Agape Community

By Mike Moran

The Board of Directors of Pax Christi Massachusetts held their September meeting at Agape on the third anniversary of September 11, 2001. Those who could arrive on Friday evening gathered on September 10 for an opening prayer, reflections, and discussion of goals for the two-day session.

On Saturday morning they were joined by other board members for further discussion of Pax Christi?s plans and activities for the coming year. Comfortable weather, the natural beauty of Agape?s location, an informal atmosphere, and good food all helped to make it an inspiring and productive occasion.
Our meeting renewed for all of us the commitment to gospel nonviolence that Agape and Pax Christi have long shared. Shortly after that day three years ago, we began working closely together on the ?Catholic Call to Peacemaking,? which has since gained significant national support.
We concluded our meeting on Saturday afternoon with a new sense of energy and determination to build on each other?s resources for our mutual benefit. For example, the average age of PC-MA members who responded to a recent survey is 54. Access to the many young people and students who frequent Agape?s could bring Pax Christi to the attention of a whole new generation of potential members.

Mike Moran is a Pax Christi Massachusetts board member who lives in Palmer.

By Joanne Sheehan

Hundreds of thousands of people were in New York at the end of August to
protest, confront and/or disrupt the Republican National Convention, which
will run from August 30 to September 2. Specifically, the antiwar movement used the opportunity of the RNC to come together and visibly and dramatically express our opposition to the country?s ongoing war.
At the same time, we know that protest isn?t enough. Demonstrations do not end a particular war. Massive protests didn?t end the continuing war on Afghanistan or the war on Iraq and haven?t ended the ?War on Terror.? Protest alone didn?t even end the Vietnam War, although the antiwar movement of the time was the most visible and successful ever.
The Indian activist-writer Arundhati Roy spoke of this dilemma at the
opening of the World Social Forum in Mumbai last January: ?It was
wonderful that on February 15 last year, in a spectacular display of
public morality, 10 million people on five continents marched against the
war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was not enough. February 15 was a
weekend. Nobody had to so much as miss a day of work. Holiday protests
don?t stop wars.?
We often turn to the example of Mohandas Gandhi, who, from within
the British Empire, fashioned the most far-reaching philosophy and
strategy for nonviolent change ever articulated. Gandhi described the
three elements of social change as personal development, constructive work
to create the new society and political action to resist direct and
structural violence. His preferred political action was not protest, but non-cooperation: Under his leadership, many Indians
stopped doing what the British wanted them to do. Non-cooperation was one
of many tactics within a campaign with specific goals; it was a component
of the constructive program as well. Using the spinning wheel while
refusing to buy British imported cloth gave Indians not only cloth, but a
sense of community and self-sufficiency.
The key example of a campaign of non-cooperation in which everyone could
participate was Gandhi?s salt march. It was a campaign to challenge the
British tax and monopoly on salt, a necessity of life. It was also a
campaign to mobilize a maximum number of participants: Anyone and everyone
could act as they gathered or purchased Indian salt, or boycotted or
picketed shops that sold British goods. ?Gandhi?s salt march was not just
political theater,? said Roy in Mumbai. ?When, in a simple act of
defiance, thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt,
they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic
underpinning of the British Empire. It was real.?

I?ve facilitated several strategy workshops where people have asked ?What
is our salt? Is there one thing we all need that we can resist?? I don?t
know if there is such a thing in the present context, and I am concerned
that a quest for ?our salt? becomes a search for the magic pill that makes
everything better. If everyone who opposes this war refused to pay for it,
for instance, that would be a direct strike at the economic underpinnings
of the American Empire; yet it would not be the end of the struggle. The
salt march awakened the Indian people to their power, which was a crucial
step toward independence and a clear goal of Gandhi?s in the campaign?but
17 years elapsed between the march and the British departure from India.
In other words, there is no short cut to social change; there is no easy
way to stop war, greed, hate and lies. It will take time, and it will take
creative, strategic thinking, and it will take sacrifice. It won?t be
done, as Roy reminds us, through ?holiday protests? (or even mid-week
protests for which we have to take a few days off). While peace activists
were in New York to say ?No!? to the Bush administration, pacifists should
also have been there to create a climate that encourages people to want to listen
to our perspective. In many successful campaigns of the civil rights
movement it was understood that while they were confronting an immediate
opponent, they were speaking to a larger audience. Nonviolent action
confronts those least likely to change, but the confrontation itself
sparks a dialog with people less diametrically opposed to the action?s
aims.
Yet the most inspiring and effective nonviolent campaigns have been those
where people were working for radical change. Preparing students for the
lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Rev. James Lawson was clear the
objective was to eliminate segregation, an extremely radical goal in the
South. Desegregating lunch counters was a step towards a more
comprehensive desegregating of society.
Feminist author and activist Charlotte Bunch wrote in ?Understanding
Feminist Theory? about the process we need to go through to develop
strategies: describe, analyze, develop a vision and then develop a
strategy that grows from the vision. This is the basis for creating goals.
And finally, of course, we must develop a common plan. In Roy?s Mumbai
speech she suggested, ?We have to become the global resistance to the
occupation. Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the
legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it
materially impossible for the Empire to achieve its aims. It means
soldiers should refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve,
workers should refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons.? Roy goes on to
suggest that ?we choose by some means two major corporations that are
profiting from the destruction of Iraq and shut them down. ? It?s a
question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience of past
struggles to bear on a single target. It?s a question of our desire to
win.?
But ?the desire to win? must be translated into the nuts and bolts of a
nonviolent campaign: setting goals, developing creative strategies and
employing a variety of tactics
As we create campaigns, we have to be careful not to set goals that are so
broad and shallow that they will not amount to change just to get more
people on board. While pacifists can be quick to criticize goals they feel
are too compromising to our beliefs, we have not been good at developing
goals where we can experience victory and move forward. We must work to
find that balance.
So to organize against the Bush administration war, we need to provide
opportunities for people to describe how the war affects them; we need to
engage people in that discussion, that consciousness-raising process. And
when they get to the point of realizing they can do something about it, a
campaign should provide opportunities for involvement.

