Ruminations: Kenneth Michael Butigan's Journal

Perth Shore

2005-12-31T13:10:00.000-06:00

Perth Shore,
originally uploaded by kenbutigan.

Pace e Bene in Australia

2005-12-31T13:03:00.000-06:00

The first Pace e Bene Australia National Planning Retreat was held November 27-December 2, 2005 at Palotti College outside of Melbourne. Two dozen From Violence To Wholeness facilitators and organizers from across Australia participated. Four members of Pace e Bene’s North American staff – Laura Slattery, Veronica Pelicaric, Ken Preston-Pile, and Ken Butigan – also took part.

Before and after the retreat, the North American contingent facilitated fifteen Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living workshops and talks in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and at three locations in Tasmania. Brendan McKeague – Pace e Bene’s Australia Associate based in Perth – organized both the planning meeting and the national tour of presentations and trainings.

Pace e Bene in Australia

These events were the fruit of much cultivation over the last decade. In the mid-1990s Brendan McKeague began offering Pace e Bene workshops throughout Australia. He had hosted an Australian speaking tour by Pace e Bene co-founder, Alain Richard, and had helped develop People of the Way, a project for organizing Pace e Bene and other programs in Australia. By 2000, McKeague and others were leading thirty or more Pace e Bene trainings a year.

In early 2004, McKeague proposed a national gathering in Australia. He raised funding to hold the retreat and to make it possible for the North American staff to travel to Australia to participate.

The National Gathering

The national meeting consisted of community-building, skill-sharing, and decision-making. It was a marvelous opportunity to meet people from nearly every part of the country – to learn about their nonviolence journeys, to hear how they had used the From Violence to Wholeness programming, and to imagine together the ways spiritually-grounded nonviolence training and action could be spread even more broadly throughout Australia.

Open Space, a participatory decision-making process, was used to help discern the next steps for Pace e Bene in Australia. Facilitated by Fr. Brian Bainbridge, the Open Space process was used by the Australian participants to decide, first, to create a national network and, second, to designate a steering committee of seven people from throughout the country to help organize a two year plan to move this network forward. This plan will include: getting familiar with and using the new Engage curriculum; developing a more systematic process of formation of facilitators and trainers; increasing communication between trainers and facilitators; and taking steps to inculturate Engage and From Violence To Wholeness in an Australian context (more Australian stories, readings, language, approaches).

Talks and Workshops

Before and after the meeting, we offered talks and led trainings across Australia. These presentations included two high school assemblies of 140 students (Burnie and Devonport, Tasmania); one two-day workshop (Perth) and two one-day workshops (Sydney and Adelaide); half-day workshops with service providers (Launceston, Tasmania), the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission (Hobart, Tasmania), and members of the Council of Churches (Adelaide), and a variety of one or two hour talks. Ken Preston-Pile even delivered a Sunday sermon a Sydney church!

Learnings

Everywhere we went, we learned about the challenges that Australia as a nation is facing: Australia’s participation in the war in Iraq; the erosion of civil liberties; legislation undermining a century of gains by labor; and the need to create a more just and sustainable relationship with indigenous Australia. There was a sense of urgency – a felt need to take steps to challenge and transform a whole set of policies and approaches.

This led to a second learning: about the rich and vibrant history of nonviolent action on which Australians stand and which will ground whatever new efforts emerge.

Finally, we learned about a widespread longing to discover ways to connect personal and social change – to root people-power in a spiritual journey of compassion, courage and connection.

In light of these three realities, there was a profound sense that we can mutually support one another in putting nonviolent living into practice. We look forward to doing so.

We wish to thank all those who hosted us on this journey, including Kim and Susan Chen, Doug Routledge, Des O’Grady and the Christian Bothers of Adelaide, Peter and Marya Stewart, Dave Freeman of the Edmond Rice Center in Fremantle, Penny McKeague, Helen and Bernie Neville, Gil Burrowes, John Dacey, and the entire staff of Palotti College. We especially want to thank Brendan McKeague for all the time, energy and relentless persistence he expended in creating this beautiful and powerful process.

Betwixt & Between

2005-07-08T14:17:00.000-05:00

On the Road Long Ago

2005-07-08T14:08:00.000-05:00

Dreaming by Heart

by Ken Butigan

It was night.
Jack was asleep in the back
and you and I got out to piss
a mile up
in the Rockies.
It was night,
and the stars
were randomly scattered fragments of tundra,
and the air was like laughing gas.

At Barstow, we were offered a ride
North, but we passed it up and,
instead, veered South to the water.
As you will remember,
we were in San Diego
sometime later that day.
We stayed for months,
swimming in the rum-warm Pacific
through the afternoon
and sauntering on the beach in the evening.

Sometimes we would cycle along Mission
Bay past the Sports Arena -- that plushy
guava circle in the rococo sunset --
cycle along the thin wire of light,
past Linda Vista Boulevard,
past Tanglewilde,
backward and forward
to Boston Harbor
north of Olympia where,
at the edge of
the water we could see the
outlying islands gradually disappearing.

Once, somewhere out there,
we were shearing the shipping lanes in canoes in the dark, where only our voices --
and the glow-worm pelt of a long cigarette --
survived. And before that, many years ago:
a freak, zigzagging storm,
with winter's
white-face everywhere,
extinguishing Puget Sound's orange light
with the
gauzy banks of snow, with the
perishing
lilies leering in the heart of December.
And inside that great house

(you know the one)

the great slate hearth
within that great cavernous room,
a people, your people.
Outside,
the storm.
Inside, the faces,
and the
nimble passage
through Seattle
and Oxford and Ocean Beach
and Berkeley
and the District of Columbia
and LA and
Chicago --
as if by braille,
as if
by
heart.

In the beginning
it was night,
and as we peed
we heard Jack the fireman snore
(with dreams
of the easy life
in Las Vegas
swarming through his brain)

and we both felt

some creature

out beyond the shadows,

circling our makeshift camp

in search of its

imaginary prey.

