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Life On Earth Needs a Nonviolent Love Army Like None Before
A call for millions to take up the path of the political bodhisattva.
Jun 21, 2024
This is an invitation to those who behold the horrific suffering and injustice that plague our world and yearn to cool the flames of pain. To those who believe that we need both a deep shift in culture and consciousness as well as in laws and material conditions. To those who sense that love, connection, compassion, and truth must be at the heart of the revolution our world needs so urgently.
Perhaps you are a student activist, a labor organizer, a nonprofit staff member, a volunteer community activist in a social movement, or simply a citizen who votes and yearns to do more. Or perhaps you are a devoted meditator or member of a house of worship who wants to help free others from suffering in ways that won’t happen simply by bringing them to the cushion or the church pew.
From whatever position, alongside the natural joy of life and the promise of this moment in history, you see that our precious world is in big, big trouble. From the hellish catastrophe in Gaza and the grotesque inequality of our global economy to the rise of new authoritarian threats to democracy and the maelstrom of addictive misinformation and heart-wrenching dehumanization online, you sense the overwhelming difficulty. You feel the weight of knowing that ours is an era seared by interlocking crises escalating amid a climate emergency that threatens the very future of human civilization even as it drives countless other species to the verge of extinction.
Yet you know that we cannot give up. The call of love moves us to try.
But how?
In the face of such entrenched and powerful obstacles, can we really overcome? Is it truly possible to move so many so quickly? To shift our civilization in the direction of love fast enough to restore a safe climate and protect it and life on earth?
From whatever position, alongside the natural joy of life and the promise of this moment in history, you see that our precious world is in big, big trouble.
The future is always uncertain. And with life comes hope. I believe there is a way.
And I believe that part of that path lies in writing a new chapter in one of the great experiments of human history.
Along the journey of Gandhi’s life—which he called “my experiments with truth”—the Mahatma dreamed of a “nonviolent army,” or shanti sena.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called us to build a movement that was itself an embodiment of that into which it would transform society: a Beloved Community.
Each of their lives was cut short by assassin’s bullets, but their service and the movements they helped build changed our world, advancing one of the most profound and powerful traditions that exists.
I call it the integral nonviolent liberation tradition: a legacy of spiritually-rooted nonviolent leaders and movements who cultivated the most radiant dimensions of human potential—the most radical love, the most embracing truth, the deepest wisdom, the most encompassing compassion, the most profound courage—and applied those great capacities in devoted service and struggle to benefit and liberate all people and beings.
We can see some of the roots of this tradition in the lives of Jesus of Nazareth and Gautuma the Buddha. They each articulated in different forms an ethic of universal compassionate love and nonviolent service, offering teachings and practices to embody it. Mohandas Gandhi was, according to Martin Luther King, “probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.” In Gandhi’s case, he was drawing significantly on teachings and practices of the Hindu tradition and especially the Bhagavad Gita to inform his fusion of spiritual practice, service, and political action. Dr. King developed an approach rooted in the prophetic Christian tradition of the Black church. And many others like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Thich Nhat Han, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, John Lewis, A. T. Ariyatne, Dorothy Day—and countless others less known to history—have made their own experiments in this profound field. All of them learned from each other or those who experimented before them.
Every moment is precious and every step a person takes on the path of a nonviolent spiritual warrior is a great and necessary blessing for us all.
There have been moments in history—like the visionary era of SNCC, Dr. King’s SCLC, and what the great Rev. James Lawson named “the nonviolent movement of America” that won the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts—when hundreds of thousands of everyday people were engaged together for years in these mass experiments in love and truth.
Looking back over this incredible history, I think we can identify several core elements to this tradition which are essential for us now.
These elements are:
- Meditation and prayer to cultivate wisdom, balance, and compassion, to loosen or dissolve harmful, reactive conditioning, and to a create a shift in identity from the egoic separate self of fear, greed, and hatred to a greater identity experienced as all life, a divine communion, or being itself; and the cultivation of a community of practice that supports this growth and embodies it in relationships
- A perspective that values truth and its continual pursuit over any fixed, partial, or instrumental view, that seeks to integrate complexity and as many perspectives as possible into a shared, inclusive understanding, and that holds all living beings as sacred, intrinsically valuable, and worthy of care as part of an interdependent cosmos
- action to alleviate suffering and create well-being for all—including direct aid to help others, especially those who are suffering most, community with others who are suffering, building new alternative institutions (where possible and strategic), and using strategic nonviolent conflict to confront injustice, prevent harm, build accountable collective power, and transform and govern existing institutions, aligning them with love and truth.
