Wake Up, Human
Wake Up, Human is an exploration of the native powers of the human being. This podcast examines the ways we humans have become disconnected—from our innate wisdom, from each other, and from the natural world—and explores practical strategies for reconnecting to wholeness. Drop in for information and inspiration to help us reawaken and heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet.
Wake Up, Human
Ep.16: The Power of Nonviolence | A Conversation with Lorin Peters
Lorin Peters shares his 50-year journey as a physicist, teacher, and lifelong activist for nonviolence and peace, from his transformative experience in the Peace Corps to his work with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine.
- How a death threat and a prophetic dream in Thailand launched Lorin's commitment to nonviolence
- The connection between Gospel nonviolence and Gandhian nonviolence through "the law of redemptive suffering"
- Why meditation became essential to Lorin's practice of nonviolence after 9/11
- The Beatitudes as a practical recipe for creating "heaven on earth" that many churches overlook
- How unarmed civilian peacekeeping works to protect vulnerable populations in conflict zones
- The devastating reality of moral injury among veterans, with suicide rates double the national average
- Practical approaches to nonviolent economics through socially responsible investing
- The importance of questioning both external authority and our own internal narratives
To connect with Lorin Peters or to share information about socially screened investments, email him at lorinpeters@yahoo.com and mention you heard him on the Wake Up, Human podcast.
Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 16 of the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Wills, and in this episode my guest and I will be talking about war, peace, religion and we'll see what other heavy topics we can drum up, but in general we're going to be talking about the power of waking up through nonviolence. It's a big deal. I hope you'll join us. Welcome to the Wake Up Human podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing what we have lost and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. The installment of Wake Up Human. Hi everyone, it's Shannon Just jumping in to give you a quick heads up on what to expect from this episode coming up. First I'm going to be giving a bio of my interview guest, Lauren Peters, and, following that, an overview of the themes of our conversation, and then I'm going to offer some of my own comments on nonviolence as a power for waking up. So I hope you'll listen to all of that intro content, but I really don't want you to miss Lauren's interview because it's so good. So if you want to skip over the intro content to get right to the conversation, you can find the interview right after the nine-minute mark. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll enjoy. My guest today is someone I deeply admire and who I consider a mentor in my own efforts to live a wakeful life, especially when it comes to aligning spiritual values with personal and social choices.
Shannon W.:Lauren Peters is a physicist, a teacher and a lifelong activist for nonviolence and peace. Beginning with a stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand in the 1960s. For over 50 years he has devoted himself to protesting violent systems and structures and educating on the alternatives. A physicist by training, lauren is a conscientious objector, a vortex resistor and a passionate critic of nuclear weapons. A teacher by profession, he taught for over 40 years at Bishop O'Dowd Catholic High School in Oakland, california, where he offered not only physics courses but also a course called Alternatives to Violence, which he began in response to the Vietnam War. To violence, which he began in response to the Vietnam War. More recently, he's taught gospel nonviolence in Catholic confirmation classes and Gandhian nonviolence at a Muslim peace institute in Thailand. Loren's Mennonite and Catholic faith informs his activism and the marriage of spirituality and social justice are at the core of his work. He spent seven summers in Palestine volunteering as an unarmed civilian peacekeeper with Christian peacemaker teams. He writes for Pax Christi, a Catholic peace and justice organization, and he regularly sends out his own email newsletters offering personal stories and analysis of current events in the context of principled nonviolence and analysis of current events in the context of principled nonviolence. Though officially retired, loren continues to devote himself in active service to his community. These days, you may find him silently holding anti-war vigil at rapid transit stations, supporting refugees in the unhoused community in Oakland or otherwise using his voice and his presence to ever advocate for peace. Lauren and his wife, loxana, live in a solar home that they built in San Leandro, just outside Oakland, where they are dedicated to living a simple, sustainable, nonviolent life.
Shannon W.:I met Lauren through our shared dedication to nonviolence, and we will talk about nonviolence a lot in this episode. Our conversation is framed within the larger themes of war, peace and religion and how we might bring a nonviolent consciousness to the places where all of these intersect. We will make some effort to offer a definition of nonviolence, which is not always easy to define. We'll explore the relationship of Christianity to nonviolence. We'll explore the relationship of Christianity to nonviolence, some of the links between Jesus and Gandhi and some of the ways that the church might be missing the mark when it comes to honoring the nonviolent teachings of Jesus. We'll talk about the practice of unarmed civilian peacekeeping, the tragedy of moral injury and suicide in soldiers and the questionable wisdom of the so-called just war theory. Basically, lauren will just be sharing some ideas about war that are not often discussed in mainstream American culture, or maybe in any mainstream culture. In addition to all of this, we'll briefly touch on the relationship between financial investing and violence and consider some ways that we can invest our money without contributing to further violence and harm. Lauren will share some of his stories and experiences with us along the way, including the story of the dream that jump-started his non-violent journey. Join us for all this and more in the episode coming up next.
