Art of Dying music group

“Just as one man must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence.”
(M.K. Gandhi, Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, p.126)

A friend told me that his wife reading my posting last night I had a nightmare and thought I was depressed. Maybe so but I like to think of it as “walking in the shadow of death”, something Dr. Martin Luther King suffered from in his later life. The story goes that his aides had to push hard to get him out of bed in the morning but went he got up and got going he was dynamite. I can related to the part of getting out of bed in the morning but it is not depression, in my opinion, so much as just the fear of waking up and seeing all the good and all the evil around us.

When university students in the ROTC programs are trained at Marquette they are trained in the art of killing. If we are to overcome the teaching of killing with nonviolence we must, as Gandhi says, be trained in the art of dying. I know I talk too much about death, dying and the shadow of death but it is perhaps only because I am a newcomer. Not so long ago in my life when something bad happened to me or others I reacted, spoke out with anger against it. Now I am slowly learning how to respond to evil with nonviolence, accepting the suffering and still resisting and speaking truth to power. I am not too good doing it yet.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement used to attend daily mass in a church whenever it was possible. When I first moved into this neighborhood, some years ago, I tried to attend daily mass at the Croatian Catholic church a few blocks away. The mass is at 7:45 in the morning. But after a while, as I became more aware of death in my life, I lost the discipline of waking early for Mass. A few times a friend has asked me to attend daily mass at 12 noon with him at Gesu church on the Marquette University campus. But the discipline of daily mass has alluded me.

As we were protesting ROTC on the campus of Marquette the other day I noticed that across the street by Gesu the sidewalk were full of young students going back and forth. Although, students on our side of the street did not take many of our flyers with words of Pope, Holy Father, on it saying “Faith and Violence are Incompatible “ I thought today if I witnessed for about 20 minutes a few days a week at the time students were flowing down the street in between persons I would reach lots of students with our message that Faith and Violence are Incompatible and afterward go to noon mass at Gesu. Witness and Prayer, it is a good combination to make change? It helps practice the art of dying.

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