Towards a Spirituality of Nonviolent Direct Action for Nuclear Disarmament

 A study of The Risk of the Cross prepares a group of us to witness against the U.S. refusal to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Like in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, through a series of exercises we immerse ourselves in the biblical narrative. We access the dangerous memory of the nonviolent campaign of Jesus as a source of mission and ministry.

The principal and foundation is our awareness of the profound yes we make to God. The graces of this contemplative period in focus on the principal and foundation is a matter of further accepting our baptismal assent to God and a designation of ourselves in the purpose of God's providence. The purpose of our acting in nonviolence, as the tip of the spear, is a further conclusion reaching to grasp this insight of our Creator's grace filled act of creation. 

It is knowing ourselves in this way that we are ready for the first week. In this period of contemplating the structural sin, of course it is a meditation not of a metaphysical natural divorce from reality, but a human-made sin, a system, an awareness of ourselves as sinners, having accepted the dirty rotten system, as Dorothy Day put it. The purpose of our confessional community incarnating a resistance to the genocidal, omnicidal mentality, as Robert Jay Lifton put it. We proclaim a relationship as travelers, pilgrims, coming together as a peregrination is to make ready our hearts for conversion. 

The intellectual conversion that is preceded in every activist's life is that of knowing the humility to suffer without full knowledge of the fruits of one's action. The divine grace which has infused the world tempts us to the tree knowledge of life, that we must test through the experimental adoption of the patterns of disciples. 

In the second week, where we encounter Jesus in the acts of ministry, we pray the art of witnessing the healing and exorcisms of Jesus, and the cleansing of the temple. We examine ourselves in the belly of the beast, the times we have failed to recognize the call of the King, the times we have passed on taking responsibility for the one mugged on the road of Jerico. We convene a study of these signs of the times and translate that sign for today in the evangelical purpose of mediating our faith in the Reign of God.

 We recall and reflect on the advent of God's final coming, as one must prepare at watch for first dawn against the robber. The time of the coming of God's nearness is appropriate in the paraphrasis I make, to this urgent act of intervening against the evil powers. Beasts of Revelation, idols whose false worship adores the power of anti-life in 

• designing W-93, a new nuclear weapon system, 
• modernizing Sentinel ICBMs, 
• manufacturing gravity B-61 bombs, 
• testing to dull conflict of conscience from triggering a nuclear armageddon, nuclear winter scenario.
•  $1.7 trillion approved over decades--not to resolve the climate catastrophe, but rather to procure a "credible" threat of ecoside. 
• This vigil of ours against the famine conditions, the 5 billion deaths that would result from the lofted tonnage of soot into the atmosphere by a limited nuclear war, failure of agricultural systems in the Northern Hemisphere.

 

 This binding of the strong man forewarned in the gospel is the real robbery of our very civilization. Meanwhile, the forced march to the abyss. Every day from submarines the launch of D5 interballistic missiles, the drills NATO shared nuclear agreements, $30 billion over 20 years designated enhancing secondary in Savannah River Site, South Carolina, to renew the process of plutonium pit production for nuclear weapons.

The third Week, as may be summarized, as the contemplation of crucified peoples, we walk within the narrative of Jesus toward Jerusalem, face set like flint. The closing of the noose around Jesus, who contravenes the religious authorities where it most matters, confronting the co-optation of the Temple by the powers. The hard-edge truth to tell at the scene of the crime, temples of the military-industrial-science complex, the immoral possession of nuclear weapons, the doctrine of deterrence, fallacies of security that we denounce in order to call for a re-ordering of nuclear economy to peaceful purposes. It is hearing the Word of God in the third week, the blood of Christ as the new covenant of nonviolence. 

 

We remember the blood crying out from the Ground (Gn 4:10) in remembrance of all nuclear victims. Thus we enter the Gethsemane vigil. We are converted, like the Catechumens in the third week of Lent, marked with the sign on the cross on our lips, and ears and eyes. It can be with the women at the feet of the cross, the mourning Veronica, weeping for the burden of our lands, poisoned by uranium mining, lands and waters irradiated by nuclear weapons testing. But it is in dying that we become a Eucharistic people...the following of Jesus to the cross, the awareness of inevitable failure, that we become like mustard seeds, perhaps. 

In the fourth week, we pray for graces in a contemplation of divine love. Here the agape experience of the believing community. We look on our ancestral calling as Christians to become the agents of transformation as Isaiah and Micah commissioned. Disciples of God's love, receiving a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem, a people of God wed in this encounter that liberates us in obedience as peacemakers. We join in unity as receivers fulfilling the gospel in our hearing, and pray our response to serve as leaven in society. The grace we pray is for the felt knowledge of experiencing our Cosmic God in the person of Christ, touching the wounded side of the Risen Christ's flesh. Fulfilling the purpose of divine intent is a communal, liturgical offering. Satisfying our hearts deepest desire to be one with God's way of nonviolence, offering up our lives to the witness in joy. Finally, knowing our uprising in faith is yet to be fully realized only by God in Kairos, in God's time.

See also Arthur Laffin's The Risk of the Cross: Living Gospel Nonviolence in the Nuclear Age (Twenty-Third Publications).

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 The South Carolina Environmental Law Project has used its legal expertise to protect land, water and communities across South Carolina since 1987.  

 

Savannah River Site Watch, based in Columbia, SC, works for the public interest by monitoring activities at the Savannah River Site. 

 

Nuclear Watch New Mexico, based in Santa Fe, NM, watchdogs plutonium pit production at both the Los Alamos Lab and SRS. Learn more at scelp.org/, srswatch.org/, and nukewatch.org/.