Shannon W.:And first I just want to offer a few comments on nonviolence myself. I believe that striving to live nonviolently is itself a form of waking up. Learning about and practicing nonviolence requires us to question some of our habitual ways of being in the world, ways of being in the world including our participation in violent systems and structures which our society in the US is literally built upon. Waking up includes waking to the reality of ideologies that are designed to keep us asleep and compliant with violence so that the few can maintain their power over the many. There are a lot of these ideologies, including capitalism, patriarchy, classism, speciesism and, of course, white supremacy and racist ideology.
Shannon W.:This also includes, in particular, the military-industrial complex and the war machine that has purportedly been set up to keep us all safe and yet has resulted in so many millions, or I would say billions, of human and non-human beings being injured or killed, traumatized, oppressed, separated from our homes and homelands and just otherwise unable to live a life of prosperity or peace. We've been sold a bill of goods that says that the military and war are necessary for peace. Meanwhile, life-affirming true necessities like education, safe housing and access to health care are going under-resourced, while the corporate military complex continues to pad its own pockets, not only feeding off of the life energy of our soldiers who it sends to the front lines, but also feeding off the energy of the masses of us who are literally paying for the war machine with our own taxes. So, instead of making excuses for this structural violence and just saying well, that's just the way things are. Nonviolence teaches us to look beneath the surface of these conflicts to a place where, instead of creating a false peace through violence, we can find a place where we can meet opposing viewpoints from a place of deeper connectedness, a respect for life, a respect for each other. Nonviolence helps us recognize and use our own power for change, not top-down corporate or government power, whether that's people power or collective power within movement building or spiritual power that we have within us. It's a strategy that can be effective for making change that uplifts all beings, rather than the sort of superficial sort of change that happens through war and conflict, that simply replaces one violent power with another. Waking up means waking up physically, psychologically and spiritually, but it also means waking up socially, so that the opportunity to wake up physically, psychologically and spiritually and to rise is available to all of us and not just a few. So that's my riff on non-violence here as waking up. In the show notes for this episode I will include a list of resources on nonviolence.
Shannon W.:Now back to Lauren Peters. He is, in my mind, the real deal. He doesn't just talk about peace or love or nonviolence. It's really, really about that for him. It's about love your friends and love your enemies just the same. I can't say enough good things about this man, and I'm so glad that this podcast can offer a platform to amplify his voice. I hope you'll enjoy learning from him as much as I do. And now for the interview. Dear Lauren, thank you so much for being here. It's truly an honor to have you and I'm looking forward to our conversation.
Lorin P.:You're welcome and I'm curious to see what happens. I'm curious forward to our conversation. You're welcome and I'm curious to see what happens.
Shannon W.:I'm curious, too, and excited.
Shannon W.:As you know, this podcast is dedicated to reawakening the essential powers of the human being.
Shannon W.:That can mean a lot of things, but one thing it surely involves is being willing to challenge the status quo.
Shannon W.:There are so many social and cultural narratives we're told about what's true, what's important, what we should or shouldn't do, and if we buy into all those narratives without questioning them, we can end up living a life that's not true to us at all.
Shannon W.:So, the way I see it, following the status quo can sometimes get in the way of us living a life of integrity, and I see you as a person whose life exemplifies that willingness to question and to filter your decisions through your values rather than the opinions of others or the social norms, and to move according to what you believe is right. I also see you as someone who's not afraid to question authority and who will refuse to participate in systems or structures if they offend your conscience. So I honor all of that in you, and I hope we'll get a chance to talk about a number of ways that this questioning and resisting has shown up in your life. I want to start by going way back in the timeline of your life to an experience that I understand was a pivotal moment in your life's journey. This is a story that involves a young Lauren and a death threat and a message that came to you in a dream. Would you start by sharing that story with us?
Lorin P.:Sure. So I was in the Peace Corps in Thailand. I was there from 65 to 69. And I was supervising construction of a water treatment plant in a village. It was the first time that such a treatment plant was being built in a regular village, as opposed to a district capital or a provincial capital, and it took about three years.