Meeting Again for the First Time

2005-07-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

Intermission

"There's more haze
these days,
I'm afraid. But if you look carefully,
you can still see the ocean from
here," he said,
waving his longtime friend
into the chair that was
soft apricot warmth
from the late afternoon sun.
He squinted through the window --
yes,
there was the brittle coast
and the sparkling filament of light
that the ocean became
at this hour and distance.
The blood beat in his head,
and he recalled the first time he came here.

Relaxing, he settled into the chair.
When his friend asked what he had been
doing these past three years,
he wondered out loud whether he wanted
the long answer or the short one,
which caused the other to laugh
and to feel the warmth grow inside for
his companion who had suddenly turned
up this afternoon without notice.
It had been a long time.

"It's been a long time," the wanderer said,
"and I've been very busy."

"So I've heard," his friend answered, giving
his old feelings room to breathe.

The room he was given
faced the ocean and,
as he unpacked, he thinks that
sometimes we return only by trespass.
We are all recidivists, he
writes in his notebook.
The sun
dipped behind the horizon,
melting the sky and turning
the bedroom red and then
purple. He did not turn the light on
but sat in the still rippling
dusk, not thinking but imagining
himself
jumping
from stone to stone
across a gravid lake,
stone
to stone
to stone,
and as the lights in the sky
begin to dash breathlessly into place,
he sits on the largest rock,
a ragged swatch of fur
that breathes and comforts itself
under the bleached eyes of the
night.

Looking West from Barcelona's Shore

2005-06-29T15:27:00.000-05:00

Words from the Glowing Dark

2005-06-29T15:21:00.000-05:00

Nearly a year ago, this...

Friday * July 9 * 2004 * Barcelona

It is the middle of the night. I am in my room on the twelfth floor of a hotel near the water. The city, guarded to the west by a ring of slumbering hills and caressed to the east by the whispering insistence of the Mediterranean, is awash in incandescent darkness.

* * *

Tonight Begins a New Life

Tonight begins a new life.

A life of prayer.
A life of intimacy

with You

and with Yours
(meaning, with All).

A life of attention
and intention.
A life of compassion
that is prophetic and loving,
that mends.
A life dissolving
the unnecessary and lethal
separations.
That sees.
Enjoys.

A life centered

not on the
demands and
fevered posture
of my tiniest, tinniest self

but on
You
And Your unstinting love
For Yours
(meaning, for All).

A life of practice.
Of silence.
Of vision.
Of surrender.
Of communion.
Of liberation.

May all my acts be prayer.

May all my giving be prayer.

May all my writing be prayer.

May all my life be prayer.

May this prayer
-- this unfathomable
but palpable prayer of the interwoven
heart, body, mind, and spirit,
the prayer of my subjectivity
infinitely and inextricably linked
to all beings
in their utter complexity
and difference and beauty --
be a way
to the center
that is in our midst
even as we journey toward it.

I offer myself
To Your
new creation
that is coming into being in this world
and that, even now,
is sleeping and stirring
in every human heart
and even in every
condition and structure
that unknowingly
longs for
its
thoroughgoing transformation.

I give myself to You
on this pilgrimage
to the unknown but promised reality
of love and its plenitude
knitting us All in All.

I vow

to live

this life

of mystery.

One Last Dance

2005-06-28T22:01:00.000-05:00

Many Decades in One Room

2005-06-28T21:39:00.000-05:00

One Last Dance,
originally uploaded by kenbutigan.

The community room at Barat College, long the library, was also the site of many dances over its decades. In the waning days of the college, I saw this picture on the wall. It is, perhaps, from the Forties. There were many layers to this image, created by the laminated pane in which it rested.

Old Main -- the regal, august flagship of the campus -- is attested to be haunted. In the last weeks it felt that we were all ghosts, taking a last turn through these halls.

Invocation

2005-06-28T21:17:00.000-05:00

I was asked to deliver the invocation at Barat College's last graduation, 100 years after the school opened. Here is what I shared that morning...

On this beautiful morning, let us pray.

Spirit,
we know you by many names.
One of the names
by which we know you –
one of the experiences by which we know you,
even when we are at a loss for words and names –
is LOVE.

This love is not what we see in the movies.
It is not sentimental.
It is sometimes
challenging
beyond
belief.

Love is the power
of connecting one another,
drawing us closer,
drawing us together,
transforming our chilly isolation,
challenging the systems
that keep us separated from one another.

This love is
fragile and
resilient and
endless.

Spirit,
We are grateful for this very land where,
for 100 years,
women –
and, later, women and men –
made this love a reality.
We are grateful that they created – that we have created --
A SCHOOL OF LOVE,
A school that taught us
how to transform our deadening isolation,
That taught us to overcome the vast separations.

Spirit,
We know that love is fragile.
That is why here, on this land,
we have taught one another how to nurture and
Strengthen this capacity for connection.

We know that love is resilient.
That is why here, on this land,
we have experienced
this capacity to endure and strengthen one another.

And
We know that love is endless.
That is why here, on this land,
for 100 years,
this experiment in learning the infinite worth of every being
has unleashed into the world
new attitudes, actions and visions
that cannot be undone.
This school has unleashed
this active, creative, audacious, mysterious love
in the world.
Barat’s innumerable experiences and acts of love remain endless.

Spirit
We ask that you bless all who have helped make this land a province of love.
We ask that you continue the mission of this school,
here on this hallowed and sacred land.
And we ask today –
in our beautiful ceremony marking achievement and transition –
that your presence call all of us
(the students, administration, staff, faculty and friends of Barat College)
to LOVE as we never have before,
and so to take
the fact and consequence of this place
with us
into every part
of our
new
lives.

The Practice of Theory

2005-05-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

And What Occupies the Void, Anyway?

2005-05-11T11:20:00.000-05:00

Let us remember the French philosopher who admonished his English colleague saying, "Well yes, it works in practice, but will it work in theory?"

Looking Glass

2005-05-11T10:39:00.000-05:00

Foreground and Background

2005-05-11T09:54:00.000-05:00

For three years at the end of the 1980s I was the national coordinator of The Pledge of Resistance, a network of 400 local groups that existed to end US war in Central America. 100,000 people took a pledge to engage in nonviolent action to withdraw consent from a war bringing enormous suffering to people throughout the region.

In our own modest way, the US Central America Peace Movement played an important role in challenging and transforming this policy, walking side by side with our friends in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. (If you are interested, the best book written about this grassroots movement thus far is Professor Christian Smith's study, "Resisting Reagan: The US Central America Peace Movement," published by the University of Chicago Press in 1996.)

Living in Washington, DC in those years was an often surreal and challenging experience. One of the few joys was the trove of museums on the Mall, including the National Gallery of Art. When the news from Central America (or the White House) proved too daunting, I would occasionally take the subway from my office in Dupont Circle and, after alighting at Judiciary Square, walk a few blocks to the National Gallery. There I would sit entranced in front of its paintings, sometimes for hours. Most of the time I positioned myself in front of the Rothkos, the Pollacks, the Rauschenbergs, the room full of Barnett Newman's crucifixion cycle. These abstract expressionist extravaganzas had a mesmerizing healing effect.

But sometimes I wandered back in time: to the Renaissance etchings, the Rococo excesses, the luscious glitter of Impressionist works that sat trembling on the edge of the monumental transformation that 20th century painting would unleash. And I would not miss the rooms of 16th century Northern European oils.

Recently I visited Washington again. (Cynthia, Ken Preston-Pile, our friend and co-worker Joyce McGee and I were there exploring some nonviolence possibilities.) I managed to get a couple of hours at the National Gallery, and I floated back to a painting that I have sat absorbed in front of many times over the years: Adriaen Isenbrandt's "The Adoration of the Shepherds," presented above (and below).

Isenbrandt, a Netherlandish artist who painted this piece between 1520 and 1540, depicts a more or less conventional adoration of the baby Jesus. From my first musings on this painting, though, I have been intrigued by its elements, beginning with the architectonic framework.

While the foreground suggests contemporary sacred space – with an evocation of a Northern European cathedral of the time – the middle ground conjures up the long-gone Roman Empire, with imperial motifs in ruins that are beginning to be grown over.

It is as if we are looking back in time. And as we look even closer, our eye travels even further into the past, arriving at a scene from the pre-Christian world: a pagan sacred circle dance.

This scene, embedded in the background, hints at the still present memory of indigenous ritual of the indigenous culture before the arrival of the Christian missionaries in Northern Europe -- and perhaps is a comment on the ongoing construction of Christianized paganism and paganized Christianity, even at the time when this painting was made.

Where, after all, are the shepherds?

And who (or what) is being adored?

No matter the transfigurations that the foreground commands, the background always remains.
Whether in 16th century Northern Europe, or 2oth century El Salvador.

Or 21st century America, for that matter.

Circle Dance 1

2005-05-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

Circle Dance 2

2005-05-11T09:45:00.000-05:00

Silent Motion

2005-05-10T21:10:00.000-05:00

Hourglass

2005-05-10T20:56:00.000-05:00

One month remains.

Barat College is a century old this year. It will, though, never see its second centennial. June 11th is its next -- and last -- graduation.

This quarter I am teaching a course on pilgrimage.
There are, I think, eight steps to this sacred journey:

The longing.
The call.
The preparation.
The departure.
The journey itself.
Arriving at the center.
The return.
And integrating the experience.

Barat's one hundred year pilgrimage is finally ending.
Will we spend the next hundred years
savoring,
absorbing,
probing the mystery
of this vibrant one hundred year frequency
and its
poignant,
perplexing
disappearance?

Water Everywhere

2005-05-10T09:45:00.000-05:00

Transient Beauty

2005-05-10T09:30:00.000-05:00

Light Green

by Ken Butigan

I am dreaming
of the Evergreen Ballroom,
a rambling, cavernous barn
thirty miles from the nearest town,
once a must stop for struggling bands.
Before they were famous
Jefferson Airplane played here.
Buffalo Springfield.
Carlos Santana.
But also
The Surprise Package and
Merilee Rush.

Ancient lore.
Now it is a lumbering whale
floating under the waves
of the nearby drowned mountains,
floating under the moon.
Now, only the soft circles
that once passed over the hardwood floor
of this abandoned bone-white ice-rink of a building
survive,
with the faintest remembrance
of faces close,
of magic hands
touching.

The slightest sensation calls those hands to mind,
lattices where the small and pollenated light re-enters,
fluttering paper-thin birds
quilted together in the
luminous dark sky --

together, then released,
then returning,
again and
again
and again.

(Two months before his death John Lennon lost himself
in the crowded streets of Hong Kong
and discovered supreme joy.)

Now, silence --
no lingering Grace Slick shrill,
no Neil Young whine.

The breath only,
and the creaking slosh of the whale
gliding south,
disappearing.

No sound.
No glittery trace.

Love is Endless

2005-05-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

A Few Images of The Nonviolent Life

2005-05-09T13:17:00.000-05:00

The nonviolent life, like any life, has innumerable dimensions. We cannot exhaust its richness and depth and surprises. The quest for the well-being of all (ourselves included) will take us all over the map.

Below are some images of the nonviolent life.

My dear friend Alfredo (center) and some of his bandmates, playing in the Winter Room at Plenty in Olympia.

Some ferns in the ultraviolet night vision of the infinite.

And the meeting of stone and living color.

A few moments of this life...

Nonviolent Life 1

2005-05-09T13:11:00.000-05:00

Nonviolent Life 2

2005-05-09T09:55:00.000-05:00

Nonviolent Life 3

2005-05-09T09:54:00.000-05:00

The Path With Heart (And No Pretensions About Perfection)

2005-05-09T09:36:00.000-05:00

The nonviolent life is here.
And now.
It is not in some other life
or some other world.
It is right here, in this world, in this time.
All around us.
The nonviolent life is
creative, challenging, insightful, modest, audacious.
It is large-hearted, cranky, courageous, wounded.
It is conscious and forgetful.
It is one step forward and seven steps back.
The nonviolent life is aware of its own stubborn violence
and aware of its untapped potential
for transcendent and unpredictable good.
It can’t stop hoping for the well-being of all.
It can’t stop taking steps for the well-being of all.
It is active, quiet, restrained and daring.
It is an ever-unfolding path of learning
and re-learning compassion and wisdom.
It is a never-ending way of starting over,
facing one’s woundedness,
learning the harsh pangs
and luminous transcendence
of forgiving and being forgiven.

