Peace of resistance: A Young Friend’s Thought for the Week

‘A question rang in my ears.’

I recently received a message from an Israeli friend asking if I’d read the news. An unknown number of missiles were making their way from Iran to unknown targets in Israel. Without knowledge of their short- or long-term consequences, these missiles existed as a kind of Schrödinger’s cat: deadly and harmless. Mid-flight, they seemed nothing more and nothing less than polymer contaminants in the firmament; ugly and desecrating. Rough beasts slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

It was 11.30pm. The missiles were supposed to arrive around one. For a while I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. A question raised by the theologian Emil Fuchs rang in my ears: ‘It is an easy thing to open the doors of violence, but who then will close them?’

At some point I did manage to fall asleep, and woke up late to the news that most of the missiles had been intercepted, with the help of the US military and others. ‘Only’ one child had been injured by missile fragments, lying in intensive care. This is of course impressive and worthy of celebration given the scale of the attack. But it somehow offers little comfort when more than 13,000 children lie dead in next-door Gaza. Ours is, generally speaking, not a world fit for little children.

I am referring to a sentence from the poet and farmer Wendell Berry. He writes: ‘If we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn.’ Berry is talking here about environmental responsibility, but it holds just as true in our world of warmongering and finger-pointing, a world that, implicitly and explicitly, in deeds small and large, operates on a principle plainly articulated by Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘Whoever harms us, we will harm them.’

In this atmosphere of spitefulness, news of the torture and death of Russian pacifist Alexander Demidenko, who helped scores of Ukrainian refugees escape, is all the more disturbing. All I can do is try to comfort myself with the words of Christian anarchist Adin Ballou, who was asked the following question: ‘If all men were non-resistants, our world would indeed be a happy one. But while only a few act this part, what will become of them?’ He answered, ‘If there were only one, and all the rest should join to crucify him, would he not more gloriously die in the triumph of non-resistant love, praying for his enemies, than he could live wearing the crown of a Caesar, dripping with the blood of the slain?… If in a small minority, demeaning themselves peaceably, they will seldom experience any thing worse than the contempt of the world; which, without being sensible of it, or grateful for it, will all the time be rendered wiser and better by their testimony… Peace be with them that seek peace and all conquering love.’

Ballou wrote his ‘Non-Resistant Catechism’ in 1844, long before the Shoah, the Nakba, the computer and the drone. Maybe his perspective is naive. But something is ringing in my ears.

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