Lorin P.:But in 1968, I was suddenly told that the money was gone, that we couldn't finish the project because we didn't have the funds to buy the materials we needed for the last phase of it. And I also was told the headman of the village was the only one who had access to those funds. So I decided that I should say something to the headman. But on the other hand, I was aware that I needed to be careful because in the thai culture, uh, respect for age is mandatory.
Lorin P.:I've I've watched a soldier beat a boy almost to death because he had been disrespectful to an old woman. Oh my, that's another story for another time. But so I was very careful. So on the next occasion, when I was sitting with the head man and no one else was around, I brought up the issue that the money had disappeared and that I was frustrated because I had devoted already three years of my life to this project. I had gotten sick, I had lost 50 pounds, I had several tropical illnesses that affected my intestines and it was hot and lots of mosquitoes, and I worked six days a week and you were?
Shannon W.:what age at this time?
Lorin P.:I was, let's see, 68. I was going on 26. I was probably still 25.
Shannon W.:And the man you were speaking to was clearly older than you.
Lorin P.:Older than me and I should also add some details here. He was the headman of the village and it was clear that everyone in the village kind of feared him. He was built like a tank. He was four inches shorter at least four inches shorter than I am, but 100 pounds heavier. He had a tattoo, from his throat all the way to his knees that covered every square inch of his body A dark indigo tattoo, the same exact color as their clothing. Apparently, they only had one dye and that was indigo, so they used it for clothing, they used it for tattoos, and from a distance you couldn't tell whether he had any clothes on or not, because he looked exactly the same. Wow.
Lorin P.:And so I expressed my frustration, and I think I also mentioned that a lot of the villagers were frustrated because they've been working on this product.
Lorin P.:All the labor was volunteer from from the villagers, and, uh, several of them had sort of encouraged me to talk to the head man, so I did, but I was very careful not to say you stole the money or that you're the responsible for it. I just was talking about my frustration and when I finished what I had to say, he had sat there frozen, completely motionless, for the whole conversation for all the time that I was speaking, and when I finished I paused and he didn't respond at all. He was absolutely motionless, silent. There was a long, awkward silence, and so then I excused myself and walked away and I didn't know what to think about that. But I couldn't continue working because we didn't have anything to work with. The materials were out, and so then after a couple of weeks I was told there a meeting had been called in the village. So I had gotten married one year before this all happened to a Thai woman, not from the village.
Shannon W.:And you're still married.
Lorin P.:We are yes, yes, not that it's always been perfect, but we are committed to each yeah in a very deep way, uh. But we can still have a good argument, uh anyway, but you've been married for one year yeah, and, and so I was.
Lorin P.:This meeting was in the evening and, uh, the peace corps had given me a motorcycle, motor scooter, I guess, more of it. So we're riding out and just as I get to the edge of the village there's a couple of men standing there and so I slow down and one of them gestures at me and I recognize him. He's the provincial development officer, a fairly young official, but I knew him fairly well. And he says to me the meeting's been canceled but we need to talk. The meeting's been canceled, but we need to talk, but I'm not free to talk with you here in this group.
Lorin P.:So would you follow me out, and I'm going to go down the road a ways so we can have some privacy. So he has a Land Rover vehicle and so I follow him back out of the village a mile or so down the road, and he stops and turns off his lights. There's no electricity anywhere and it's dark, there's no moon out. It was completely dark and he was standing right in front of me but I couldn't see him, but I could hear his voice, and the voice said the headman wants to kill you, just like that and I immediately said no, I'll kill him first.
Lorin P.:And I immediately said no, I'll kill him first. I was very angry and so I wrestled with that. The will to kill him disappeared after an hour or so, or maybe even faster than that. But then I began to get afraid and I began to watch my back. I began to look over my shoulder and to see is someone following me? Has an assassin been hired.
Lorin P.:And that went on for a week or two, or at least a week. And then I began to think about okay, maybe I need to get a gun. I'll get a gun. I don't want to kill him anymore. But you know what I'm going to sneak out. I'm going to get a gun and sneak into the village in the middle of the night and put a bullet through his house. I'll put it high enough that I won't hit anybody, but I want him to know that I'm armed and dangerous. And I was thinking about that and then all of a sudden, I was given a strange dream in which one of the prophets took me by the hand and said let's go talk to the head man. And the prophet did not identify himself. The only prophet I could think of, that was that crazy. To go to talk to the man who wants to kill you is Jesus. So I assumed that was the case, but that was enough.
Shannon W.:You. You felt sure of the presence that you felt with you.
Lorin P.:Yeah, yeah, I have never had any doubt, but that the dream was from the divine. And then that was the end of the dream. The conversation with the headman didn't actually was not part of the dream. The dream ended before we got to the actual house of the headman. But the message was guns are not my way. Guns and violence is never my way. And so I eventually realized that the dream and the prophet had saved my life. And so for the next couple of years I kept wondering how come I never heard this in church? You know, I married a Catholic and so I practiced as a Catholic. But I was raised in the Presbyterian Church, my father's from the Mennonite tradition, my mother's from the Salvation Army, but nowhere had I ever heard anyone suggest in any tradition that if someone wants to kill you, go talk to them. Anyone suggest in any tradition that if someone wants to kill you, go talk to them? And so for two years I was asking people where did this dream come from? Have you ever heard?
Shannon W.:of such a thing from anybody. So what I'm curious about is, after you had that dream, you clearly changed your feeling about the situation. I was framing this introduction to you in terms of you being someone who's willing to question authority, and in this case, it strikes me that you were actually questioning the authority of your own mind by having the dream. It's like you had a narrative or a belief or a decision or a thought process, and this dream came to you and showed you a different narrative and actually caused you to then question or second guess those beliefs you had in your waking life. And I find that interesting that we can sometimes need to even question our own authority, our own beliefs around things in order to get to the place where we can do need to even question our own authority, our own beliefs around things, in order to get to the place where we can do the best thing for ourselves.
Lorin P.:Yeah, when I joined Christian Peacemaker Teams in 2003, as part of the training, we were each required to share our own personal journey and to talk for at least one hour.
Lorin P.:share our own personal journey and to talk for at least one hour individually. Wow, no-transcript. And so I told that story, and at the end of the story, the director of Christian Peacemaker Teams was a gentleman named Gene Stoltzfus. He's now deceased In fact, he sadly died just a couple of years after that and he's well known in the Mennonite world as, among other things, the founder and the first director of Christian Peacemaker Teams and the first director of Christian Peacemaker teams. And so he heard the story and he approached me right after. In fact, the very first comment is he said Lauren, you just proved Carl Jung's theory of the collective subconscious because you're the Mennonite in you.
Lorin P.:You're half Mennonite, your dad's side, and this story is classic Mennonite narrative. This is what the Mennonites are all about. Is complete nonviolence, a willingness to lay down your life before you will raise a hand and harm another human being, and it resides among Mennonites, it's part of our subconscious and his comment was you just proved Carl Jung's theory of the collective subconscious. So that's another part of the story yes, it sure is.
Shannon W.:That takes what I was just reflecting on and takes it one level deeper into the, into the realm of archetype, that, the, maybe a non-violent archetype that was expressing itself through your dream.
Lorin P.:That's amazing that he said that to you well, of course, and I and I was not raised in the in the mennonite tradition except one summer, when I was 14, about 14 years old, my dad sent my brother and I my brother's, two years younger than I we rode, rode a Greyhound bus from Oakland, california, to Clinton I think it was Clinton, oklahoma. It was a long bus ride. We spent a whole summer there working on the family farm, driving tractors. We worked around the clock. You drove for six hours. You went home, slept for five hours, you went back out and drove for another six hours. This was a 4,000-acre wheat farm and so they had several tractors and at least three of them running at any given time, and they ran day and night.
Lorin P.:But one weekend we were all sent off to a kind of a weekend retreat for young Mennonites, kind of a weekend retreat for young Mennonites. And one of the speakers stood up and said I don't remember the exact words, but the message was Christians ought not to fight in wars, they ought not to become soldiers. And my first reaction was wow, I've never heard that before. Presbyterians don't talk that way. No, they probably don't.
Lorin P.:From what I can see now, very few of the denominations have that as part of their, their teaching, but it's stuck in my head and so it sort of planted a seed. Well, okay, what is what about that? You know what should I think about war and becoming a soldier, and for many years it didn't germinate. And so the death threat and the dream I was in the Peace Corps and I'd been in for three years already, and I mean the idea of refusing to go to Vietnam or refusing to be inducted, hadn't crossed my mind, crossed my mind. I had essentially zero pacifist at that point as far as I knew, and yet that was in 1968. By 1975, I finally realized I am a genuine, conscientious objector. There are no wars that I believe are necessary. All situations can be dealt with in a better way without, without war, without violence you had become committed to non-violence yes um, I don't know how much listeners will know about non-violence.
Shannon W.:Non-violence is a huge topic, um, but I do just want to mention that you and I met through a shared commitment to non-violenceence, as we were both of us affiliated with MediCenter for Nonviolence in Berkeley, and through Michael Nagler's teachings on Gandhian nonviolence, and so much of your resistance and activism seems to me just inextricable from the principles of nonviolence. So even the fact that you live in a solar home that you built and that you live in is a reflection of a commitment to me, that's you're living lightly, you're living nonviolently on this earth and basically just being an unapologetic teacher of peace and nonviolence for decades, often within structures that don't necessarily embrace a nonviolent position. So Will I have two questions I want to ask? The first one is considering all the different ways we might define nonviolence, would you just speak a little bit about what nonviolence means to you? But then the other question is after all these decades, what keeps you going and what has sustained your commitment over all this time.
Lorin P.:So the problem with nonviolence is that the word is not very helpful. It just says it's not violence. Okay, well, what the hell is it? Yeah, and so Gandhi wrestled with that, of course, and lots of people have wrestled with it. Part of it is there's the personal level and then there's the institutional level. The personal level is in my personal relationships.
Lorin P.:What does nonviolence mean? Well, it means literally ahimsa, which is the Sanskrit term. Ahimsa, him is the word for to violate. Ah means without violation and sa means desire. So there is a literal translation from the Sanskrit is one without desire to harm another at all. So that would be physical harm, the verbal harm, it would be emotional harm, it would be any harming someone by cheating them or stealing from them or lying about them. So you could pretty much list all of the Ten Commandments and so forth.
Lorin P.:But then, as we grow older, we begin to realize that there's violence embedded in a lot of our culture and our institutions and the way our society is organized, not just the military, but exploitation, economic exploitation, racial exploitation and oppression, and on and on. And so I've spent some time wrestling with various different aspects of our culture, for example, one of the, and this one is going to force some of your listeners to really think hard. One of the more exploitative institutions is the advanced placement system, the AP system, which takes the top students out of every classroom and puts them together in their own room, leaving the rest of the student body, the other 80%, that couldn't get into the AP course without any helpers. You know, when I was teaching, I had in the laboratory because it was physics, so there were lab benches. There were, I think there were 12 of them in the room, and so, and each bench sat three kids, three students.
Lorin P.:And so I carefully arranged I would take the students according to their previous work academic work and I divide them into three groups the top group, the bottom group and the middle group. And then I take one kid from each of the three groups and put them together at a bench. And then I said to them I expect you to help each other, I expect you to work together on everything except the test, the test. I want to find out what you understand. But help each other with the lab reports, help each other with the homework. I would allocate classroom time for kids to help each other on homework problems and so on. Wow, and then I said to them now if one kid at your bench is struggling and not getting good grades, is not able to do things, that's kind of your fault, because your job is to help each other. That's amazing.
Lorin P.:And so the weak students need the strong students there to help. Before AP started, there was one AP was just beginning to come into Bishop Adad High School. When AP was just beginning to come into Bishop Adad High School, one semester I had a class of physics students where there was an AP class. It wasn't in science but it was in some other department, and so that one AP class sucked all the strong students out of one of my physics classes and that physics class. It was like trying to teach physics to a forest.
Lorin P.:I would explain something and I had already been teaching for 20 years and so, and yet, and when I taught that class, nobody understood what I was saying and there was no one to at the benches. There was no one there to help explain it to the, to the other kids and the grades in that class. I finally just virtually the whole class would have earned an f or a d. They were trying, so I think I gave them mostly c's but. But it was a disaster and it was excruciatingly clear that when, when the ap kids are pulled out into the AP classes, they may be able to go a little faster or a little deeper, but the rest of the student body pays an atrocious price for that, and so that's one of the applications of this whole nonviolent concept.
Shannon W.:So this is just to speak to that for a moment. That's really touching to me. We may make decisions where we think that we are trying to help individuals, and yet if we were to take a step back and we were to look at the collective, we may make a different decision. And so that's decision, and so that's suggesting that to me the power of nonviolence at least part of it, is a dedication to the well-being or upliftment of the collective rather than the few Right. So that's one example of what nonviolence leads to if you follow it through.
Shannon W.:Try to to look at the big picture, yeah, and looking at the humanity of all of the people, what would you say about the follow-up question that? You know, I see you as having maintained this staunch commitment to non-violent for many decades now, and I'm curious what keeps you going, what sustains your commitment to nonviolence in the face of challenges, hardships, even dangers that you have faced along the way?
Lorin P.:Well, I'm not sure where to even start to answer that one. Okay, september 11th, the September 11th.
Shannon W.:The September 11th.
Lorin P.:It was the third day of my sabbatical. After 30 years of trying to teach nonviolence at Bishpatad, I decided it was time to go back to Berkeley and actually find out what I should have been teaching all 30 years, because you were teaching physics the whole time. I was teaching physics. Four sections of physics and one section of I called it alternatives to violence.
Shannon W.:Oh, yes, okay, Please go on.
Lorin P.:So I decided it was time for a sabbatical. So I went to Berkeley. The third class of the semester was the morning of September 11. And I was enrolled in Michael's Peace and Conflict Studies. Course 164 was the basic introduction to nonviolence.
Shannon W.:A year long course, Amazing that there was a year long course, university course in nonviolence.
Lorin P.:If you meant Mecklenegger, you'd know why.
Shannon W.:Yeah, no, absolutely. I just want to put a pin in that right there, so for somebody to think about that.
Lorin P.:So he walks into the classroom at 9 am, about one. Well, a couple hours after the towers have collapsed and everybody's sitting on the edge of your seats. This is a world-class non-violence teacher. And what is he going to say now, now that you know that those towers and of course we had no idea how many people died initially. I was imagining at that time of the morning there there might have been 10 or 20, 30 000 people in those towers, but clearly it was an enormous provocation, something at least on the order of Pearl Harbor, and there was going to be a very violent reaction from our nation. There was no doubt that it would be extremely violent if we could just figure out who the culprits were.
Lorin P.:Because our nation solves problems, problems, solves conflicts through violence yeah, and so the very first thing he said was the following there is a laboratory for learning non-violence. It is called meditation, and all of a sudden, uh, the truth of that penetrated. I had been trying to teach nonviolence for 30 years without any meditation and it was instantly obvious to me that was the piece that I had been missing. So I showed up the next day. He said the class meets every morning at 8 am in such and such a room, and so I showed up the next morning at 8am, and every morning for the rest of the year, from September all the way to the following May, never missed, because it was. I had. No, never thought twice, never looked back.
Lorin P.:Clearly, this is something I need to learn to do. So I, I met. I try to meditate every morning for 30 minutes. I'm not very good at it, but it makes no difference, it doesn't matter. I know that I need it, and the fact that I am not good at it my mind wanders. Is this more evidence that I need to do this? Michael is saying look, this is essential, it's not an option. If you're serious about nonviolence, we have to meditate, we have to get control of our minds. Mind has a mind of its own, and I think we've all had this experience that it's hard for us to control our minds.
Shannon W.:Yes indeed.
Lorin P.:Our minds are always wandering off and trying all kinds of crazy things.
Shannon W.:Well, and the question that you're answering is what sustains you? And so, how does that sustain you? How does working with the mind help us to effectively work for nonviolence?
Lorin P.:To effectively work for nonviolence.
Lorin P.:Well it's almost like it's a self-examination every morning More or less.
Lorin P.:In my case, there's two parts to it. One is reciting some centering prayers. I'm not sure prayer is the right word, so I begin every morning by reciting the prayer of saint francis, and then I recite the beatitudes.
Lorin P.:the beatitudes, for me, have become extremely important. Uh, you know, the christian churches want to talk about everything except what jesus taught. They want to talk about the crucifixion and the resurrection. They want to talk about, uh, all kinds of things, but they rarely talk about what jifixion and the resurrection. They want to talk about all kinds of things, but they rarely talk about what Jesus spent three years talking about his vision. He called it the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven, depending on which gospel you read it in. He gave a rather clear exposition of it, and especially in the Sermon on the Mount, and the very first words of his first sermon, according to the Gospel of Matthew, were blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and I always want to add, the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Lorin P.:So much of Christianity has said oh, when Jesus talks about heaven, he's talking about the next life. No, yes, he is talking about the next life, but he's equally talking about this life, and that is not part of the teaching of most churches. And so I do part company with, unfortunately with many Christians on that question. Yeah, he was crucified, and that's a terribly important lesson for us about how to resist evil and violence, but it's not the core of the message. The core of the message is that we're invited to create heaven on earth, and the Beatitudes, especially, are the recipe for how to do that.