The nonviolent life wants it all:
justice and peace that is
personal, interpersonal, and social.
The nonviolent life is a life of
experiments, longings, conjectures, gambles.
It is the flow of infinity between the eyes.
It is struggle for human rights.
It is sorrow and joy.

The nonviolent life is Here.
Now.

The Flow of Infinity Between the Eyes (Marla Ruzicka and Friends and Photographer Unknown)

2005-05-02T17:02:00.000-05:00

Ex Nihilo: A Poignant Peace in the Making

2005-04-25T12:53:00.000-05:00

In Harm's Way in the Terrain of Truth: Remembering Marla Ruzicka

2005-04-25T10:40:00.000-05:00

This is what nonviolence looks like.

Voluntarily assuming the risks faced by others: to shed light, to uncover pieces of truth, to walk on uncertain terrain to a fragile but resilient zone of peace calling plaintively out of nothingness for its final, definitive creation.

Marla Ruzicka died a few days ago the way so many others have -- caught in the smothering heat of death spraying in every direction from the split second contact with eternity that a driven suicide bomber unleashes.

She had resolved to count the Iraqi dead and injured and so remember them, acknowledge their life and passing, acknowledge their infinite worth. These lives, she said with her words and actions (and the dangers they exposed her to) must not under any circumstances be expunged from memory, from consciousness.

And so we remember and acknowledge Marla and the company she now keeps: all those who will not be expunged.

We the living -- standing on this side of that sheerest bubble that divide life from the vast, teeming province of death -- bend head-first into the ruffling hot wind and wreakage of that split-second cataclysm, and collide with the half-life of that ever-returning, insistent query:

"So, what is our work,

now?"

Vanishing Plank

2005-03-15T14:42:00.000-06:00

Remembering Larry

2005-03-15T14:27:00.000-06:00

Though I am still woozy this morning -- my illness holds on, dragging into its second week -- I feel a bit better. My lungs are not quite so congested. Cynthia urges me to get out. Though it is a sharp, cold morning, I take her up on this, deciding to walk Sunshine to the lake. In the photo above, you see what was waiting for me.

As I pause at the beach, I suddenly am aware that my brother Larry, had he lived, would have turned 50 today. He likely would have liked walking with Sunshine and me at the edge of this inland ocean under this fierce blue sky.

I bow before you, my brother, you who spent your life out in the open, in every kind of weather.

Rest well.

Neither Here Nor There

2005-03-13T19:07:00.000-06:00

Mostly Horizontal

2005-03-13T18:29:00.000-06:00

Ill for most of the past week. I was stricken with a skull-crushing headache, chills and achey-ness during my first class last Monday, and I am only now starting to come out of it. I nevertheless managed this week to keep a gackle of tasks herded toward the marathon finish line. School, Pace e Bene, RAIN.

This afternoon I finally completed my tasks on the General Audience Format of "From VIolence To Wholeness." Or at least my writing and editing tasks. There are still a few more rounds before we publish, but at least my part is more or less complete. It now goes into the hands of half a dozen readers for the next month.

Now I have a stack of papers to read -- and another stack of exams this coming Wednesday.

And I dream of writing those fun little vignettes, like in the old Oxford days.

How many millenia ago was that?

It Is Still Winter...

2005-03-04T11:03:00.000-06:00

...Still!

2005-03-04T10:56:00.000-06:00

The paralyzing brunt of winter tarries, and decides to settles in for another long frigid nap. Everything remains elemental, crystalline, pure. Simple.

Puget Sound

2005-03-04T10:21:00.000-06:00

Brief Intersection

2005-03-04T10:20:00.000-06:00

Northwest Moment

2005-03-04T09:42:00.000-06:00

Last weekend: Olympia. A carousel of family, friends and astonishing summer-like weather. Mom is house-sitting on Madrona Beach, and I spent three nights there. It was such a treat to be with her.

She and a handful of others have just launched The Renaissance Group, a nonprofit publishing company whose mission is to publish poetry of seniors. Wisdom of the Elders, given voice and giving notice.

It was lovely to simply sit with her -- I immersed in some penultimate editing of the "general audience format" of the From Violence To Wholeness Study Program; she pouring over a cache of papery leaves of text. Both of us tending our gardens silently. Occasionally looking up to see the Sound lapping against the shore.

And occasionally marveling at this brief moment of communion.

I was able to see my friend Alfredo, and also spend a bit of time at Plenty, Jim and Nicole's restaurant in downtown Olympia (where I saw Bob Ziegler, who is soon on his way to El Salvador for the 25th commemoration of Monsenor Romero's martyrdom). On Sunday morning we had a brief Butifest at Mom's, where the Washington folks all gathered:Anne and Kelly; Bill, Kristin, Haley; Clare, Mike, and Paris; JIm, Nicole, and Sophie...

A splendid time...and a rare Beloved Community moment. Another glimpse of the beauty and fragility and staying power of the extraordinariness of this ordinary life.

Winter Session

2005-03-04T09:17:00.000-06:00

A Burst of Solas

2005-03-04T08:40:00.000-06:00

Abbey Pub, Chicago. A blast of cold weather outside, where the band's long, dark blue bus with tinted windows stalwartly waits to truck the group -- and, from the look of it, half the audience -- to Minneapolis or Indianapolis or Detroit.

Inside it is a different matter. Solas is a blast furnace of energy and virtuoso musicianship, all rolled into a semblance of casual and focused amiability. This postmodern Celtic ensemble has been together for the last decade. The road -- and the endless stream of CDs -- has turned out to be good for them. Unlike other bands, this long distance gyre has not torn them apart. It seems to have only made them more concentrated, the whole far transcending the sum of the parts, even though each of the parts is magnificently accomplished and, well, great.

