Nonviolence. It’s a practice.

God’s will being done on earth looks like everyone being good to each other.

The praises:

Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, that we may love our neighbors even as ourselves, redoing in the good of others and giving offense to no one.

-St. Francis, Day by Day

Thomas Merton:

The society that is imaged in the mass media and in advertising, in the movies, in TV, in best-sellers, in current fads, in all the pompous and trifling masks with which it hides callousness, sensuality, hypocrisy, cruelty, and fear. Is this ‘the world?’ Yes. It is the same where you have mass man–the same spiritual cretinism which in fact makes Christians and atheists indistinguishable.

-Contemplation in a World of Action

NONVIOLENCE

Contemplative practice teaches us to honor differences and also realize that we are all much more than our nationality, skin color, gender, or other labels which are all aspects of the passing and thus false self. Contemplation brings us back to our True Self, who we are in God.

At this place of both poverty and freedom we have nothing to prove or protect. Here we can connect with everything and everyone. Everything belongs. This cuts violence at its very roots before there is any basis for fear, anger, vengeance, or self-promotion—the things that often cause violence.

Many activists I knew in the 1960s loved the nonviolent teachings of Jesus, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968). But it became clear to me that theirs was often a mere intellectual appreciation rather than a participation in the much deeper mystery.

People on the Right tend to be perpetually angry, fearful, and overly defensive, and people on the Left tend to be perpetually cynical, morally righteous, and outraged.

Activist [based in spirit] are themselves “a new creation” (Galatians 6:15) and the lightning rods of God’s transformative energy into the world.

-Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation