During all the ceremonies on this historic Inauguration Day the phrase running through my mind was: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” I first heard this phrase some years ago when I started to work with Mothers Against Gun Violence. At first it did not make sense to me and I questioned my friend, Marna, about it. She explained the mothers had got it from another group in Washington D.C. that was also fighting gun violence on the streets. The phrase slowly made sense to me. Instead of looking to others to solve our problems, we, individuals and communities, need to look at ourselves. Within us is the answer and response we are looking for.
I started to hear this phrase again during the presidential campaign. In the presidential campaign Obama, now President, started to use it to call attention to the fact that we all need to work together to effect significant change. He did not use it today during his inauguration talk but the message was clearly there: for effective change we must start with communities, our institutions and ourselves.
Last night at a small reception after my friend Father Purcell’s funeral mass of Christian burial a friend of mine who had been active in the election campaign of Obama asked me if we will ever see peace and the end of wars. We were sitting on a table in the church hall of Gesu Church on the Marquette University campus. I find myself saying, without thinking, that there will never be any peace as long as Marquette University is host to military training centers for war and violence. I caught myself and spoke softly as I saw one of our mutual friends, now the Director of Ignatian Identity at Marquette, approached the table. However, she talked with my wife and not with the two of us.
I think why I said this remark in response to his question has a lot to do with my Pilgrimage of Peace: In the Footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi that I recently took. Gandhi taught and his followers tried to practice that nonviolence started with ridding oneself, communities, villages and institutions of violence. Putting together what you say, your idea, with what you do, is something I have been struggling with since high school and a lesson learned in India.
Marquette preaches peace and justice yet teaches war and violence. Violence is so embedded in our culture that many do not seem the moral contradiction with a Jesuit Catholic University being a military training center that teaches values contrary to our faith and beliefs.
I do not claim to live nonviolently but at least I try and admit my failures. I now understand that “we are the ones we are waiting for.”
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