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One friend is increasingly bored and dissatisfied with her Christian Sunday church services.

Another left her job of teaching 175 high school students a year in the public school system to volunteer for three months teaching in the Palestinian West Bank. She’s now happily using her foreign language skills to work with the parents of youth in the school system.

A third is a medical student about to graduate who is worried that the grind of an upcoming residency may obstruct his vision of the kind of humanistic medicine he really wants to pursue.

A fourth had enough of 12-hour social worker days (into nights) and is now seeking a life path to integrate contemplation, beauty, and healing.

A fifth has “left” the Catholic Church, but isn’t sure of where he is now.

A sixth, a university professor, is increasingly aware of the limitations of academic writing and is looking for other ways to share and exchange knowledge and insight.

Several of us recently started a monthly meditation gathering when we utilize the teachings of Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

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The experiences of these friends remind me of Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze’s recent book, Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities  Daring to Live the Future Now. The authors define “walk outs” as “people who bravely choose to leave behind situations, jobs, relationships, and ideas that restrict and confine them, anything that inhibits them.” The authors note a second decision made by the walk outs: “They walk on to the ideas, people, and practices that enable them to explore and discover new gifts, new possibilities.”

Throughout the book, Wheatley and Frieze explore small communities of people—in Mexico, Brazil, Ohio, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India and Greece—who have devised ingenious projects that address the needs of the communities in which they are rooted. You can read more about these experiments at the book web site, for example, in India: http://www.walkoutwalkon.net/india-2/

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I offer the following notes from my reading to entice those who may want to think more along the lines of this book to start conversations and write entries in their notebooks about their own dissatisfaction and possibilities.

The authors suggest eight simple principles to foster creative walking on:

Start anywhere, follow it everywhere: “At the beginning, we don’t have to know where we’re going. We don’t have to have an organization ahead of time. We don’t have to have approval, funding, expertise or answers. We just have to get started. …. As walk outs, we can start anywhere—we can go to a community meeting that we’ve avoided in the past, we can speak up at work, we can talk to a few friends about what we care about, we can decide to learn more about an issue that troubles us rather than ignoring or denying it.”

We make our path by walking it: “If the road looks familiar, if we’ve walked it before, if we feel comfortable knowing where we’re going, then we aren’t walking on, we aren’t pioneering something new.”

We have what we need: “Our creativity produces infinite wealth. We share what we have, and there’s more than enough to go around.”

The leaders we need are already here: “A leader is anyone willing to help, anyone willing to take those first steps to remedy a situation or create a new possibility.”

We are living the worlds we want today: [Walk Outs Who Walk On] let go of complaints, arguments and dramas; they place the work at the center, invite everyone inside and find solutions to problems that others think unsolvable.

We walk at the pace of the slowest:  “Speed is not our goal. Growth is not our purpose. Winning is not evidence of our success.”

We listen, even to the whispers: “Which voices do we listen to? Are they the familiar voices of power—those with position and authority, influence and wealth, expertise and training? Or do we make the road to the future by listening to the voices of everyone: the faceless, the nameless, the invisible, the indigenous people of Chiapas, the squatters in Brazil’s cortiços and favelas, the dalits of India, the homeless in Columbus, and everywhere, the voices of women, elders, children.”

We turn to one another: “Here’s a miraculous gift: It doesn’t matter if no one is coming to help. We have what we need, right here, right now, among us all.”

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 How many of us have heard many times the line attributed to Einstein about insanity—doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results?  The authors point out some assumptions that may keep us bound to such uncreative repetition. We might keep one of these in mind during the week and be on the lookout for how often we ourselves and others use it.

1. The answers exist out there—and the experts have them.
2. To get things done, you need people of power and influence to champion your cause (a peace group recently called on Michelle Obama to use her influence with her husband to deter him from attacking Iran).
3. Plan ahead and stick to your plan.
4. Nothing gets done right unless you’re in control.
5. Don’t ask for other people’s opinions.
6. We don’t have time to experiment and tinker around.
7. We mustn’t fail! (And when we do, find someone to blame.)

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 Next, a few short passages questions from Walk Out, Walk On to stimulate our imaginations…

The Elos people have walked out of the notion that we need to leverage power to produce results. They have walked on to the belief that creativity is in everyone, play unleashes that creativity and if we want to create a healthy and resilient community, we need to invite the members of that community to play together. When we play, everything once again becomes possible.

Leaders as hosts invite us to experiment and take risks—rather than to avoid failure. They invite us to discover new and surprising connections—rather than to stay inside our box on the org chart. They create the conditions for information to flow freely and abundantly—rather than to manage the message. And they call forth the visionary leadership of the many, rather than the few.

We can notice all the strings we attach to our efforts—our need for approval, recognition, status, appreciation—and think about whether we want to cut them.

Our work is to see what’s right in front of us and to step forward to claim it. And then to keep seeing, to keep paying attention, to stay with the hard places, the uncomfortable relationships, the unanswerable questions.

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 Finally, three questions to explore …

How are the demands of consumer culture impacting me, my family, and my community?

What behaviors am I willing to walk out on?

Where might I next offer my talents, ideas, skills, as gifts?

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.

A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. …The mass of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated by it as enemies.

When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with any thing which was. It not only divided states and churches, it divides families; aye, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Men generally, under such a government ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse that the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name,–if ten honest men only,–aye if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefore, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission.

The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles.

The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

–passages from Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” also known as “Civil Disobedience”

Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules

http://www.cablegatesearch.net/

1.

Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.

–Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” (1967)

2.

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering.  Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world.  Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images and sounds.  By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.

–Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing (1987)

3.

Toxic chemicals and defoliants were dropped, and lot of napalm. Many people today still have scars from napalm bombs. There were different kinds of fragmentation bombs, some the size of a fist. Even now people get killed from small, unexploded bombs. Wounded people were looked after by their families, or by the community if they had no children or relatives. The dead were buried everywhere, without coffins. Three people died in my family.

The Americans cannot repay this debt, because it’s too big.

–Mrs. Nguyen Thi Thiet, quoted in Martha Hess, Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam (1993)

4.

Unusual among Americans, Fred Wilcox has been willing to steadily look the suffering of the Vietnam War in the face.  His 1983 book is entitled Waiting for an Army to Die and it helped to raise awareness about the afflictions of U.S. veterans battling with Agent Orange.

Wilcox’s second book on Agent Orange was published last fall, this time focused on the Vietnamese people who have been damaged by the U.S. war:  Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the official U.S use of such herbicides as Agent Orange in Operation Hades, later renamed Operation Ranch Hand. After many years of research and study, Wilcox and his son, a photographer, traveled in Vietnam in 2009 to come into direct contact with the  human suffering of successive generations of Vietnamese who have been exposed to Agent Orange.

One of the most valuable aspects of the book is the voices of the Vietnamese themselves.  One urged Wilcox, “Go out to the countryside. Meet Agent Orange victims. Listen to what these people say. That is the best way to learn about the effects of Agent Orange.”[ 77]

One former soldier whose wife had monstrous offspring said, “In my family, there is always a fight with my children screaming all the night. After nearly 30 years since peace has been restored in the country, we have not experienced a single day of peace.” [46]

Doctor Nguyen Trong Nhan asserted, “Vietnam and its people continue to suffer from severe war wounds left behind by the largest chemical warfare in mankind’s history…. Thousands of people have already died in agony with deep indignation towards the perpetrators of crimes. Many women have suffered reproductive complications and even the total loss of the right to be a mother.” [43, 47]

In her work during the war, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong noticed an increase in babies born with defects: “[In 1969]  I delivered for the first time in my life a severely deformed baby. It had no head or arms. The mother didn’t see her child, and I tried to hide my tears and my fear from her. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what the baby looked like, so I said it was very weak. It died, and I just told her that it had been too weak to live.” [156]

She told Wilcox that she has extended invitations to the manufacturers of Agent Orange to come to Vietnam and see the human consequences of their product.  But they refuse to acknowledge the suffering and their role in causing it.  Dr.  Nguyen thinks that people of conscience the world over should boycott the products of companies like Monsanto, until these companies render compensation to their victims.

5.

Back in 1973 as U.S. troops were leaving Vietnam, activist and poet Denise Levertov offered the following challenge to her fellow American citizens: “I would like to see this withdrawal followed by the penitent presentation to the people of Vietnam by the U.S. of huge quantities of food and supplies—such quantities that people here would feel the pinch, actually sacrifice something, not merely donate a surplus. I would like to see this given absolutely outright, and unaccompanied by U.S. ‘advisers,’ though  large numbers of doctors, nurses and other people who might really be of use in reconstructing the ravaged country might humbly offer their  services to work under Vietnamese supervision. Such acts of penitence distinct from the guilt that stews in its own juice would do something to make the future more livable for our children.”

Decades later, Wilcox’s accessible, compassionate, and indignant book is a call to Americans to contribute to a future more livable for Vietnamese children and families. Refusing to close his eyes to the suffering caused by U.S. militarism, he asks, “Do American Agent Orange children deserve more help, more love and kindness, than those who lie twisted, blind, and deaf upon pallets and floors and bamboo beds throughout Vietnam?” [138]

This year I have invited people to participate in an Arab Writers in Translation Reading Circle. Last month, several friends and I met to discuss Egyptian writer Nawal El-Saadawi’s 1983 Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, an account of her two months in confinement on orders of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

When reading Nawal, I was reminded of Pierre Hadot’s description of the philosophical school of the Cynics:  “They did not fear the powerful, and always expressed themselves with provocative freedom of speech [parrhesia].”  Among the eight of us who met to discuss Nawal’s book, we were each impressed by her strong, brave, defiant spirit.

Born in a rural village, she was from a young age determined to make a life for herself different from all those around her, both female and male. In the first chapter of Memoirs, she admits, “At every stage of my life I have obeyed only that voice coming from my deepest self.” [6] That obedience her led to question religious, political, social, sexual, economic, and male authorities and hierarchies.