Lorin P.:Gandhi understood that there were missionaries who were always trying to convert Gandhi to Christianity, including a friend of my mother who was a missionary, who talked to Gandhi and tried to convert him. Gandhi's response was Jesus is a fabulous teacher, but what all you Christians claim? You say that Jesus has got all the answers, but then nobody practices them. All the answers, but but then nobody practices them. Why would I want to join christianity when christianity is a religion of people who say that jesus has got all the answers and and then don't actually live according to his teaching? He was pretty some people would say confrontational, but I think he was telling it like it is uh, pretty clear and so that's.
Lorin P.:That's one part of why I meditate is, or why I recite the beatitudes is that I understand, and gandhi understood, that he someone it's unclear exactly what age somebody gave him the to read the beatitudes when he probably when he was a teenager, and when he the first time he read them, they went straight through his soul and he realized this is the important teaching. And so Gandhi recited the Beatitudes every day for the next 40 years. And so I figured the least I can do is to follow that lead. And I have great respect for the Catholic tradition and all the thousands and millions of saints and people who have devoted their lives to the teaching of the church. But they've missed some basic things.
Lorin P.:And so the Catholic Church says the just war theory. And so for at least 15 or 1700 years, christianity has been teaching people that some wars are not just and some are just. And so what do Christians do? Well, they always automatically assume that their war is just. Yeah, right. So French Catholics and German Catholics get to kill each other because the leader said the life of our nation is at stake and you have to go out and kill those other people, the life of our nation is at stake and you have to go out and kill those other people.
Lorin P.:And so in the 20th century, you know, there are 100 million people have been killed in wars, and 50 million of them were in World War II, and they were mostly Christians, busy killing each other or killing people of other traditions.
Shannon W.:The Japanese were, I suppose, mostly Buddhist, but I think this is a critique that many people have of Christianity. It's common for people to see the hypocrisy in that I want to say, and it can be a shame if the true message of Jesus is actually not able to be touched upon because of that. So you know, there can be many people who are so resistant to Christianity as it is being practiced and especially seeing the ways that it has been used to. It has been used as an oppressive force over the decades and over the centuries, and so just you being able chief exhibit would be the crusades absolutely, absolutely.
Shannon W.:So I appreciate you bringing up non-violence in the pure teachings of jesus, and you have. You've also you kind of touched on this, but you've talked about the kind of teaching that you were teaching around, non-violence being gospel non-violence, and then that it's not so different from gandhian non-violence, which people may be more familiar with, and even gandhi reciting the beatitudes shows a clear reflection and affinity between the two traditions. But I wonder if you might speak about how Gandhian nonviolence and gospel nonviolence fit together in your way of viewing nonviolence.
Lorin P.:They're virtually identical. So many decades ago I wrote a curriculum that I call Gandhian nonviolence, and that's a pretty good summary of what I was teaching for 30, 40 years. So when I started thinking about it I realized that gospel nonviolence and Gandhi and nonviolence are exactly the same. The fundamental principle is called the law of redemptive suffering, and that was Jesus' answer to the question of what do you do about evil, what do you do about violence? And the answer is from Jesus' way and from Gandhi's way, the answer is you choose to accept suffering that's being imposed on you by some source of violence, but you do it with absolute nonviolence and courage, and that wins respect.
Lorin P.:When courage is really powerful and obvious, it always wins respect. And then, secondly, with a disciplined love. And so you're saying, yeah, you're torturing me, you're hurting me and I still love you. And make it real that this very highly disciplined love for the oppressor, for the evildoer, the violent person, will win their trust. And eventually they come to realize they can trust you. And when the British officials began to trust Gandhi, they began to understand him and his message. But winning trust is an essential part of the process. So that's a very short. That's sort of the key to redemptive suffering, which was the foundation of what Jesus was doing in the crucifixion and in lots of other ways, and what Gandhi was doing.
Shannon W.:Well, and people in the US may also be familiar of that concept of redemptive suffering through the civil rights movement and through the work of Martin Luther King, who was very much a student of Gandhi and, of course, of Jesus, and used that to great effect in winning the respect of the people, the respect and the trust of the people whose minds that the civil rights activists were working to change through allowing themselves to hold their suffering, to hold redemptive suffering instead of expressing redemptive violence. Right, you know, along this line of exploration, speaking of the power of nonviolent presence to potentially diffuse the threat of violence, what comes to my mind is the practice of unarmed civilian peacekeeping, which I know is something you've been deeply involved with through your work with CPT, with Christian Peacemaker Teams, and I'd love to ask you a bit about that. Would you share with us a little bit about what is unarmed civilian peacekeeping and how are you and Christian Peacemaker Teams involved in that effort?