We can practice this tradition in almost any field or arena of science, art, even business—by courageously and skillfully leveraging the resources available to us and working urgently to align the institutions we are part of with these values and vision.
In our time, the greatest need is for nonviolent organizing and action to shift policy and wield governing power to lead a society-wide emergency mobilization that restores a safe climate while establishing a planetary baseline of democracy, peace, and human rights.
Such strategic action looks like campaigns of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience, direct action, and noncooperation, running referendums or ballot initiatives, campaigns to organize or compel voluntary corporate policy changes, running for office or supporting candidate campaigns, building political parties or contesting for their leadership, organizing unions or other mass community or political organizations, forging governing alliances, and securing legislative and treaty agreements.
I believe that this crossroads in human history calls for us to carry this noble tradition forward by building a global army of millions of 21st century spiritual nonviolent warriors who will lead a surge of such efforts.
We... live in a time when millions of people worldwide are waking up to the mega-crisis we face and engaging in political and social action to confront collective suffering and injustice.
We must grow a fellowship of political bodhisattvas: people who commit our lives to cultivate deep, scientifically-informed spiritual wisdom and compassion and apply them directly—at an unprecedented scale and with a new clarity of intention—through strategic nonviolent action and leadership in the struggle to guide the dominant institutions of political and economic power that will determine our collective fate.
Where are the millions who can become this love army?
Thankfully, we live in a time when there is an explosion of interest in the teachings that cultivate the inner potential of a spiritual nonviolent warrior or political bodhisattva. Every day, new people begin learning mindfulness meditation and compassion practices rooted primarily in the Buddhist lineage, as well as contemplative practices of other traditions, including indigenous ones and renewed interest in the intentional, supported use of psychedelic medicines for spiritual growth—all informed and supported by burgeoning scientific research and insight. After many years of meditation, I’m training to teach mindfulness and compassion practices myself. Yet cultivating this heart and mind to confine it to the realm of personal peace and interpersonal harmony will not meet the challenge of our age. There will be a little less suffering as the ship of human civilization sinks in flames.
Thankfully, we also live in a time when millions of people worldwide are waking up to the mega-crisis we face and engaging in political and social action to confront collective suffering and injustice. Yet, our movements for justice and struggles against regressive, authoritarian forces are often plagued by currents of hatred, bitterness, cynicism, veneration of violence, hypocrisy, reductionist thinking, and dishonesty that repel countless potential recruits and cause debilitating internal conflicts. We are often severely constrained by our own unhealed trauma, reactive conditioning, and unhelpful and often deeply confused cultural legacies and contemporary tools, leaving us very vulnerable to opponents who would use deceit and manipulation to weaken us and our efforts. In my two decades as an organizer working to build nonviolent movements for peace, justice, and democracy, I’ve experienced and contributed to this dysfunction myself. I know well the pain, the challenge, and the possibility of healing through applying and integrating the medicine of the integral nonviolent liberation tradition.
The stark fact is the global progressive left is the only game in town for a mass political force to win an emergency climate mobilization and build a democratic, peaceful, just world. But we are beset by our shadows and struggling to self-regulate. If we can’t heal and correct, we will fail in our historic mission.
So these developments are great opportunities, but without integration they are unlikely to produce the kind of enlightened social force that is essential to intervene and enact the dramatic, rapid global shift our planet needs right now.
The stark fact is the global progressive left is the only game in town for a mass political force to win an emergency climate mobilization and build a democratic, peaceful, just world.
We must set about the work of intentionally recruiting, training, organizing, and deploying a quickly-growing fellowship of people who can effectively lead in political struggle from a strong spiritual foundation. That foundation must sustain loving, hope-affirming action guided by integrating intelligence through the inevitable tumult of ups and downs, conflict and suffering.
Our people are so hungry for real connection, peace, hope, and belonging. Hungry for a vision of a human life and society in which we can really imagine ourselves and our children and grandchildren—all of us—thriving in a healthy, sane world. For leadership that embodies real wisdom, integrity, service, courage, common sense, and genuine emotional and spiritual maturity. This is what leaders rooted in the integral nonviolent liberation tradition can offer.
Those who walked this path in history were not angels, gods, or superhuman beings. They were people, human beings just like me and you who devoted themselves to a path and grew in it.
They may have been exceptional, as LeBron James is a truly exceptional basketball player. But you don’t have to be LeBron to score a couple points, make some assists, or grab a few rebounds. Most of us can become decent neighborhood basketball players if we commit ourselves and work at it. And this “way of the political bodhisattva” requires no special physical talent nor even an able body. Instead it builds on the most basic capacities of the human body-heart-mind. To breathe, to be aware of our experience, to learn, to care, to help another through communication, presence, action. And like basketball, this path can be studied, practiced, and shared.