Early in her medical career in 1962, she spoke up at the National Conference for the Popular Forces at which Gamal Abdel Nasser was present.  Taking the side of the peasants, she was seen by the assembled powerful as “unknown young woman, without position, title, prominent family or clique.” [112] Three words were written down next to her name: “Uncalled-for-boldness,” and since that time the Interior Ministry started a file on her and her name was put on a black list.

Many other middle-class women were arrested at the same time Nawal was.  They were perplexed: Why did the police violate their homes? Why had they been arrested?  Why weren’t they charged with anything? Rather than sink into passivity and endless fretting, Nawal writes,  “Yet, something would move inside me suddenly, something built into me, the rebel, angry and revolting against this gravity, this submission to worry and grief. Rebelling against passivity and lack of movement, resisting defeat and pessimism, so that I would say: ‘We will not die, or if we are to die we won’t die silently, we won’t go off in the night without a row, we must rage and rage, we must beat the ground and make it shudder. We won’t die without a revolution!’” [36] Those last two sentences anticipate the collective defiance seen throughout the Arab world over the last fourteen months.

Nawal had been arrested while working on a novel (later published as The Fall of the Imam). For her, writing was her life, the pen more important than anything or anyone else.  Yet being imprisoned wasn’t going to stop her from pursuing her vocation.  The only time for the crucial solitude was late at night and before the morning call to prayer came:  “After midnight, when the atmosphere grows calm and I hear only the sound of sleep’s regular breathing, I rise from my bed and tiptoe to the corner of the toilet, turn the empty jerry can upside down and sit on its bottom. I rest the aluminum plate on my knees, place against it the long, tape-like toilet paper, and begin to write.” [129]. But in a prison cell that was ultimately for political offenses, writing posed the greatest danger. She would not relent.

But writing outside the prison cell also had its consequences. Nawal is disappointed that, while many people from around the world protested her arrest, some writers held back: “Not even a single [Egyptian] writer from among my colleagues and friends published one word in defense of freedom of opinion and speech. They shrank inside their homes, taking refuge in silence and inaction, or traveling abroad, or sharing with others in playing on the strings which give pleasure to the holders of power.” [140] She wasn’t disappointed, however,  at the solidarity and camaraderie she found among the women of various backgrounds in the prison.

It seems the “crimes” Nawal and the others committed had to do with their criticism of Sadat’s deal with Israel at Camp David.  During her stay in prison, Sadat was assassinated, and within a month of his death, she was free.  In her afterword to the 1994 American edition of the book, she writes, “When I came out of prison there were two routes I could have taken. I could have become one of those slaves to the ruling institution, thereby acquiring security, property, the state prize, and the title of ‘great writer’; I could have seen my picture in the newspapers and on television. Or I could continue on the difficult path, the one that had led me to prison. I chose the second way, and so I came to be under permanent threat, not only of imprisonment but indeed of death.” [202] In the biblical tradition, these two paths were taken by the court prophets and the prophets, the latter whom tradition esteemed over the former.

Sadat thought that he could silence, punish, and intimidate Nawal and her comrades in the women’s prison. What he unwittingly did was thereby help to generate a work—Nawal’s memoirs—that would guarantee his infamy.

Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, American Edition 1994, University of California Press, translated by Marilyn Booth.

The enemy is all about erasure
Tactics: derision and denial
Insults and salt in the wounds
When you’re a student of history
It’s no surprise-
That’s what the powerful do
So tell them over and over and over
The stories you have lived
Heard, witnessed, nightmared
Catch your breath
Shore up your sanity
And tell them again
They are a compass for the young
A splash of cold water in the face of amnesiacs
A pinprick to the comfortably settled
Hope is telling one story after another

On Sunday afternoons
You come to our meetings
Your exuberance fills the room
Of sometimes weary adults
Who need to laugh or smile
(It may have been a few days since that last laugh
We justify ourselves saying, “Look at the news”)
But you’re the good news
A reincarnation of that great anarchist revolutionary
By the flash of your eyes you declare:
“If we can’t have fun doing a flash mob
I don’t want to be part of your BDS movement”
From your elders you’ve absorbed some of your history
Keep that alive with your joie de vivre
Hope is offering one smile after another

– Amal Tamari assisted Amal Salem at her presentation this past Sunday at the U City Library on “The State of  Mental Health in Occupied Palestine.”

I would just like to take this chance to let you know how much of an impact The Book of Mev has had on me. I read it in August of 2010, eight months into my time in Nicaragua as a Jesuit Volunteer. Beginning my time there, I struggled to bridge the life I left behind with the beauty that lay before me. After being there six-seven months, I finally began to feel that Nicaragua was indeed where I wanted to be and from there, I hit the ground running.

Around this time, a community mate and dear friend recommended that I read The Book of Mev and I picked it up and finished it in two days’ time. Mev’s life, her discernment and awareness, her sense of humor and spunk, and your writing ignited me to the core. Here, in this book, so much of what I felt was put into words: solidarity, accompaniment, downward mobility, faith that does justice, preferential option for the poor, and exhibiting the struggle of all through a creative medium.

I still get tingles thinking about how decisive the book was at that point. It shed new light on my work at a home for kids and adults disabilities, living in community, talking to neighbors, interacting with my friends and family back home, etc. I found myself putting on ‘Mev goggles’, striving to see the world around me as she may have based on what I had read in your book.

