To What Other End does Hatred Lead?

-Alice Barrett

         “On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler’s Germany.

         These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of incinerated human remains; warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses; prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies; and―perhaps most disturbing of all―the half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes.”

—Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945 by John C. McManus

         After 1945, the revelation of the mass killing of Jewish people slowly emerged in horrific photographs, one after the other, in newspapers.      

Gentiles were shocked and stunned. Jews, after centuries of Christian hatred, perhaps not as stunned. To what other end does hatred lead?

         Politicians who hint and imply racist tropes, just enough to be deniable, insinuate that a Trump presidency will not be as bad as he himself makes it sound.

         The Holocaust of Jewish people came to an official end in1945, just four years before I was born. My dad and uncles fought against fascism.

         Yet anti-semitism did not end. The memory of what those soldiers experience on seeing victims of anti-semitism may fade, but we cannot forget the lessons of hate. 

         Reactions against the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza and the West Bank are righteous. Anti-semitism is not. Politicians, columnists blur the edges. Be alert. 

         Holocaust: never again.

         Mass bombing civilians: never again. 

A Christmas Prayer for Our Enemies

May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.

May my enemies be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.

May I be safe and free from injury.

May my enemies be safe and free from injury.

May I be free from anger, afflictions, fear and anxiety.

May my enemies be free from anger, afflictions, fear and anxiety.

May I learn to identify and see clearly the sources of anger, craving and delusion in myself.

May my enemies learn to identify and see clearly the sources of anger, craving and delusion in themselves.

May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free.

May my enemies be able to live fresh, solid, and free.

-adapted Metta chant from Thich Nhat Hanh

A Quaker Call for Peace in MiddleEast

I call myself a Quaker or Friend, and Friends throughout history have maintained a testimony for peace. War, we say, is contrary to the mind of Christ, and it is laid upon us to live in the virtue of that life and power that wins through love and not war. This is not an easy testimony, and it has three aspects:

To refuse to take part in acts of war ourselves;
To strive to remove the causes of war;
To use the way of love open to us to promote peace and heal wounds.

-Jean Zaru from “The Things That Make for Peace”, from Global Ministries

What Are We Fighting For?

“Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself, “What else is the world interested in? What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships. God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship with each other of love. “

On Pilgrimage, April 1948

How to make a peaceful demonstration violent, 1940

Picket lines are too often associated with violence, and it is true that as in Boston, an opposing party may suddenly spring in among you, wrest the signs from your hands, and by the use of force, infect others to use force. The very effort to hold on to signs, to resist being choked to death when the sign hangs around your neck, gives the appearance of participation in violence, and the police enter in then and contribute their share. From a peaceful, orderly demonstration I have seen a picket line become in one second a rioting mob. There is always the feel of it in the air, the threat of it. There is always the passer-by who contributes his share, “Why don’t you get in their and rough ’em up!” to the crowd gathered on the other side of the streets watching for trouble. 

And of course we were all accused of being communists and socialists.

1940

Dorothy Day on Bitterness and Despair

The battle at home now is to conquer the bitterness, the sense of futility and despair that grows among the young and turns them to violence, a violence which is magnified by the press, the radio and television. We lose sight of the poor people’s cooperatives and boycotts, the conquest of bread, as Kropotkin called it, which goes on daily in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, not to speak of California, Texas, and all the states where Mexicans have been imported for agricultural labor.

The Catholic Worker, February 1969

Our Source of Conscience

Thich Nhat Hanh:
…we have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But in the name of freedom, people have done a lot of damage. I think we have to build a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast in order to counterbalance. Because liberty without responsibility is not true liberty. We are not free to destroy.
-PBS interview 2003

During this time of COVID, some Americans are refusing to wear masks because it infringes on our freedom. One such person said: “We’re Americans, we can do whatever we want.”
Dorothy Day’s life makes clear how differently we live when we rely on our spiritual tradition as the source of our actions. Clinging to a half-baked definition of “freedom” is bad. However, simple “decency” may not be quite enough. And here is where Day makes us uncomfortable.

Day made her spiritual home in the Roman Catholic Church. She did not blind herself to its many faults. However, here she found she could dig down deep into a level of commitment to God-in-each-other. And so she stayed. Why did she not remain devoted to Communism? Many of the same ideas and visions of justice remained with her always. What was missing?
We have ideas of justice, of freedom and responsibility, of the family of humanity. Recognizing God-in-each other is more than an idea, it is a gut-wrenching challenge to everything we hold dear.

The Catholic Church is not the sole, or even perhaps best, spiritual home for most Americans. The dig-down-deep spiritual traditions of 2020 cannot be enumerated. The specific source of gut-based, love-based, willing-to-sacrifice conscience does not matter. Catholics called humanity “The Mystical Body of Christ.” By any other name, it means the same.
Provided we dig down deep.

Are The Leaders Insane? – April 1954

Two quotes from Dorothy Day’s column:

“It is time again to cry out against our “leaders,” to question whether or not, since it is not for us to say that they are evil men, they are sane men”

“Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief; take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh; in thee have I hoped, let me never be confounded.”

Anchor the Eternity of Love

John Lewis
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness.
Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates.
Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge.
Release all bitterness.
Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.
Choose confrontation wisely,
but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice.
And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love,
if you shine like a beacon for all to see,
then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation,
a world community,
and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself. 

~ John Lewis (February 21, 1940–July 17, 2020) 

Refusal to Assist in the Prosecution of War

“Because of our refusal to assist in the prosecution of war and our insistence that our collaboration be one for peace, we may find ourselves in difficulties. But we trust in the generosity and understanding of our government and our friends, to permit us to continue, to use our paper to ‘preach Christ crucified’.”

January 1942