A Deep Encounter With Nonviolent Living

Submitted by Ryan Dowell Baum on October 4, 2007 - 6:05pm.

For nine months, from October 2006 through June 2007, I participated in Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service’s Engage Training for Trainers program. Engage is a training program designed by Pace e Bene to help people in many different contexts and circumstances explore the power of creative nonviolence to transform one’s self, one’s relationships, one’s community, and ultimately, the world. The nine-month Training for Trainers program involved about a dozen people from all over the country that were interested in becoming certified Pace e Bene Nonviolence Trainers. I was one of them.

What I found most surprising about the process was the discovery that nonviolence, more than anything else, is a way of life, a spiritual self-positioning. It is not something you do; it is something you are. Often, when we hear of nonviolence in the context of Gandhi’s independence movement in India or King’s civil rights movement in the United States, we think of nonviolence as some sort of ethically pure tactic for achieving a political or social objective. This, I have come to realize, is a misunderstanding. In the messy, sticky, uncertain world of human interaction, there is virtually no “ethically pure” way to do anything; humans are flawed, and therefore our actions are flawed. It is part of the path of nonviolence to be honest and humble about this. What nonviolence does achieve is to ground us in the reality of the common humanity of all involved in a conflict; it exhorts us never to lose sight of an opponent’s humanity and never to denigrate that humanity through the use of violence.

One of the most important realizations I took away from the training in terms of practical application to my own life is the relationship of nonviolence to pace: pace of life, pace of action, and pace of thought. It was during a role-playing exercise that it hit me. We were doing a simulation of a conflict that we were beginning to resolve through deep listening and a patient, understanding spirit. I had a deep sense of God’s presence in the room. Lunchtime came, and I ate my food and resumed my life at my normal pace, making and answering phone calls, catching up on homework, etc. When we re-gathered after lunch, I no longer felt such a strong sense of divine presence. I became distressed, grasping for it, wishing for it to return, but it eluded me. One of our trainers announced that our first activity after lunch would be to engage in some shared silence, and so she rang a bell and the silence commenced. After a while, I was flooded once again by a sense of God’s presence. It seemed to come spontaneously, without my having done a thing. Upon reflection on this experience, I realized that it was the slowing down of my thoughts and deeds that seemed to allow room for God’s light to shine through. The pace of life to which I am habituated through participation in American culture allows very little space for waiting on God’s presence. It is indeed a radically counter-cultural move to simplify one’s life such that God’s still, small voice may really be heard and obeyed, and there are very few American institutions (seminary included, I believe), with which one does not have to struggle hard to put such a change of pace into practice.

Coming from a Quaker background, I believe these realities are at the heart of much of the Quaker tradition, but the Society of Friends has always had to struggle with the tension between being firmly in and involved with the world and being a peculiar people of God with a distinct way of life. Quakers have never separated themselves from those outside of their religious group to the extent that many Old Order Amish and Mennonite communities have, and so they have had to resist being consumed by the dominant culture through their interface with it. I believe that my continued involvement with Pace e Bene will help me to reconnect with my Quaker roots by reminding me of the principles like slow pace and deep spirituality that are the essence of nonviolence.

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