As I processed the book in the following months I asked myself why Mev’s life touched me deeply and in seeking an answer, I thought through different ways that I could combine my passions for writing, theology, and Latin America and have decided to one day pursue graduate studies in liberation theology. In so many words, I was and still am inspired and think about the book all the time.

In fact, when anyone asks the icebreaker question of if you could have coffee with anyone, who would it be? I respond Mev Puleo. Your book honored her life well because 14 years after her death, she changed mine.

Thank you for that.

Andrea Essner

1.

“Really living like Christ will not mean reward, social recognition and an assured income, but difficulties, discrimination, solitude, anxiety. Here, too, the basic experience of the cross applies: the wider we open our hearts to others, the more audibly we intervene against the injustice that rules over us, the more difficult our lives in the rich unjust society will become.”

–Dorothee Sölle,Germany

2.

“In the university, the essential character of the society comes across: no matter what the students are told to read, the values of the world outside those college gates constantly intrude.”

–Daniel Berrigan,U.S.A.

3.

“Marx did not invent class struggle—much less did we. It’s out there. And any true pastoral activity will be conflictive as is the gospel itself. To opt for the poor of the earth means opting in a saving manner “against” the rich of this world.”

–Pedro Casaldáliga, Brazil

Matt invited to me to an event today at Wash U. Students and people from the community met with Shahrnush Parsipur, one of the foremost writers inIran. Fatima Keshavarz translated the question and answer for 75 minutes, as people freely asked her what was on their minds.

I was impressed with her presence, conscience, and devotion to her path.

I jotted down a few things from her generous responses….

Writing is a lonely pursuit, you do it alone. She reminded me of Proust in Time Regained, “Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence.”

Writing connects you to everything.

She read Dickens’ Great Expectations 35 times. And I’ve only read The Brothers Karamazov eight times!

She loves Dostoevsky; her favorite book by him is The Possessed (also translated as The Demons); I think I’ll start that this weekend.

When she was in prison she’d wait till everyone else fell asleep, then she would write practically till dawn.

About the prisoners she met (criminals, addicts, etc.), she quoted a line from Brecht, “A human being is a human being,” which evoked in me the line I learned from Pema Chödron, “Just like me, she wants to be happy, she doesn’t want to suffer.” She said, “99% of the people you meet in prison are just like us.”

Ernesto Cardenal said that first he was formed by the Gospels, only later Marx. Parsipur mentioned “Sufi love” a few times; I wonder if in the 60s and 70s there were people like Cardenal inIran: first they had Sufism, later Marx was integrated.

She had the distinction of being imprisoned in Iranbefore the Revolution and after the Revolution.

After all the criminal destruction we have wreaked on Afghanistan and Iraq in the last decade, I wonder how many of our writers ended up in prison for resisting the imperial violence of the Bush and Obama administrations. No, not just writers, all of us, how many of us citizens…

“We do not believe the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza,” [Hilary] Clinton told reporters at a news conference with the visiting foreign minister of the Philippines. “We think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke action by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.”

–reported by Matthew Lee, Associated Press, Thursday 23 June 2011

Increasingly, a political-moral link is being made between the soon to embark Gaza Flotilla and the 1961 Freedom Riders.

Imagine a local or national politician, Southern or Northern, for that matter, saying the following in 1961: “We do not believe that the so-called Freedom Ride is a necessary or useful effort to assist the Negroes in the South.” Back then, paternalistic politicians would object to direct action being taken by mere citizens, black or white. “Necessary” and “useful” action, by definition, would be that taken by elected officials, who know better, know more, and ought to be trusted by the people they represent.

Then, imagine the politician (governor, senator, administration official) claiming: “It’s not helpful for there to be Freedom Rides that try to provoke action by integrating those buses on Southern highways and creating a situation in which the whites have the right to defend themselves.”

Some whites did “defend” themselves, firebombing one of the buses at Anniston. They further defended themselves when the Freedom Riders arrived at the Birmingham bus station. Whites used baseball bats and iron pipes to teach a lesson to these provocateurs. An FBI informant contributed to the beating. White activists were singled out by the provoked Klansmen for special attention; for instance, Jim Peck required over fifty stitches to deal with wounds he suffered on his head.

In his study of the civil rights years, historian Taylor Branch noted that in a second State of the Union address in May 1961, President Kennedy spoke of his “freedom doctrine,” in words that will sound quite familiar to people today: “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation.” Unmentioned by Kennedy in his address was either the injustice/tyranny toward blacks in the U.S. south, or the efforts of the Freedom Riders.

The Freedom Riders decided they were not going to be deterred by the violence in Alabama and, so, they continued on to Mississippi, the New York Times stated, “They are challenging not only long-held customs, but passionately held feelings. Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.” According to a Gallup poll that summer, 63% of the American population did not approve of the Freedom Rides.

The Gaza Flotilla is likewise challenging long-held customs and passionately held feelings, such as those of Hilary Clinton and the Obama Administration that Israel can get away with injustice, tyranny, and exploitation against the Palestinians.