Now is the time.
Billions of years of the evolution of life on earth and tens of thousands of years of human cultural evolution have brought us to this precipice—and given us the tools to meet it. We must make a great leap forward as a species, as a civilization. And we need millions of political bodhisattvas to guide, encourage, and skillfully push us to make that leap.
Billions of years of the evolution of life on earth and tens of thousands of years of human cultural evolution have brought us to this precipice—and given us the tools to meet it.
If this vision resonates with you, there are many resources to explore it and find community in enacting it. One way to start is by learning about the lives and work of any of the exemplars I noted above, applying lessons that resonate with you in your life and work. Community with others on a similar path is so helpful. You can connect with aligned programs like the King Center’s nonviolence training, join love-guided movements like the new Poor People’s Campaign led by Bishop William Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis, or learn from spiritual teachers who encourage compassionate action like Tara Brach or Lama Rod Owens. One new opportunity is joining the inaugural fellows program of my organization, For All, a small group fellowship of study and practice in this tradition that we hope to expand from this pilot into a much larger force.
Whatever particular form or flavor you choose, begin or continue. There is no time to lose. Every moment is precious and every step a person takes on the path of a nonviolent spiritual warrior is a great and necessary blessing for us all. May millions of us walk it together and so help heal our planet and make our world a Beloved Community.
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Love From Violence and the Beloved Community
The point I’m struggling to make in this moment is that love— in the deepest possible meaning of the word—is more powerful than growling dogs and firehoses and jail cells.
May 26, 2024
We will not evolve into the future with closed minds.
And nothing closes the human mind—either individually or collectively—like the weapons of war . . . and the freedom to use them. Step one: Dehumanize those you’re about to kill (i.e., accuse them of being who you are, as exemplified by, among so many others, our old pal George W. Bush, who declared that America’s enemies “view the entire world as a battlefield” and proceed to turn the entire world into a battlefield).
But there’s a far deeper irony here as well—a positive irony, according to Martin Luther King. Consider the fourth of his six principles of nonviolence:
“Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform. Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation. Unearned suffering is redemptive and has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.”
This is not yet a principle that has entered the collective human consciousness. It is not a principle at the core of mainstream news coverage of conflict, which remains linear in its scope: who’s winning, who’s losing. This is the case even though King’s nonviolent civil rights movement structurally transformed racist America. It defeated Jim Crow not by killing the segregationists but by . . . caution: this is going to sound crazy . . . not by fighting back but by loving back.
“While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist,” he said in a 1963 sermon. “This is the only way to create the beloved community.”
Oh my God, the “Beloved Community”? No one talks about this – certainly not at the level of politics and national or global power. The point I’m struggling to make in this moment is that love—in the deepest possible meaning of the word—is more powerful than growling dogs and firehoses and jail cells. It is more powerful than burning crosses. It is more powerful than 2,000-pound bombs. It is the force that is able to embrace conflict and transcend it—and it should be at the core of how we envision the human future.
There are three kinds of love, according to MLK. There’s romantic love (eros) and affectionate or friendship love (philia), and then there’s agape love, which he has described as “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all, an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative . . . the love of God operating in the human heart.”
Why is love generally reduced to a geopolitical sneer word? In war reporting, it’s flicked away like an annoying mosquito. But perhaps it’s the most powerful force on the planet—and we have access to it!
In King’s words: “Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people. . . . It begins by loving others for their sakes” and “makes no distinction between a friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. . . . Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community.”
This is a world with a $2.4 trillion collective military budget. It’s a world with some 12,000 nuclear bombs (implements of mutually assured destruction). It’s a world obsessed with what it hates, what it fears and what it wants to control. Yet what makes life possible is community, which is an organic structure. Why are we much more interested in the destruction of communities than their creation?
“The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption,” King noted. “The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermath of violence is emptiness and bitterness.”
And yes, the Beloved Community is an endless, ever-evolving, organic creation. It is not declared by fiat. We all play roles large and small in creating and sustaining it. And suddenly I’m thinking about an incident that happened to me about a dozen years ago, one night after I’d gone bowling with some friends. My driveway was inaccessible because an accident a few days earlier had damaged my next-door neighbor’s garage, so I had parked a few blocks from my house and was walking home.
