Power of Nonviolence

Passive Resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the opposite of resistance by arms” (M.K. Gandhi, CWWG, Vol. X, p. 48.)

Today I heard from a friend that some other friends were saying that I was the problem, not the message, Marquette University, Be Faithful to the Gospel, and No Longer Host Departments of Military Science., in the resistance to Marquette University hosting the Army, Navy/Marines, Air Force on campus and teaching values contrary to the Gospel.

My first instinct was to react, not respond to my friend. But then I remembered the lessons I had learned from nonviolence. Also I got a picture quote above and side from Gandhi. Early in his experiments with truth, what we now call nonviolence was called ‘Passive Resistance.’ Gandhi did not like this description because the word ‘passive’ did not communicate the active work of nonviolent resistance. So he decided to use the word ‘ashima’ which we translate as nonviolence. When he tried to describe the struggle of nonviolent resistance he could not find a word. He was struggling for human rights in South Africa at the time and ran a contest in an Indian newspaper looking for a good word. The winner was the made-up word ‘Satyagraha’. This word describes Gandhi’s “weapon of nonviolent resistance.”

One principle that remained the same in all the descriptions of soul or truth force is in the quote above: “a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the opposite of resistance by arms”. It is the same message we received from Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., St. Ignatius of Loyola, Dorothy Day, Nelson Mandela and others. I frequently used Judith Brown’s description of ‘satyagraha’: “striving nonviolently to the point of sacrifice rather than fighting to attain one’s vision of truth.”

So in this spirit I wrote my friend about what he heard from other friends that I was the problem not the message, the fact that I had tried and failed to reconcile with these common friends. Thus I was going to try to practice passive resistance or nonviolence on this issue. It is hard for me to love my friends as well as I ‘love my enemies” but I must try. The power of nonviolent resistance is accepting personal suffering.

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