The ethereal vocals, the sonorous violin, the ceaseless progression of instruments from which enthralling music is coaxed -- the parts, like Spinoza's monad, can stand by themselves fully whole and sufficient if they must. But thankfully what must ultimately happen is their delicate and insistent fusion, that soul-shaking (and gladdening, even when plumbing the lower registers) jig that is the brew Solas has been concocting for years.

Cynthia and I joined Susan (her cousin) and Liam for this Irish feast. Last year some time we saw The Tom Tom Club here. There's something about the density of it. I go away with diamonds from all this creative and unrelenting and glorious pressure.

It is Still Winter

2005-02-19T15:13:00.000-06:00

Be Loved

2005-02-18T16:20:00.000-06:00

The Beloved Community

2005-02-18T16:02:00.000-06:00

"The Beloved Community was not a lofty utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.

"Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.

"Dr. King’s Beloved Community was not devoid of interpersonal, group or international conflict. Instead he recognized that conflict was an inevitable part of human experience. But he believed that conflicts could be resolved peacefully and adversaries could be
reconciled…."

From: The King Center website

All Trees Everywhere Stand Firm in Their Mourning

2005-02-17T16:16:00.000-06:00

We Honor Your Life, Dorothy

2005-02-17T16:05:00.000-06:00

Sister Dorothy, Worker for Rainforest Justice, is Assassinated

A note from the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur

Sister Dorothy Stang, SND
June 7, 1931 – February 12, 2005

Sister of Notre Dame de Namur Dorothy Stang, moved to the Amazon 22 years ago to help poor farmers build independent futures for their families. She was shot to death Saturday, February 12, in Anapu, Para, a section of Brazil's Amazon rain forest.

A citizen of Brazil and the United States, Sr. Dorothy worked with the Pastoral Land Commission, an organization of the Catholic Church that fights for the rights of rural workers and peasants, and defends land reforms in Brazil. Her death came less than a week after meeting with the country’s human rights officials about threats to local farmers from loggers and landowners.

After receiving several death threats Sr. Dorothy recently commented, “I don’t want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.”

Sr. Dorothy, 73, was born in Dayton, Ohio. She entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur community in 1948 and professed final vows in 1956. From 1951 to 1966 she taught elementary classes at St. Victor School in Calumet City, IL, St. Alexander School in Villa Park, IL and Most Holy Trinity School in Phoenix, Az. She began her ministry in Brazil in 1966, in Coroata in the state of Maranhao.

Last June, Sr. Dorothy was named “Woman of the Year” by the state of Para for her work in the Amazon region. In December 2004, she received the Humanitarian of the Year award from the Brazilian Bar Association for her work helping the local rural workers. Earlier this year, she received an “Honorary Citizenship of the State” award from the state of Para…

The Indicative and Subjunctive Meet

2005-02-14T11:59:00.000-06:00

As Wise As Ever

2005-02-14T11:49:00.000-06:00

Here is a quotation I have long loved, from the anthropologist Victor Turner. I think it is as apt as ever:

"When we act in everyday life we do not merely re-act to indicative stimuli, we act in frames we have wrested from the genres of cultural performance. And when we act on the stage, whatever our stage may be, we must now in this reflective age of psychoanalysis and semiotics as never before, bring into the symbolic or fictitious world the urgent problems of our reality. We have to go into the subjunctive world of monsters, demons, and clowns, of cruelty and poetry, in order to make sense of our daily lives, earning our daily bread. And when we enter whatever theatre our lives allow us, we have already learned how strange and many-layered everyday life is, how extraordinary the ordinary. We then no longer need in W.H. Auden's terms the "endless safety" of ideologies but prize the "needless risk" of acting and interacting."

From:
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 1.

Dance of Plenitude

2005-02-11T08:50:00.000-06:00

Dance of Compassion

2005-02-11T08:40:00.000-06:00

Yesterday a blur of good meetings. The general audience format of "From Violence To Wholeness" is nearing completion; we grind on, sentence by sentence, page by page, on conference call. Then Cynthia and I spend a couple of hours downtown with folks from a "digital storytelling" firm she has worked with before. Exploring RAIN and Pace e Bene websites. Fab. Then we head out to Chicago Joe's for a meeting with Joyce to forecast RAIN events over the next year.

It is raining generosity everywhere.

Alfredo's Other Way

2005-02-09T07:56:00.000-06:00

Another Way

2005-02-08T22:32:00.000-06:00

I just had one of those pure unplanned innocent moments when the beauty and possibility of the creative life presents itself in its rapturous shudder. Grateful, grateful, to my dear friend Alfredo in Lacey, Washington for his voice and guitar and cadence, all mysteriously present in the room, via the tin can-and-string of the Net. The galloping trill of Another Way.

The Spaciousness of Human Life

2005-02-07T10:56:00.000-06:00

Ending the War

2005-02-07T10:42:00.000-06:00

All the wars -- within, without -- are a fierce, harsh cry for each of us to clamber onto the muddy, potholed road to peace. This road is usually not pretty. And it is not always taken. But it is there, right outside our window, and it can be taken. By each one of us. And as we step onto that street, we discover that there are others there. We hook up, headed to a destination that we can hardly imagine, but that we can smell. We follow our noses. Together.

Let's get on with The Real Peace March.

It's a long, complicated journey. But it will prove the greatest voyage of our lives.

If you get a chance, see a video on the US war in Iraq produced by the American Friends Service Committee by clicking on or going to: http://www.afsc.org/wagepeace.

Peace.

Vibrant Possibilities

2005-02-07T10:22:00.000-06:00

Two Kinds of Power

2005-02-07T10:02:00.000-06:00

Two forms of power function in human existence: The Power of Violence and the Power of Love.

