A Fighter for Peace

JOHN DEAR has just finished a live radio telephone interview with a local radio station. It is Sunday morning, the final day of a three day conference where he has been thrilling more than 300 participants with his eloquent portrayal of radical peacemaking today. We haven’t had breakfast yet, but he looks alert and ready to face the day. You could imagine him being the all-American boy – a youthful 47 year old, good looking, slightly tanned, impeccably dressed, with a North Carolina drawl – and it is hard to imagine that he has been arrested over 75 times for acts of civil disobedience, organised scores of demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons at military bases across the US, and spent eight months in North Carolina jails for a Plowshares disarmament action.

He has led Nobel Peace Prize winners on a visit to Iraq, and given thousands of lectures on peace and non-violence across the US. “We must rediscover the spiritual roots of peacemaking,” he has been telling his English audience. “We must keep resisting and teaching”. He condemns the billions of dollars his government spends on nuclear weapons, which he feels is completely incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. “We’re in the long haul of organizing a peace movement, but with President Bush’s approval rating in steep decline this is a good time to get on with it,” he says. “You know,” he adds, “that Bush has not attended even one funeral of a serviceman killed in Iraq”.

Sign from Heaven

In his view, peacemaking is at the heart of the Gospel. John Dear talks about a conversion experience he had in the summer of 1982, a few months before entering the Jesuits. He flew to Israel to make a pilgrimage through the Holy Land, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Israel had recently invaded Lebanon, and he found himself in a war zone. He spent his last week camping along the beautiful Sea of Galilee in the north. Each day, he visited the small stone Chapel of the Beatitudes, which stands on a hilltop overlooking the Sea. The Beatitudes are inscribed along the church’s eight-sided walls. One afternoon, he read the words slowly and carefully. He describes walking out onto the balcony overlooking the Sea of Galilee, seeing the blue sky above, and it suddenly dawned on him: Jesus is serious. “I looked up at the sky and said to God, ‘Are you trying to tell me something? Do you want me to hunger and thirst for justice? Do you want me to be a peacemaker? Do you want me to love even my enemies? Alright, I declared, I promise to work for peace and justice for the rest of my life – on one condition: if you give me a sign!’” Then, he says, all of a sudden, there were loud explosions and sonic booms as two Israeli jets swooped down from the sky, appearing right over the Sea of Galilee, heading straight at him! “They flew directly over me and, in a few moments, dropped bombs along the Lebanon border. Trembling, I looked up. Okay God, I’ll work for peace and justice, I said, and I’ll never ask for a sign again!”

He relates seeing, at that moment, the reality of war and death in our world as if for the first time. Even more powerfully, at that moment in Galilee, at the Mount itself, he heard Jesus, as if for the first time, saying what, in his view, He still says today: “The God of peace wants us to live, not to kill; to spend our lives rooted in God, living life to the full, promoting life for all, serving all those in need, loving even our enemies, and working to stop war and injustice”. Pondering God’s spirituality of non-violence, he marvels at the dramatic contrast the Beatitudes present to the prevailing culture’s spirituality of violence. He feels that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches that the way of non-violence is a narrow path that few find, while the road to destruction is wide, and many take it. Nonetheless, it is into the culture of violence that Jesus comes, announcing the God of nonviolence and a life-giving spirituality of nonviolence.

A missionary path

John Dear was born in 1959 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University, and two masters degrees in theology from the Graduate Theological Union in California. He is a former Executive Director of Fellowship of Reconciliation, the largest interfaith peace organisation in the US, and is a Pax Christi US Ambassador for Peace. He has worked in homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and community centres around the US, and travelled in war zones around the world, including most recently Iraq and Palestine. He has lived in troubled areas of the world – in El Salvador, Guatemala and Northern Ireland. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Dear volunteered as a Red Cross chaplain, and became one of the coordinators of the Red Cross chaplaincy program. During this time he worked with and counselled some 1,500 family members who had lost loved ones in the tragedy, as well as with hundreds of firefighters and police officers, while at the same time he spoke out against the US retaliatory bombing of Afghanistan.

His work for social justice and world peace has won him international admiration and spurred features in such publications as The New York Times and The Washington Post. John Dear is also the author of 20 books including The God of Peace; Jesus the Rebel; The Questions of Jesus; Mohandas Gandhi: Essential Writings; and the just released Transfiguration, which has a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. He is a weekly columnist for the US-based National Catholic Reporter newspaper.

Spirituality of violence

John Dear currently lives in northern New Mexico, and is presently engaged in an ongoing campaign to shut down the nuclear weapons industry in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the Bomb. “That’s the legacy of Daniel and Philip Berrigan,” he tells me “and that’s what my friends and I are trying to do in the United States – to confront these nuclear military imperial installations through active gospel nonviolence, and say no to it”. He worries that the Australian and UK governments have aligned themselves with the US government, with the war in Iraq and with nuclear weapons, and wanting to be part of the whole big global empire.

“I’m going to quote Martin Luther King here – the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence, the choice is between nonviolence and non-existence”. John Dear’s opening remarks at the National Justice and Peace Conference set the tone for his first presentation. He quoted the present day examples of terrorism and the war in Iraq as movements towards non-existence. Making matters worse is the fact that the aggressors are now moving towards developing a spirituality of violence. “They claim wars are justified and that war is peace,” said Dear, who criticised those elements of the Church that go along with war-making religiosity. “I have heard the call ‘blessed are the warmakers’ from the Churches over recent years.” Dear recalled how Martin Luther King pointed out that violence doesn’t work. “War doesn’t work; war is terror; war sows the seeds for future wars. We must work as peacemakers to denounce not only total war, but also the false spirituality of war”.

Positive developments

He tells me that there are 35 wars going on today, yet, on the positive side, over the last 20 years, some two thirds of the planet has been involved in nonviolent organisation. “Nonviolence is at the core of every major religion,” says Dear, pointing out that Muslim bombers are not following the teaching of Islam. He feels the US and its supporters crossed an important moral line when they vaporised 200,000 people at Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. Dear declares there to be a particular obligation on US and UK citizens to do nonviolence because they have been the cause of so much suffering around the world through empire building and militarism. He claims that the whole system in the US was so far gone that there are many in peace and justice circles who have given up on trying to get people into the system as public servants and seeking to influence and change society that way. “Christians and Catholics need to unpack the nonviolent tradition and talk about it,” Dear says. He also calls for more Christians to get involved in public action for peace which disrupts war making.

We start moving to the queue for breakfast, ready to begin another day of the busy conference programme. He is full of energy and a sense of mission. “As we cultivate nonviolence of the heart, and root all we do in our relationship with the God of peace,” he reflects, “we begin to see God everywhere – in the poor, in the struggle for justice and peace, in our communities, in the gifts of bread and wine, in creation itself, in our enemies, in one another”.