What happened was that three, or maybe four, boys came running at me out of nowhere—out of a “hole in the night,” as I later called it. One of them punched me, knocked me down. All the while, they were having a helluva good time. They wouldn’t let me get up. I called for help, braying like a goat (so it seemed). They ran away. I was left with a bruised cheekbone but hadn’t been robbed. That was it. I walked home.
Beloved Community? Yes, yes, it was, and is, present in my imperfect, Chicago life. I was very much involved in the concept known as Restorative Justice—a unique way of connecting with people, which I have written about numerous times over the years. We sit in a circle; everyone has a chance to talk: to tell their stories. It can be, simply, a means of getting to know people, but primarily it’s used in the aftermath of harm or wrongdoing, as a means of healing.
A few days after the attack, some of my friends in the Restorative Justice community held a healing circle for me. We sat in loving connectedness and everyone talked about times they had been afraid, times they had been harmed, how they had transcended the moment. Oh my God! I was not alone. We sat for two sacred hours. I was almost in tears.
As I wrote in my journal the next day: “This feels so much bigger than the occasion that brought us here.” I later thought of the circle as a form of alchemy, a means of creating gold out of harm. If my attackers had been caught, oh, I would have loved to hear their stories and understand why they did what they did (and know they learned the affect it had on me).
“Real power occurs in silence,” I wrote, “the silence of reaching out, listening, understanding. And as I talk to people about my encounter, as the flow of love begins to heal the emotional rift, I feel a silent determination grow inside me to stay the course of peace.”
As I say, this was over a dozen years ago. That sense of determination, the belief in agape love and the ongoing creation of a Beloved Community, both locally and internationally, is still fully alive in my soul.Keep ReadingShow Less
Women to Unite for 'She Speaks' Virtual Assembly Marking March on Washington's 60th Anniversary
"Extremist lawmakers are using state capitols to subvert our democracy and erode voting rights, denying living wages, and suppressing access to healthcare, all while concentrating this rich nation's wealth," said Hanna Broome of AME Zion Church.
Aug 28, 2023
Six decades after civil rights and labor groups held the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, women from across the country plan to come together Monday evening for a virtual "She Speaks" mass assembly to honor female leaders from 1963 and draw attention to issues that persist today.
"While numerous brave and brilliant women—including Rosa Parks, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Diane Nash, Dorothy Height, and Mahalia Jackson—were central voices behind the March on Washington, they were not given the chance to speak," organizers said in a statement. "Sixty years later, thousands of women are joining together at the Lincoln Memorial and speaking out to ensure not another anniversary goes by where women's voices aren't central to the conversation."
As Meghan Weaver of Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute detailed last year, Parks said a quick "hello" and "thank you" to the 1963 crowd, the NAACP's Daisy Bates delivered a couple of brief remarks, and actress and activist Lena Horne shouted "Freedom!" into the microphone. According to the researcher, activist and entertainer Josephine Baker "spoke for just over two minutes, in the longest address that day by a woman."
Speakers for Monday's event include Hanna Broome of AME Zion Church; Rev. Kazimir Brown of Repairers of the Breach; Mary Kay Henry of the Service Employees International Union; Rabbi Sheila Katz of the National Council of Jewish Women; Roz Pelles of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School; Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Joy Reid of MSNBC; Karen Georgia A. Thompson of United Church of Christ; and members of Black Voters Matter, Beloved Community, and the League of Women Voters.
"Women refuse to stay silent as we fight back against the most pressing issues harming our communities today," declared Broome. "Right now across the country, extremist lawmakers are using state capitols to subvert our democracy and erode voting rights, denying living wages, and suppressing access to healthcare, all while concentrating this rich nation's wealth into fewer and fewer hands."
"Until the systemic injustices that have been plaguing our communities end," she vowed, "we will continue to make our voices heard across the nation."
During the assembly—set to be livestreamed at 6:00 ET—speakers plan to "demand a lifesaving agenda that includes living wages, voting rights, reproductive healthcare, and more," according to organizers.
"Sixty years ago, the agenda of the March on Washington was to raise the minimum wage 75% to a living wage, expand and protect voting rights, secure healthcare for all, and expand the Labor Standards Act to end racial discrimination," noted Bishop William Barber, who is expected to speak at the event. "Today, we are not finished with that agenda."
"Right now, 73 million women make up our nation's poor and low-wealth population. And millions of these women continue to be impacted by voter suppression," he added. "At a time when poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in our nation, these women are calling on all people of moral conscience—regardless of race, gender, or political affiliation—to join the fight for the moral soul of our nation and call out these attacks on our rights. We need all voices in this movement. This 60th anniversary is not an occasion just for nostalgia, it is a moment for action."
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