The Power of Violence

The Power of Violence is destructive force unleashed to defeat and dominate others. It is often motivated by fear, hostility, greed, or the desire for justice for past violence. (Perpetrators of violence often see themselves as victims of prior violence.) The Power of Violence often operates by:
• Maintaining a rigid distinction and division between us and them.
• Seeing them as less than us (inferior); as less than human (an animal or a thing); or as the opposite of being human (evil incarnate).
• Exercising power over them by threat, retaliation and other forms of domination.
• Seeking to preserve or enhance us at the expense of them.
• Claiming legitimacy by asserting that threat power establishes order, restores stability, rescues us, and saves the world.
• Asserting that it is the ultimate force: violence is the bottom line and the way things are and therefore cannot be changed.
• Depending both on the implementation of violence and, crucially, on active or passive cooperation.

The Power of Love

The Power of Love, on the other hand, is constructive force rooted in the unity of life and the pursuit of truth. The Power of Love:
• Is stronger than the Power of Violence. Its strength lies in the fact that it is a different kind of power: power that unifies rather than threatens; that integrates rather than fragments and destroys; that seeks the truth and not simply victory of one side over another.
• Affirms human interconnectedness and restores it when it has been frayed. While violence depends on coercion, the Power of Love is a constructive force for justice, equality, reconciliation and the wellbeing of all that abstains from threat, destruction, or retaliation.
• Is rooted in the human capacity for cooperation, connection, and compassion.
• Every person has within herself or himself a reservoir of this integrative, cooperative power. This power can be unleashed by an individual as she or he confronts violence and injustice, or it can also be manifested by large social movements exercising nonviolent people-power for structural change.

Nonviolent Power: Organizing and Living Out the Power of Love

• Active nonviolence is “organized love.” It is an orientation, a set of principles, a method, and specific strategies that puts the Power of Love into practice.
• Active nonviolence, when it functions with integrity, recognizes that each of us have tendencies toward both violence and love. It recognizes, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Active nonviolence recognizes that we each only have a piece of the truth, and therefore we each possess a piece of the un-truth. Active nonviolence fails itself when it is arrogant or self-righteous, especially when it claims to be free of violence, or when it asserts that only others are violent.
• Therefore, while the following contrast describes Nonviolent Power, it is understood that the same human beings who claim and use this power at the same time often claim and use the Power of Violence. Active Nonviolence is a method that is chastened and challenged by this awareness of one’s own brokenness and distorted vision.

• In contrast to the Power of Violence, Nonviolent Power functions by:
• Seeking the well being of all.
• Resisting dividing us from them. It seeks to transform us versus them thinking and behavior.
• Rejecting therefore the assumptions that classify them as less than us (inferior); as less than human (an animal or a thing); or as the opposite of human (evil incarnate).
• Not exercising power over them by threat, retaliation, and other forms of domination.
• Disputing the legitimacy of violence or its ability to, in a lasting way, establish order, restore stability, rescue us, and save the world.
• Calling on people to not cooperate with violence and to actively collaborate with creating a nonviolent world.
• Nonviolent Power is stronger and more enduring than the Power of Violence. If not, human beings would have destroyed themselves long ago.

Putting Nonviolent Power Into Practice

• Nonviolent practitioners expose and critique the reality of violence and injustice; withdraw consent from it; help to create conditions for all parties to end their support for it; and unleash a process to reveal the pieces of truth and untruth in a conflict as the basis for a just and constructive solution. Nonviolent practitioners pursue this process, not with passivity or retaliation, but with creative engagement and loving resistance.
• Nonviolent practitioners refrain from violence to break the cycle of escalating and retaliatory violence; to reach out to the opponent and to potential allies; to focus on the issue at hand; and to help see more clearly the truth and justice of the situation.
• Nonviolent practitioners love their opponents; that is, they acknowledge, safeguard and engage with the humanness, woundedness, and sacredness of the other, while actively challenging and resisting her or his violence and injustice.
• Nonviolent practitioners face the consequences of their engagement and resistance as an integral part of active nonviolence.
• Nonviolent practitioners require training and experience in love, courage, creativity, and relentless persistence. This includes examining and transforming the ways they have consciously or unconsciously internalized and cooperated with this violence and injustice.
• Nonviolent practitioners are nurtured and strengthened by community, relationship-building, ongoing education, and spiritual practice.

We live in an era when, despite its enormous violence, a deep historical shift is taking place in favor of the cooperative power of active, transformative, and effective nonviolence. This shift, which has been gathering momentum for the past three hundred years, accelerated during the 20th century with the application of spiritually-grounded nonviolence by Mohandas Gandhi to win India’s independence from Britain; with the spirited use of disciplined nonviolence by the US Civil Rights movement to make epochal change in the United States; and with countless nonviolent struggles for human rights, political change and environmental protection. People in innumerable contexts have used nonviolence to work for the survival and dignity of all. Over the past two decades, this disciplined and grounded nonviolent people power has:

• Brought down the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1986) and the Suharto regime in Indonesia (1998), and created the conditions for East Timor’s independence from Indonesia (2000);
• Fueled the Solidarity movement’s social transformation of Poland (1980s);
• Powered the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and throughout Eastern Europe (1989) that undermined Soviet control and contributed to the disintegration of the USSR, a collapse that occurred in the wake of the 1991 military coup which was thwarted by 40,000 people nonviolently defending the parliament building in Moscow;
• Ended military governments in Spain and Portugal (1970s), the dictatorship of Milosevic in Serbia (2000), the corrupt government of the Republic of Georgia (2003), and is in the process of creating nonviolent change in Ukraine (2004);
• Upended numerous military dictatorships in Latin America, including Pinochet’s regime in Chile (1980s) and the governments responsible for Argentina’s “Dirty War” against its own people (1970s and 1980s);
• Ended the apartheid regime in South Africa and sparked that country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1980s-1990s); and
• Created the global conditions for the emergence of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, ending almost all nuclear weapons testing on the earth (1992).

Nonviolence Beyond Violence

While nonviolent power is a means of confronting violence and injustice, even more fundamentally it is a way to construct and celebrate a world of abundance and plenitude. Such a place of maturity and fullness is not a utopia but a set of relationships that must be continually envisioned, woven, mended, and honored. The spirit and methods of nonviolent power are suited to this ongoing creation and re-creation of the world.