And as for the allegedly provocative non-violence of the Flotilla activists, they may be quite familiar with these words from a famous letter by Martin Luther King, Jr. a couple years after the sit-ins and Freedom Rides began to dismantle Jim Crow: “Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

For the governments of the United States and Israel, such exposure by the flotilla internationals in solidarity with the Palestinian people is unnecessary, not useful, and, obviously, harmful.

Alabama governor George Wallace said in 1962, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

In so many words and by so many actions, Hilary Clinton and the Obama Administration have likewise proclaimed, unity with Israel today, unity with Israel tomorrow, and unity with Israel forever. Translated: The Gaza Flotilla be damned.

Then, as now, there’s the agenda to maintain domination, pursued by such people as George Wallace, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Hilary Clinton.

Then, as now, there’s the agenda to struggle for freedom, pursued by such people as Dianne Nash, Jim Peck, Kathy Kelly, and Alice Walker.

Dianne and I drove Hedy Epstein to the Missouri Scholars Academy in Columbia at Mizzou on Sunday, where she spoke for the 17th straight year to 300+ gifted students from across the state.

She shared her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany, and then in Britain, where she went as a result of the Kindertransport before the beginning of World War II.

She read from her mother’s last two communications to her, a long letter, and a postcard indicating that she was “heading to the East.”  Both Hedy’s parents and several other family members died at Auschwitz.

The next day Hedy was to leave for Athens, Greece to begin the preparations for boarding the U.S. Boat to Gaza, as part of the Second International Freedom Flotilla.

During a period of silence in the car, late at night as I drove us back to St. Louis, I recalled the following journal entry from Mev shortly before the beginning of the Gulf War in January 1991.

Yesterday, I printed out Mev’s reflection, and walked it over to Hedy at her condo on Waterman.  I wrote on it, “You and Mev are two of the bravest people I’ve known.”

… and I think that our world, primarily at the instigation of “my” country, is on the brink of war – nuclear potential, no less – and I am in the process of conversion.  This is a significant moment.  The convergence of hearing daily the words, stories, laughter, challenges of people who have made an option and are paying the cost, are reaping the grace — I am called.  I am called forth to say no to injustice, war, the preparation for war.  I am called forth to yes to life, yes to diversity, yes to the stepped-on ones standing up and claiming what is theirs.

This is a turning point in my life.  I was an activist in college, engaged in various ways.  But the Middle East situation has told me that my life as usual can’t continue when such massive bloodshed is being planned, discussed, prepared for!  It makes me sick.  There is not a moral indignation, but a moral revulsion, nearly physical, that impels me to move, to do, to deepen my reflection, to put my body out there on the line. Enough.  Stop the bloodshed.

God, empower us to strive and struggle with integrity, love and humility for a better world, to strive and struggle courageously, willing to risk, willing to be inaccommodated, placing our freedom on behalf of others’ unfreedom — empower and inspire us to act creatively and justly and lovingly and disruptingly.  Life as usual cannot go on, as it grinds the poor into the dust and sand – sick, sick, sick.

God, heal this sick world and let us be your hands.  Condemning no one and afraid of no one.  Putting our bodies before the wheels of the great machine that crushes the bones of the poor, blacks, gays, PWAs, elderly, children, orphans, strangers, Jews, Palestinians, Latin Americans, Iraqis, U.S. soldiers – no more.  No more.  No more.

–last chapter, The Book of Mev

“Don’t give up, don’t give in, don’t give out.”

John Lewis, one of the 1961 Freedom Riders

My friend Hedy Epstein joined the “Move over AIPAC” protests in Washington in late May. While she was there, she paid a visit to the office of her Missouri senator, Claire McCaskill. The 86-year-old Holocaust survivor informed an aide of her upcoming participation in the second Gaza Freedom Flotilla to break through Israel’s vicious siege against the people of Gaza.

The aide to Senator McCaskill told Hedy that the Senator “wants you to be safe.” Yet, if the Senator was like her colleagues, when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before Congress in May, she gave him 29 standing ovations.

The U.S. government proudly upholds its relationship with Israel. As the U.S. believes itself to be above the law, Israel, as a loyal U.S. ally, enjoys a comparable privilege to consider itself beyond the reach of the law, whether that of the seas or of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Netanyahu is clear about Israel’s intention to maintain the blockade on Gaza and so to keep 1.5 million human beings in desperation. He has been quite explicit that Israel is well prepared to deal with the 15 or more boats and thousand people from 40 countries soon to head toward Gaza.

The women and men who will board the U.S. Boat to Gaza object to the cruel imprisonment and impoverishment of the Palestinians in Gaza. In fact, they are willing to embody that objection and risk their well-being on this mission.

They know full well the lethal means Israel employs consistently and with utter impunity against Palestinians. They also know that global citizens concerned about human rights can be treated similarly, as evidenced by the nine people murdered last year by Israel’s commandos who took over the Turkish boat, the Mavi Marmara.

By her words, actions, and ovations, Senator McCaskill has long demonstrated on whose side she stands. Ms. Epstein is likewise forthright and clear: She is standing with a growing number of those struggling for a decent life for the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed and demonized by Israel for over sixty years.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Riders sought to hasten the end of segregation and, by doing so, they faced harassment, beatings, bombing, and defamation. As far as the white supremacists were concerned, the Freedom Riders were subversives.

In 1961 how many American senators expressed solidarity with such “subversive” citizens?

Likewise, those who are willing to defy Israel’s brutal policies and to defend the dignity of the Palestinian people are regarded by Israel and its supporters as subversive.

In 2011 how many American senators can utter one sentence of support for the people soon to board the U.S. boat, known as the “Audacity of Hope”?

“Yes, our hearts are breaking, but the great grace of how God is with us in our pain is that the breaking need not be a breaking apart. It can be a breaking open: open to the poor whom Mev’s photographs allows us to see, open to the reality of injustice that creates and sustains such poverty, open to responding in relationship with those who are suffering […] We will honor Mev best by taking her life seriously and allowing her passion for justice and her commitment to the God who struggles with us to become our own” (357).

The first day of Senior Seminar, I remember being told that reading The Book of Mev would break my heart. This has proven to be true. Each page of the book brimmed with poignant truths: raw honesty, the beauty of life, and the overwhelming pain of poverty and suffering. I did not expect to be broken open anew to the poor, to injustices, to responding in relationship to such a strong degree. The journals, poems, interviews, photos, and accounts truly did break me open, and will continue to do so. It is an understatement to say that reading this book is an incredibly powerful journey for me. Even more powerful was the opportunity to read it in the community of the senior seminar class, where we could be insightful, honest, supportive, and even confused together.

Journeying through this book, I felt an overwhelming sense of accompaniment: with Mev, Mark, Ilza, Ann, Maria Goreth, with the entire communion of saints. I immediately felt that Mev could be my sister, confidant, mentor, even a best friend! I was both refreshed and relieved reading her thoughts on the Church and her prayers to God, thinking “someone else has felt this way too!” Nothing means as much to me as her honesty about her struggles with her society, family, church, and purpose in life. The questions she asks are ones that I can relate to in my life right now. I feel as if Mev has met me exactly where I am at, bringing the entire communion of saints to encourage me forward.

In particular, I identified deeply with her Prayer from Autumn 1989, especially: “And it doesn’t steal me away from the poor, it doesn’t compromise my alternative lifestyle, it doesn’t dilute my intimacy with you. Rather, it energizes my commitment to the poor, it challenges me to be more true to and discerning of the lifestyle I feel called to, enhances my intimacy with you—opening chambers of my heart I never knew existed! So, while I’m in the tomb and I don’t know who Jesus is and […] what the hell is going on with my faith—I am also in the womb and something new is being forged and revealed. It is as awesome and dumbfounding as new birth” (100).

I have read this prayer probably twenty times, recording it in my own journal as a rock to cling to in this season of my life. She wrote this prayer at a time where her faith was growing and changing in many ways. Her description of feeling “raw” and fragile after returning from Brazil and Mark’s realization that he could not fix her but only listen and accompany her on this “faith-crisis” spoke deeply to my heart. Mark writes that Mev eventually “came to describe this time of her life as a ‘faith-crisis’, by which she meant that she could no longer believe in the same God or have the same spirited, easy, even chatty relationship with Jesus that she had heretofore enjoyed. Her previously strong faith was dispirited in Brazil, even as she realized that she was not so well put together as she had thought” (74, 75). I am sure that re-reading this book several times in the future will lead me to several new points in her life that strike different chords, but right now these parts of her journey are continuously on my mind and heart.

These accounts from Mark brought me to silence, appreciation, and wonder that what I feel is my own faith-crisis is really a breaking open. Seeing the way Mev’s life unfolded was so beautiful. Reading of her relationship with Mark was encouraging dose of the reality and beautiful mystery of agapic love. From seeing the way her and Mark’s relationship developed, to her journeys to interview and be in solidarity, to her helplessness and humanness in living the deep mystery that was the suffering of cancer, I saw Christ in each page. Truly, even as Mark prays the Song of Songs to Mev on the day she died, their frustration, anguish, vulnerability, and pain gave me a deep glimpse into the mystery of suffering.

Truly, “In her last months Mev led us more and more deeply into poverty. It was, as Saint Francis de Sales called it, a destitution of love. She had wanted to give the poor a face, a voice. She always wanted to be identified with them. And so it came to pass[…] She became the poor she loved ” (326). Mev’s struggle and connectedness in her conviction that “the struggle is one” gave such a deep dimension to everything she did in her life. Her questioning was not “why me?” but “why not me?” shows that although she did not choose her sickness, she was willing to enter into the suffering of the poor, the suffering of Christ. The lessons this has taught to countless people who have been touched by Mev’s witness are a bold echo in the legacy of the communion of saints and a prophetic voice that speaks of the coming of the kingdom of God.

Journeying through The Book of Mev truly did break me open, and I thank God that I can be continually broken open, yet strengthened by the hope in building the kingdom of God, the inspiration of the communion of saints, and trust that agapic love endures. It is a consolation to know that although I have felt my own breaking apart, it really is a breaking open to something new. The witness I have learned through The Book of Mev connects me more deeply to the communion of saints. To her I would say, Mev, you are among the mirrors you spoke of, “and it sometimes chills me and embarrasses me to look at myself in your light. I feel disgrace, a need for mercy, a need for your strength to pull forth to me […]Help me. Move me. Be with me. We are one. Yes, the struggle is one” (374).

