Good News is that God loves us in the person of Jesus, poor, humble, meek...

...In one concrete case, the Romans crucified two thousand insurgents at one time...

...The first decision is most fundamental: the decision to stay...

...Are there candles, battery-powered radios and cassettes, enough food and water...

...He died forgiving his persecutors, in obedience and in trusting fidelity to his Father...

...Mary at the foot of the cross gave highly public witness to the truth of her son's life and the injustice of his death...

...The vaunted pax Romana was a cruel peace imposed by the Roman Empire through force of arms...

...In this internal war, violence by the Peruvian military rivals that of the groups and individuals it seeks to suppress: in 1989, 55 percent of the documented cases worldwide presented to the UN Working Group on Disappearances were attributed to the Peruvian military...

...We are to announce the Kingdom of God, the announcement of Jesus alive now in the flesh and blood of his followers...

...we must never deny what we know is true...

...Nonviolent himself, he suffered a cruel violent death...

...Jesus suffered under this imperialism of a foreign military and political power that held Jewish beliefs in contempt, even blasphemed against them...

...Many of his parables speak to the surrounding realities of injustice and cruelty: the Good Samaritan, the unjust judge, the vineyard workers-assassins...

...Grace presupposes and builds upon the natural...

...A Christian spirituality of nonviolence in service to the community is an even more valiant Christian testimony than that which seeks eternal life...

...When we have nothing to do we finally do what Christ did so simply and effectively: a prayerful, faith-filled spirituality of presence...

...It is I." In our distress we meet "our high priest, who does not remain indifferent before our weaknesses...

...As one retreatant said, "A short time ago I made perpetual vows in my congregation 'until death.' Only now I understand what 'until death' may mean...

...In Peru we have sought answers out of experience and reflection...

...Through the prayer of Jesus we also discover new riches in the psalms, the lamentations, the cries of Job and the prophets...

...And our presence should be visible...

...Somewhat more concretely, a Christian spirituality is the following of Jesus of Nazareth, making oneself his disciple, accepting him as Christ the Lord...

...Innocent, he was arrested, tortured, and condemned through a series of judicial maneuvers of dubious legality...

...We see some atrocities...

...We must celebrate the sacraments, above all the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity and familyhood, in new and more vital ways...

...Such persons are simply transferred far from the more conflictive areas...

...and we must announce the multiple forms of the mercy and love of God present in Christ, his teaching, his peace...

...We begin to see that when our own people, with their deep folk piety, mourn and weep for their dead, they are praying profoundly in the traditions of the inspired prayers of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament...

...We will not abandon our people...

...And yet a Christian spirituality of nonviolence flows only from an option that is free and personal...

...Every situation of violence must be studied very closely in its precise historical/political context...

...In situations of violence, one defines the Kingdom of God with great care, without political preferences...

...The message is decisive...

...All the people-the suffering residents of the area, the military, the various subversive groups-should know that the church has remained in the region...

...The most powerful figure for us is that of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the foot of the cross...

...In many parts of Peru today hardly any of these conditions exist...

...Most historical examples of active nonviolent efforts have also included reliance on access to the public through the media, enabling disenfranchised people to appeal to a sense of justice shared even by some of their oppressors...

...What is one to do when there is nothing to do...

...Yet many ordinary pastoral works and especially social programs are no longer possible...

...At another level, a Christian spirituality of nonviolence presupposes a community environment of support that allows all to share openly their feelings of fear, anxiety, frustration, and helplessness...

...Christian eschatology accepts no single philosophy of history and rejects Utopian solutions to such absurdity...

...But all have answered: "We will stay in our communities in service to our people...

...The time was marked as well by class conflicts, religious fanaticism, official corruption, assaults, robberies...

...In some situations communities should prepare themselves for possible open conflict...

...Nor is there permitted a type of brainwashing or of forced collective consciousness in the style of some cults or ideologies...

...Recent revelations of past atrocities in Chile, Brazil, and Eastern Europe attest to that power...

...All Christians, by virtue of their baptism and confirmation, are to give testimony to their faith "until death...

...Lebanon is distinct from El Salvador, which is distinct from the drug wars of Colombia or the street fights of Northeast Washington, D.C...

...We follow that nonviolent Christ who had not whereon to lay his head...

...The Father remains faithful to Jesus on the cross in his own mysterious way and raises him up in glory...

...Simply knowing what forms violence will take confers psychological strength...

...In the jungle areas, where housing is of light wood, people have spent nights sleeping in the relative security of shower stalls...

...Given that premise, we found it necessary to address directly the issue of fear, of the extraordinary stress and anxiety brought on by the open violence we are experiencing in many parts of Peru...

...This now becomes a reconciling, peace-making presence...

...The whole area is still a no man's land of uncertainty, terror, and death...

...This is a learning not so apparent in the experience of active nonviolence as practiced by Gandhi and King...

...Meanwhile, those who stay in violent zones feel the need for more free time, more recreation, more time to share their feelings...

...Violence reached close to him when his cousin, John the Baptist, was unjustly imprisoned and when, by the mere whim of a drunken king, John was killed and his head displayed on a platter during a feast of the royal court...

...Again, he refused...

...A powerful reflection for us is the parable of the good shepherd...

...Any genuine spirituality must be chosen, and only after serious reflection and prayer...

