Being arrested for resisting war

On public radio today I heard someone say that “Hope is a function of struggle.” I was reading today, while waiting for a friend at the doctor’s office, a book by James Douglas called “Gandhi and the Unspeakable, His Final Experiment with Truth”. It is about Gandhi’s assassination. He tells how Gandhi was preparing all his life for death. Gandhi said: “Just as we must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, we must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence.”

Both these quotes remind me of something that has been going around and around in my mind these days. We honor soldiers who learn how to kill and who make great sacrifices in war but are we willing to make the same sacrifices, even death, in our efforts toward peace and nonviolence. Yet as Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others show us, until we are willing to sacrifice in our training for nonviolence we cannot hope to achieve peace and a nonviolent way of life.

Reflecting on my life and others I have met I find that those who struggle and suffered the most often have the most hope. I said to a reporter when I was struggling with my ill parents and a sick adult son that “my curses are my blessings”. I remember that thought was in the headline of a local Catholic newspaper right after I learned that I was being fired from my job at a Catholic Church for my advocacy for the rights of those with mental illnesses.

Also when I fell in love with the people of Haiti who struggled just to survive and when my son died I learned the ‘art of dying”.

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