–Savanna is a student at Creighton University. This reflection was for a Justice and Peace seminar.

1.

I have seen the victims.

And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me

That the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true light.

That is to say—as words spoken in enmity against reality.

2.

Instructions upon return.

Develop for the students the meaning of Ho’s “useless years.”

The necessity of escaping once and for all the slavery of “being useful.”

On the other hand; prison, contemplation, life in solitude.

Do the things that even “movement people” tend to despise and misunderstand.

To be radical is habitually to do things which society at large despises.

3.

An adequate peace movement could not satisfy itself

With assuaging the sufferings of the victims

By medical help at the point of impact.

The radical work consisted rather in staying with conditions at home

Trying as best we might to work changes upon a society

In which military victims were the logical outcome

Of a ruinous, power-ridden national ethos in the world at large.

–In 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and historian Howard Zinn traveled to North Vietnam to accompany back to the U.S. three U.S. pilots who had been captured by the Vietnamese.  Berrigan gives an account of their journey in his Night Flight to Hanoi, which contains the above passages.

The following is from Sheila Donnelly, a student in the School of Social Work at Saint Louis University….

So, as I read books, articles, or whatever else that hit me in a sort of way, put words to thoughts I couldn’t articulate, or provide me some insight to another’s experience or wisdom, I write on sticky notes passages, sentences, or phrases that most stick out. I do this for some class readings, but mostly for reading strictly for what others call pleasure and I call exploration. Anyways, I just finished The Book of Mev, and had 34 sticky notes.

After finishing, I have always wanted to explain to the author that she/he has impacted my world-sense as well as me as a person by writing what they wrote and have never really been able to do so so personally before. So I guess I just wanted to let you know that the personal AND global sides of your book were enlightening to me.

I feel like you included so many wonderful and horrific stories from both your own life and the world. It was so beautiful to see the parallels and the divergence between the two.

Rarely do I read books where the author is so honest and vulnerable about his experience, but at the same time the awareness of the larger struggle within humanity.

So, some of what I put on sticky-notes were quotes from interviews by Mev, one by Kathy Kelly and another by MLK, but I couldn’t fit the entire experience of this book onto sticky notes.

I just wanted to once again thank you for sharing your experience and I wanted you to know that it truly reached my soul.

With love for a common humanity,

Sheila

1.

In his 2007 book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter had this to say: “When we arrived there in January 1996, it was obvious that the Israelis had almost complete control over every aspect of political, military, and economic existence of the Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza.” It’s good to say what you see. It’s even better to see what you see.

2.

Later, Jimmy Carter even went to Bil’in where the local Palestinians have protested weekly for years against the apartheid wall Israel has been building. They’ve been joined by internationals and Israeli dissidents. The people of Bil’in embody sumud—“steadfastness.” Critics smugly ask, “Where are the Palestinian Gandhis?” Those critics would see plenty of Gandhis in Bil’in and many other villages of the West Bank if they would go there, as Jimmy Carter did.

3.

When he was governor of Georgia in March 1971, Jimmy Carter celebrated an “American Fighting Men’s Day.” On that day he urged the state’s citizens to be in solidarity with one of Georgia’s own and so to drive with their headlights on “to honor the flag as ‘Rusty’ had done.” “Rusty” was Lieutenant William Calley then under house arrest at Fort Benning; he was facing charges for murdering over 100 “Orientals” in the Vietnamese village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

4.

In 1977, the first year of his presidency, Jimmy Carter was asked at a press conference if the U.S. should pay reparations to the Vietnamese. He responded, “The destruction was mutual.  We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people.  I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.”

5.

When he was out of the Oval Office, Jimmy Carter stood side by side with the Palestinians, who are still seen as terrorists by the Israeli state that seeks their disempowerment and dispossession. In his mid-eighties now, Carter could conceivably take a flight to Southeast Asia. It could be arranged for him to meet people over age fifty who survived My Lai. They could tell him a thing or two about how Rusty Calley and Charlie Company honored the flag. Carter and his esteemed elders could make a pilgrimage to many villages throughout southern Vietnam, so many of which received similar treatment from the U.S. armed forces, albeit on a smaller scale. And the Vietnamese could tell Carter enough stories to give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

6.

On another trip to Vietnam, Jimmy Carter could spend some time with some of the young and aged Vietnamese victims of U.S. chemical warfare (Agent Orange, provided by Dow Chemical and Monsanto, among others). He could explain to them how the U.S. owes them no debt. He could tell them he has never castigated himself for what took place there as ordered by four of his predecessors in the Oval Office.

1.

And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

–John O’ Sullivan, 1845

2.

…after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine… The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine by a Jewish-Arab agreement… The state will have to preserve order not only by preaching morality but by machine guns, if necessary.

–David Ben-Gurion, 1938

3.

Benny Morris:  Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them.