...I call this new image of Jesus the nonviolent Christ...

...If street fighting breaks out, mortar shells begin to fall, or dynamite blasts are heard, in what safe room will the community congregate...

...In Peru, to date, there has not been open persecution of the church as such...

...Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever...

...What would it mean for the others, the enemies of the gospel...

...In these conditions, it becomes irrelevant to debate just war theory or to find rationalizations for a specific armed rebellion...

...This is what is called "total violence...

...Do not fear...

...The atmosphere of the retreat/encounters is prayerful and reflective...

...What does one do when there is nothing to do...

...Until, say, ten years ago, I thought I had successfully converted these ideas into a pastoral life-style in the Central Andes...

...More clearly now, we see that Jesus was born into a century of rebellions, massacres, terror...

...This humble, quiet, valiant presence, in solidarity with the victims of violence, is the presence of Christ among us...

...The good shepherd knows his flock...

...We say, then, that it is in the spirit of Jesus to study and understand the specific tactics and strategies of the violence we know around us...

...The death toll now stands at seventeen thousand...

...we are enabled to see that we are all children of Adam and Eve, and that, since Cain killed his brother Abel, ours has been a history of blood...

...John's disciples lovingly buried his remains and the Gospels say that Jesus withdrew alone to pray...

...We are a fallen race...

...We ought to shop in the public markets, take part in wakes and funerals, make home visits...

...A spirituality must be found consistent with the stark, brutal, everyday reality of active violence as it is experienced in this place and time...

...Any day I can join a protest, flaunt a terrorist order, denounce a public authority, and I will become the direct object of such threats...

...we hear of many more...

...Thus it can be pragmatically and psychologically dangerous to deny or hide the fact of fear, or to regard it as a sign of weakness...

...In such situations what mystique or vision will inspire people to remain nonviolent...

...As one priest, well tested by the realities I have described, told a group: "It's easy to be killed...

...One seeks to remain faithful to the nonviolent Christ whom the Father loved and supported through death and resurrection...

...As Christians, we believe in life eternal through the Resurrection of Jesus...

...Jesus spent long nights in prayer, but the following day he was back with people, healing lepers, touching the blind, taking babies into his arms...

...In all the testimonies we have shared, no one has said that she or he was ready to die for eternal life...

...Gandhi's whole theory of nonviolence is based upon satyagraha-the power of truth...

...What we are discovering is that the only relevant mystique is a more sober Christian spirituality of nonviolence, the hard following of the nonviolent Christ...

...As a Peruvian Jesuit put it, "We want to be with Mary, standing next to the cross, denouncing sin and injustice and announcing hope in God...

...They can have exercises similar to drills for fire or earthquake...

...Just as some people cannot work at high altitudes, in the tropics, or in cold damp climates, some cannot endure fear-based stress over long periods...

...The media are severely restricted, or they rely on tertiary sources, and what they communicate is simply untrustworthy or sensationalistic...

...The question became: How does one remain nonviolent, talk nonviolence, train for nonviolence, in a context of uncontrolled violence...

...This is all the more true of a Christian spirituality of nonviolence...

...I believed, with a certain satisfaction, that I was actively witnessing to peace and justice in the name of the Kingdom...

...Shining Path" destroyed all their work in two months...

...But even more important, if because of threats and episodes of violence we abandon our people, what would this mean for ourselves, our religious communities, and the church...

...This approach requires for its success a number of sine qua non conditions: a well-established state, a functioning government, a legal system (including independent courts and judges) that generates a reasonable degree of confidence and respect, and, underlying all these, a general consensus on the meaning of life, human rights, and basic ethical values...

...But with the escalation of violence, our small safe enclaves began to collapse in upon us...

...Even the brutal violence we witness today in Peru can hardly match such barbarity...

...we Christians have no other voucher to guarantee our eschatological hope...

...The Christian spirituality of nonviolent presence should not be construed as an expression of mere passive resignation, of quietism or fatalism...

...Fear joined with guilt becomes an unbearable burden...

...This is not an easy or superficial decision...

...The answer is that simply staying in those areas of conflict helps to make manifest the continuing presence of the Kingdom of God...

...We do not stay out of a whim to be martyrs, but to serve the people...

...his life was a message...

...Against fear, we find Jesus walking across stormy waters and passing through closed doors saying: "Peace...

...As Catholics, we understand (and the people instinctively understand) that when we are present as church, Christ is mystically and sacramentally present in and through us...

...The fidelity of God is eternal...

...Total violence strips away all such delusions...

...In fact, every institute approved by the church as a way of sanctity has, explicitly or implicitly, a spirituality of martyrdom...

...Pondering Jesus' whole life and praxis in the midst of unconstrained violence, we reach a deeper level...

...Only a deeper, more consciously chosen love of Jesus can inspire such a spiritual commitment...

...A presence that knows and preserves the truth is a powerful restraint against the father of lies and the destructive forces of darkness...

...The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep...

...We now look for different signs to attest to the presence of the Kingdom...

...Some professional people give specialized talks on psychology, human rights, local cultures...

...There is created an ambiance of trust to enable those who have lived under the stress of deep anxiety to share their experience and reflection and listen to those of others in similar or worse circumstances...

...Rising as it does out of our most basic instinct, self-preservation, fear is not only irrepressible but useful-essential, in fact, in helping the prudent person assess real dangers...