Truckin'

2005-02-06T16:09:00.000-06:00

Winter Contemplation

2005-02-06T16:07:00.000-06:00

The Daily Pilgrimage

2005-02-06T16:00:00.000-06:00

Down to the lake. Yet again.

Every morning, Cynthia and I accompany Grady and Sunshine to the edge of Lake Michigan, just five blocks from our house. This morning, like always, we wander through the neighborhood, cross busy Sheridan Road, then arrive at beautiful Loyola Park (about a half mile from Loyola University).

The lake is encrusted with ice. And we take in the vibrant, melancholy blur of sky.

Festive Threshold

2005-02-06T09:30:00.000-06:00

Departure

2005-02-06T09:27:00.000-06:00

The false spring – 50 degrees throughout most of yesterday, deemed by innumerable Chicagoans as shorts weather – self-destructs about eight p.m., with temperatures plummeting and gusts of frigid wind rattling through streets and buildings and bodies. Cynthia and I brave the chill to go out to Edison Park (a neighborhood at the far western edge of the city) to celebrate with Denise (left, in the above photo) on the eve of her departure for six weeks in Italy. We arrive at Moretti’s, where a circle has gathered for a cozy send-off. These are long time friends who are here to wish Denise well.

She will be away for six weeks learning Italian in Florence and traveling. There will be moments in the ancestral haunts in Northern Italy and Sicily (and even a quick trip to Warsaw).

Her plans return me mentally to the several trips I made to Italy long ago. Twice in 1975 and once in 1978. One of my most vivid memories is walking at night along a road someplace between Milan and Florence. It is summer. It is warm. I have been hitchhiking all day. The heat, even after nightfall, is an intoxicating story whispered from every direction. The next day I would slip into Florence, but now I was adrift, and full, under the pitch black sky and the fields on either side, alive.

Seeing The World From Another Angle

2005-02-05T16:06:00.000-06:00

I’m Looking Through You

2005-02-05T16:01:00.000-06:00

Cynthia and I go out for spectacles today. She is getting hers repaired. I’m getting new ones. Last week, as I was walking down the staircase at home, the left temple suddenly snapped. Metal fatigue (provoked by mental fatigue?).

Recently we’ve been frequenting Facets (a video shop on Fullerton in Lincoln Park specializing in many offbeat and artistic movies).

Each film a spectacle. Each film a way of seeing and being seen, and helping all (who care to look) to see anew.

Flight of Fearlessness

2005-02-04T14:24:00.000-06:00

Fear Not

2005-02-04T13:53:00.000-06:00

Levitation

by Ken Butigan

We swing upward.
The granite circular stairway takes us.
We skim the ektoskeleton
of Florence's great pulsing thing,
the bulging Dome.

At the end
we perch
on the edge of the narrow perfect floating circle above.

Below,
the immensity of emptiness,
and, below that,
hundreds of people
who cannot make us out
for we blend
into brushstokes
of black light
that bends back
against the enduring gravity
of heaven
and hell
leaning earthward
behind.

At ground level,
this chiaroscuro cosmos
seems elegant,
balanced.

But up close
everything is writhing outsized chaotic disturbance.

Being so high
spawns a lucid
jab of terror,
and then,
just as suddenly,

the cloying temptation

to hurl ourselves from heaven

to staunch

our earthly fear.

Loves Casts Out Fear

2005-02-04T12:23:00.000-06:00

Fearless

2005-02-04T11:26:00.000-06:00

The American monk Thomas Merton once wrote, "It's not love that makes the world go round, it's desperation."

In his peculiarly insightful way, Merton stresses how the world (more specifically, the system of social arrangements that have come to be seen and accepted as the world) runs on a frantic worry and nervous energy propeled by a conscious or unconscious anxiety ultimately rooted in hopelessness -- there doesn’t seem any real fulfillment ahead, so I will settle for anything I can manage to cobble together, whatever the cost to myself or others. Or if there is fulfillment ahead, it depends on my running at full spead in every direction all at once.

Seen from this angle, despair -- the lack of hope -- is a form of fear. Merton could have as easily said, "It's fear that makes the world go round" -- that makes it spin out of control, that keeps it in the incessant blur, that pitches it into chronic vertigo and Angst. Hopelessness is only one dimension of a pervading, free-floating fear.

In the end, we have to reckon with this terror and its innumerable incarnations.

Coercive and dominating violence thrives on fear and fear-based systems that are both internalized and institutionalized -- that structure many of the policies, conditions, institutions and fundamental approaches of societies and cultures. Violence is the power of fear in action.

Nonviolence, on the other hand, is fearnessness in action.

Fearlessness is less about courage and more about compassionately reweaving the tangled wiring within (and without) that is coded for fear.

It is a patient and enduring process that regards the small self with compassion, since so much of it has been formed and reinforced by fear. This loving gaze helps us understand that the small self has been rooted in and shaped by an impulse and a matrix that are fear-based.

The nonviolent life is a path that lovingly slows the world of desperation and fear -- that fear-based world spinning within us and spinning around us. It undoes fear not by attacking it but by loving it beyond its cramped, fixed, simplistic approaches.

To life the nonviolent life involves practicing fearlessness as we confront injustice and violence, because systems of injustice and violence (in the grip of the social "small self") will use whatever means necessary to protect and maintain their dominance and status, including emotional and physical threats and violence.

But this practice of fearlessness will go beyond these moments of confrontation. The practice of fearlessness is crucial to embody and reveal to an entire system and its members what it looks like to forego life lived in the paralyzing grip of fear.

Lives committed to fearlessness can, in so many small and large ways, help liberate an entire social order -- even for only a moment -- from the life of fear and its exorbitant costs to the person and to the entire world.

And this fearlessness...breeds more.

The Narrow Path Gets Crowded

2005-02-03T11:49:00.000-06:00

The Narrow Path

2005-02-03T10:01:00.000-06:00

Too often this phrase – the narrow path – is construed as a road of rectitude and restraint, a way of being that resolutely foregoes laxness and license, or at least a way that dispenses with a kind of ethical expansiveness and even sloppiness that, its champions intimate, obstruct us from reaching our goals, whatever they may be. It can pertain to the moral life, but it can equally apply to science or the arts or business. It is a catchphrase for discipline and ascetical persistence.

I, too, think of it as a metaphor for discipline, but not in the sense typically meant above. To me, The Narrow Path is not about moral parsimoniousness but the arduous yet delightfully creative process of crafting and following a Third Way that draws on the best of both realms on either side of the tightrope. Hence it is not necessarily a way of moderation (as the Buddhist notion of the Middle Path signifies). Rather, it is a practice that transforms the binary by befriending and knitting together two aspects that typically are at odds.

Most generally I ruminate on this process in terms of my own perennial preoccupation, Nonviolence. In fact, Nonviolence – as a method, an orientation, and a set of practices – is a preeminent form of The Narrow Path as I am defining it here (that is, not a carefully defined, perfectionistic moralism but a way of engendering “optimal relatedness,” including relating qualities and aspects of life that, on the surface, seem antithetical).

For example, Nonviolence is a path of Fierce Gentleness, Loving Anger, Thoughtful Action. Perhaps even Wu Wei’s “Actionless Action.” It is incomplete if it is only fierce, angry or thoughtful. It is incomplete if it is only gentle, loving or active.

We can endlessly ruminate on this urge to “wholeness.” This wholeness (this unity of opposites, that becomes something greater than the sum of its parts), is experienced in this nearly invisible line-that-is-no-line between. Hence The Narrow Path. In fact, The Narrow Path is formed by this delicate linking and caressing and embracing of these opposites and their nuzzling unity.

There is another way to think about this path. The Nonviolent Experiment is a careful amble between two fantasies. On the one side there is the fantasy of violence, the fervent hope and belief that its coercive threat will secure and save. On the other side, there is the fantasy of easy and polite peace, the daydream that civility and sentimental love will secure and save. The Nonviolent Experiment dispels these fantasies. It does so by drawing together – and then transcending – the tempting but shallow binaries. Instead, it recognizes this Third Thing, a nonviolence that is intense, relentless, assertive, that refuses and unremittingly pits itself against structures that kill and propagate obvious and subtle double standards, yet does so out of the endless well of love that longs for the safety and transformation and well-being of all.

A Moment Among Barat's Books

2005-02-02T12:32:00.000-06:00

Barat College's Brilliance

2005-02-02T12:11:00.000-06:00

Unexpected Sunbust

2005-02-02T11:42:00.000-06:00

Weeks have stretched into months... And now it is nearly two years since I first came to Barat College for a brief interview and an offer to teach. How grand it has been, being able to teach so many subjects that stoke my passion and that, in their own peculiar ways, offer clarity and even a bit of solace: Peacemaking in Buddhism, Christianity and Islam; Christian Nonviolence; The Thought and Practice of Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh; Liberation Theology; and even a class in Pilgrimage.

This particular stint will end soon -- DePaul University has decided to close this 100 year old school at the end of June (in spite of the best efforts of the Barat Community and some of its allies on other DePaul campuses) -- and then I am off to the next leg of the jouney. (All my life I have been handed my orders and have been dispatched to the next task or adventure. I am fiercely drawn to the thought of resuming my full-time -- or almost full-time -- work with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service at this critical moment in the life of the world. So much training and action is needed!)

My time at Barat has been hallowed. I have been able to have about 300 students, thus far, in classes. We have explored together what being human in our age means. Students, staff, other faculty members and the administration have shown me in so many ways how this is possible. It has been a gift in every sense of that word.

Winter Light

2005-02-01T15:22:00.000-06:00

February, Again

2005-02-01T09:51:00.000-06:00

The gauzy shutters of winter. Near the shores of ice-crusted Lake Michigan -- giving its shambling imitation of Arctic topography, with craggy loops of ice rising and falling, far out toward the horizon looking east -- the sky is milky, formless, indirect light. The light is discreet, modest, but nonetheless looming and, in its own way, immediate. We are bathed in this mysterious, milky light this morning.

All of a sudden, as I write, a siren blasts through the light. Rumbling, unexpected, shrill. What does it mean, this frantic, insistent wail, charging through the sheer Chicago terrain of indistinct light?

It is suddenly February...again.

Barely Audible Winter

2005-02-01T09:40:00.000-06:00

Merton at Ninety

2005-01-31T09:17:00.000-06:00

Not unlike the frosty days Thomas Merton experienced in January when perched in his hermitage in the mid-1960s, today is cold, bright, and spare in Chicago. This brilliant, chilly day marks Merton's 90th birthday, and I happily raise my metaphysical glass to this poet, thinker, brooder, mentor and spiritual voyager who, even in death, is forever beckoning us "further," into the emptiness that is rich beyond measure.

One of Merton's Friends

2005-01-31T09:10:00.000-06:00

July Twenty-Eighth:
Poem for Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

by Ken Butigan

You are outside
tonight,
Daniel,
adrift in the whirred glare
that tiny fragments spin,
missing in action
in the hard artificial light.

Wandering,
you find
the Salvadoran dead
lying on Broadway,
frozen and numbered.
Traffic picks its way
round bodies
that appear by magic.
The public is outraged
by the inconvenience.

But you remain.
What memory does this
loosen?
What hand pressed
against the spiraled flesh
of your own?

What recognition
scenes unfold?
What poignant dreams?

While the chatter of death
plays on,
upstairs the music
rattles
like stones
swung hard
inside
a bowl

big like the earth,

swung by one
whose life
swings out in circles.

Upstairs there is the low bellow,
and the colored stones--
sienna, camel, burnt-orange,
each like eyes--
are wrested from rest
by the fiery feathered dance,
by the chord
struck at the start
of all new things,

which even now
is clear and clean,

which even now
urges the thin crust of the ground
forward and back.

You are here,
Daniel,
learning to balance by shaking,
practicing
the vertigo of spirit

that fixes you
to this precious earth.