Interviewer: And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?

Benny Morris: That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.

–Haaretz, 2004

She’s spent four years at SLU

And is moving on

I’ve spent fourteen years at SLU

And am moving on

We had class together fall 2008

Her tender sophomore year

We’ve met ten or twelve times since that class

Invariably in cafes and restaurants

(I never once used the “adjunct office”

For “office hours”)

And there was that spending binge downtown

At Left Bank Books right before Xmas break

I knew that she was a writer

From the student profile she turned in the first day

(Maybe I was too exuberant about it

She sometimes eyed me as if I had a screw loose)

She’d come to my mind when I’d read

What Brooklyn College teacher Allen Ginsberg said

“Older people gain vigor, refreshment, vitality, energy, hopefulness and cheerfulness

From the attentions of the young

And the younger people gain gossip, experience, advice, aid, comfort

Wisdom, knowledges and teachings from their relation with the old”

She wondered if Kerouac meant, “Accept loss forever”

Or “Accept loss forever”

During the 75 minute conversation amid Café Ventana sunshine

We drank champagne

I toasted her with a clink

She took a photo of me from her fancy phone

Sitting there she looked out in the distance as if in a trance

Watching for Ecstasy to come around the corner

I didn’t tell her

That Yeats’ “For Anne Gregory” didn’t apply to her

I said “good for you!” to refuse the Fulbright and instead

To embrace Teach for America and Casey in D.C.

(Love conquers all

Besides, prestige is so overrated)

The word “soteriology” was never mentioned

The word “diarrhea” was used once

Karl Rahner never came up

But Shawn Copeland did

We agreed “women’s ordination” doesn’t go far enough

If it only installs women in hierarchical power position

(Still, I ponder

How many kids & women & men

In Catholic churches may never hear HER

Illuminate Word & World & Wonder)

There’s Marx’s thesis on Feuerbach that the philosophers have interpreted the world

The point, however, is to change it

There’s Jesus’ vision of the brokerless Kingdom of God

A program of free healing & open commensality

Broken Spanish & homesickness

Barbed wire & acrobatic empowerment–all shared

I invited her repeatedly to be guest speaker in social justice classes

For her riveting, no bullshit Nicaragua testimony

In a parallel universe Mev at 25

And  she at 22 would be best pals

She’s soon to move to Washington DC

Accompanying the kiddos

She’s not got mind-reading power yet

But she knows how I am going to end this–

I can’t give her a big official prize for scholastic achievement, GPA, something quantifiable

I can only remind her of this

Alexis Mary Lassus:

“You’re a Genius all the time”

We had now made a clean break with the fazendas. We could no longer celebrate the Eucharist under the shelter of these lords of the earth. No more traveling in their cars or airplanes, no more sharing food or whiskey at their tables, no more being “assisted” at Mass by those who were systematically enslaving their lesser brothers [and sisters]. That was no longer the Lord’s Supper! We were losing the friendship of the great and facing up to them. No exploiter or profiteer from exploitation could be a godparent at a baptism, for example. We stopped accepting rides from them, we positively shunned their company and their smiles. We even ceased greeting the most barefaced offenders. (On the other hand, we were winning the trust and love of the poor and oppressed.)

– Brazilian Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga

(who narrowly missed being assassinated by those disturbed by his choices)

From his book, I Believe in Justice and Hope

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot of French philosopher Pierre Hadot.  In several books, he focuses on spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy (Socrates, Seneca, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius). In a few of these works, he is fond of citing  the following passage from French Marxist Georges Friedmann’s 1970 book, La Puissance et la Sagesse.

“To take flight” every day! At least for a moment, which may be brief, so long as it is intense. A “spiritual exercise” every day—alone or in the company of a person who also wants to better himself.

Spiritual exercise. Leave duration behind. Try to strip yourself of your own passions, of the vanities and the rash of noise surrounding your name (which, from time to time, itches like a chronic affliction). Flee backbiting. Strip yourself of pity and of hatred. Love all free human beings. Become eternal by transcending yourself.

This effort upon yourself is necessary; this ambition is just. Many are those who become completely absorbed in militant politics and the preparation of the social revolution. Few, very few, are those who, to prepare for the revolution, are willing to make themselves worthy of it.

In What is Ancient Philosophy? Hadot offers the this comment on Friedmann: “The ‘engaged’ philosopher always runs the risk of letting himself be swept along by political passions and hatreds. This is why it was vital, in Friedmann’s view, that in order to improve the human situation we concentrate our strength ‘on limited groups, even on individuals,’ and ‘on the spiritual effort (the transformation of a few),’ which, he thought, would eventually be communicated and diffused.”

1.

The very definition of democracy is the right to innovation, invention, and imagination. Since nothing in the current social organization is sacred, democracy becomes subversive by nature. Subversion is the driving force of social transformation.

–Samir Amin

2.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

–Thomas Jefferson

3.

Later, when I, as well as others, marched on Washington or Chicago, we carried with us the lessons that the local power structures had fought us tooth and nail—that racism was ingrained in the system. We also realized that the lessons came in spite of our formal education. (My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.)

–Abbie Hoffman