The Rev Barbara Ballenger
The following is an address that I shared yesterday at an interfaith luncheon, sponsored by the Women of Keneseth Israel. Time restraints prompted me to cut it in half. This is the original version.
I am honored, humbled and in some ways very challenged to be among you all today to share some thoughts on hope, on how to keep the work of justice and peace going in these times of moral rupture. This is a very vulnerable time for coalitions that have been hard-won and long held. I appreciate the need to focus on tools of connection, so that we can stay together in a time where we might intensely disagree. So much is at stake as our elections fly toward us. Democracy hangs in the balance.
So as a way of giving you an idea of where I come from in this work, I’d like to tell you a story. It’s titled “The time I was nearly run out of the peace group for being violent.” This takes place in Cleveland Ohio in the weeks after 911. My spouse and I attended a gathering called by the local Catholic Worker community for those advocating for a non-violent response to those horrific attacks. We soon found ourselves in an ongoing and diverse movement that pushed against the drumbeat to war that began around the same time. We called ourselves the Cleveland Non-Violence Network, CNVN.
A small group of us began to meet weekly in Public Square in Cleveland to stage peace demonstrations. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, we would stroll around Public Square singing ironic holiday songs that we had written. What sounded from a distance like inviting carols, on closer listen had lyrics like “John Ashcroft in Running your Town” and “Billy the Bomber was a jolly happy soul…”
Soon conflict ensued. But not from people who disagreed with our stance, and who did not frequent Public Square in Cleveland in December. Some in our group, inspired by peace activists like Thich Nhat Hanh, considered the sarcasm in our street theater and songs to be a form of violence. I considered the art to be ironic and compelling. A meeting was called to iron things out Quaker meeting style, no debate, just a sharing of experiences and feelings.
In the end we agreed that we shared a commitment to preventing war, though we did not all share the same definitions of what peace and nonviolence entailed. We decided to offer a variety of expressions of advocacy and activism, and that people could choose the ones they were most comfortable with. We came together and separated as necessary over many months and years. The group continues today.
I share this story with you because peace work is some of the most fragile and perilous work we can do. In the end, I think our little group survived by learning how to have conflict well, and committing over and over again to relationships that modeled its values of peace and justice, mercy and forgiveness.
I left Cleveland more than 20 years ago, but those lessons have stayed with me, and they have been tested and strengthened in the crucible of peace and justice work I’ve engaged in since. I believe they are helpful now, as we do our work in light of the conflict in the Holy Land and beyond.
By way of resources, I’d like to share with you some of the conversation partners I turn to when my hope gets stretched, my heart is broken, and I find myself in conflict yet again.
The first is Vaclav Havel. The late Czeck political prisoner, writer, and the first president of the emancipated Czech Republic was asked in an interview: “Do you see a grain of hope anywhere in the 1980s?” This was three years after he was released from prison and three years before he was elected president of the new state he helped to form. His answer is in an essay called “The Politics of Hope.”
“. . . [T]he kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us, or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul, and it’s not particularly dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.”
He went on to say: “Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Hope is the certainty that something makes sense, Havel says. I would call that vision – hope has a vision of how the world should be that resides deeply in the heart and mind. I think that’s why the Cleveland Non-Violence Network didn’t end in violence, and why it outlasted the war it couldn’t prevent. It held in common a vision that made sense, regardless of how it turned out, and still does.
My second conversation partner is Joanna Macy, the architect of the Work that Reconnects and the co-author of Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy and the book Coming back to Life: the updated guide to the work that reconnects. The Work that Reconnects is a set of tools and practices drawn from a variety of faith traditions and the insights of systems theory. It helps people stay in justice work in the wake of the wounds and traumas that the efforts can inflict.
Macy writes: “Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have. It is a process we can apply to any situation, …Since Active Hope doesn’t require our optimism, we can apply it even in areas where we feel hopeless. The guiding impetus is intention; we choose what we aim to bring about, act for, or express. Rather than weighing our chances and proceeding only when we feel hopeful, we focus on our intention and let it be our guide.
My Third Conversation partner for staying in the work of peace and justice, is South African Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, who with his daughter The Rev. Mpho Tutu, wrote The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and our World.
In it, Tutu writes: “I would like to share with you two simple truths: there is nothing that cannot be forgiven, and there is no one undeserving of forgiveness. When you can see and understand that we are all bound to one another—whether by birth, by circumstance, or simply by our shared humanity—then you will know this to be true. I have often said that in South Africa there would have been no future without forgiveness. Our rage and our quest for revenge would have been our destruction. This is as true for us individually as it is for us globally.”
The practices in Tutu’s book are culled from his work as chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which helped the country recover from its history of apartheid. They are also the insights of an Anglican pastor with an immense love for mercy and for justice.
Hope. Vision. Reconnection. Forgiveness. My conversation partners tell me that the work that fosters peace and justice is cyclical, imperfect, transcendent, ongoing and always, always relational. It demands diverse community.
A few weeks ago, I got a very visual reminder of whom I share this common cause with during a silent march to lament the innocent people who died in the violence that launched the war between Israel and Hamas and to lament all who have died in the war since. More than 300 people gathered in Chestnut Hill and walked in silence about a mile up Germantown Avenue and back, blocking traffic, drawing quiet observers. In that reverent, heart-broken line, I made tearful eye contact with colleagues from every issue that I’ve been working on in Philadelphia for the past 10 years – fellow workers in racial repair, environmental justice, anti-poverty and school equity work, co-workers in combatting gun violence, police violence, global violence. They were in that silent, sacred walk, along with many more whom I had never met.
They are the reason for the hope that I have. Not that we all agree on solutions. But that we all show up.