Joanne Sheehan, Chair of War Resisters? International, is on the staff of
WRL New England and a long-time friend of Agape. This piece is excerpted with permission from Nonviolent Activist: Vol. 21, Number 3.

by Brayton Shanley

Thoreau went to the woods "to live deliberately, to front only the essentials of life." Similar to Walden Pond of the mid-nineteenth century, the Quabbin Watershed woods where Agape is nestled, is deep woods.
The wilderness has been a place apart a separate moment on the other side of the sights and sounds of the 21st century North American style of living. For the last ten years we’ve experienced a rare blessing of communing alongside wild animals deep within an almost self-contained natural world. The sense of the Divine is felt almost daily. A landscape of mysterious beauty provides a continuous feeling of reassurance in the goodness of life. This life seems to hearken back to a rural past, and you can almost hear Thoreau calling us to "simplify, simplify, simplify."
Then the bulldozers began to rumble down Greenwich Road.
Our Agape silence has been shattered in the last 12 months as three houses have been built within a few hundred feet of the St. Francis House kitchen, plus the completion of one auto body garage, across from our driveway. 21st century sprawl has reached across the cow town of Hardwick, Massachusetts.
Four new houses are under construction just up the road and seventeen are planned for this year and next. Our insides team with conflicting feelings as we powerlessly witness the woods crumble around us. As a community, residents at Agape rejoice in the arrival of newcomers. Yet, the way development is harming our defenseless, deep woods sanctuary, this "new-comer" feels too much like an invading army.
This "invasion" threatens two realities precious to our calling to be peacemakers: 1. Living in the wholesome untrammeled landscape of the natural world and 2. Communing with its close companion, contemplative silence.
Experiencing the assault helps define the urgency of the ecological age, reminding us that our earth has become our threatened home. This earth residence is a "thou", being bought and sold as an "it", a resource of profit.
Geologian Thomas Berry framed the experience of this present age with power and accuracy, saying that we live in times that require "human-earth mediation." History records God as human, and human-to-human has been our mediation, however faulty and incomplete. Today, the environmental threats of the Twenty-first Century necessitate an honest peaceful communication to reconcile the human to earth mediation. We need to find our life-sustaining place within the created order and begin to experience nature as Divine Gift, holding up one undisputable fact–that god is undeniably and magnificently green.
The first page of the Bible speaks of heaven, earth, sun , moon, stars, planets, trees, birds, animals, fish in the sea, and that "God created all of them." God saw all as God. Therefore, all is sacred. We’ve lost this vision. We’ve misplaced it. We are at war with ourselves and the earth.
So what does human-earth meditation permit us to do? To heal and reconcile with the Christ love of Agape. This non-injurious love will put us in a sustainable ying-yang balance where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. This harmonious balance will lead us as a people to the "promised land," a vision of place belonging to People Israel, where no one owned land at the expense of the other.
A friend shared that someone who came to Hardwick, and seeing all of the trees felled to widen the road, wept openly at the loss. This instinctively expresses the Buddhist’s Karma or, compassion for all that lives. "All life is one" is the integrated vision of the world religions. But we can even widen the circle.
Quantum physics is now able to measure the oneness of the universe. If it is becoming a scientific fact that all in the universe is interconnected, then it follows that a threat to life anywhere is a threat to the fragile web of life everywhere.
Therefore, it seems axiomatic that human/earth meditation will not be advanced by real estate development. Outside developers came to Hardwick, bought land across from Agape, clear-cut the trees right to the road, built two homes so close together and fifty feet from the road and on top of a wetland, that the sense of outrage and urgency are total. The developers feel differently. Build these homes quickly and cheaply. Time is money, and all the transformation at Agape and in Hardwick is for one essential purpose–maximum profit for the developer. If this land is inherently sacred, then to denude it, subdue it and turn a buck with it, is a desecration. Mowing down trees, vegetation and the wildlife habitat is but another violence in the human repertoire.
Our world in Hardwick is a mystical one. I was walking across the homestead early one morning when Suzanne cautiously called out to me: "Brayton, there’s a moose in the garden." And there she was–full grown cow, standing between the thyme and the parsley, staring at me. In her wondrous stare, I could almost hear her saying: "What is happening to my home?"
"Rural is quiet and quiet holy," writes mystic, Catherine Doherty. Real-estate development on three sides, visible and audible, certainly threatens the sacred silence. God had coaxed us into this meditative silence in 1987 when we moved here. Throughout our stay, we have extended this invitation to thousands of people. What kind of silence do we invite people to? Absolute silence. As much as humanly possible, it is a silence free of the drone of human machines and the noise, about which Thomas Merton fulminates: "Those that love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They bore through silent nature in every direction which their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness." The invasion of bulldozers, chainsaws, heavy machinery and pounding, will, no doubt, soon give way to the "domesticated" sounds of an anxious culture–TV, radios, three wheelers and snow mobiles.
We came to the woods as Thoreau did "to front only the essentials of life" and to reject the anxious noise of 21st Century North America–for the crickets, the peepers, the wind in the trees, the birds, chipmunks and even moose, rustling through our garden. These sounds celebrate the truth that life is good, that God rejoices with us in simple things and that this all is worth defending in the name of Agape, unconditional love.