Lorin P.:And how are you and Christian Peacemaker teams involved in that effort? So, christian Peacemaker teams, there are some historic peace churches the Quakers, the Brethren and the Mennonites who for centuries have been saying well, if you guys want to go fight a war, that's fine, we'll stay home. But in 1984, ron Sider, who's a theologian, gave a public speech to the World Conference I think it was a Mennonite World Conference saying, no, we're told to love our enemies, not to stay home. And so when there's a war, we need to show up and show people how to love their enemies. It's not enough just to stay home and say I'm glad I'm not a soldier.
Shannon W.:In other words, conscientious objection is not enough. Is what he's saying.
Lorin P.:Right, okay, so so that that was in 1984. So it took about 10 years for the peace churches the again, the Quakers and brethren and the Mennonites to get organized, but they finally and and Jean Stolfus was the person who they chose to do the original initial work leading it, and so by 1994, they sent out the first team I think it was to Haiti, and also, a year later, the Senate team to Palestine and lots of other places. And so the idea is that we're providing unarmed civilian accompany matter, unarmed civilian protection that as a civilian, especially as an outsider, sometimes that protects us. Normally the American passport or the Canadian passport or the British passport is enough protection, that normally we're not targeted. And, as I said, we simply are standing at the flashpoints making sure that nothing flashes, that nothing, there's no violence.
Shannon W.:So you're coming to places of conflict and you're literally accompanying civilians with the intention to keep them safe from whatever oppressive forces may be around them.
Lorin P.:Yes, okay. So I spent seven summers in Hebron, palestine, with Christian peacemaker teams. So every day we walk around the city in pairs, usually maybe three or four people, but typically just two people. We especially during the school hours in the morning when the students are coming into school and in the afternoon when they're going home, we'll stand at the checkpoints. Our presence.
Lorin P.:The soldiers say things like we don't like it when you watch us, but we have to admit that when you do watch us we behave better and we sort of like understand why you're doing what you're doing and we're apparently extremely appreciated. One of the tragedies is that the Palestinians feel like the international community has abandoned them and the only people who show up are the Christian Peacemaker Team folks not all of whom are Christian. In fact, we have a growing number of Muslims on the team, but other than us, the Palestinians, we're one of the few international groups. There is a team, the Hebron TIF, the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, which the Norwegians facilitate. Now that's a professional group of soldiers and policemen who are recruited from those European countries and they're well organized and funded and they have all kinds of fancy equipment and they kind of adopt us, and so every Friday they have a barbecue and they invite the Christian Peacemaker team guys to their barbecue because they know that we don't have any money. So they bring you over.
Lorin P.:It's an interesting relationship. Yeah.
Lorin P.:And I have great respect especially for the Norwegians, who are always the leadership of this whole thing. Norway does some good peacemaking stuff, not just in Palestine but other parts of the world too. Our team I forget what year it was, maybe 2008 or 2007, decided that we needed to move our team to somewhere else. So I happened to be there and my assignment was to tell our allies that we were leaving Hebron. So I started meeting, going around some of the local groups, different groups that we had worked with the local Palestinians, and I was dumbfounded when I told on two occasions, when I told grown Palestinian Muslim men that we were leaving they burst into tears.
Lorin P.:I said we are totally abandoned. You were the last hope. Christian Peacemaker Teams was the one thing that gave us hope that maybe we were remembered and that the international community cared about us. They were crushed by the thought that we were going to leave. So that was quite an education of just how profoundly grateful the Muslims and the Christians are to have international presence there.
Shannon W.:How important your presence was to them.
Lorin P.:Yes, yeah, I mean, I had heard it said, but when these grown men burst into tears it really drove the point home how deeply they feel abandoned. And to some extent I'm sure that that feeling still goes on, because, and although public opinion even in America has begun shifting, it's a little less supportive of Israel, a little more supportive of the Palestinians. We still have good ways to go to get it fair or even, but there has been some progress in the last five, six, seven years, in the last five, six, seven years. The other thing I'll mention is that a number of times this has happened eight or nine times an individual Israeli soldier will call me over.
Lorin P.:If I'm standing at a checkpoint or something, one of the soldiers will gesture to me come on over, I've got a question. And they always start off by saying well, why are you here? Well, because we're concerned about this occupation, and so on. But you know, we can't understand why we don't want to be here. We hate what we're doing here, so we can't understand why you guys would come and be here. And part of this, and in each case, what became clear to me is that these individual soldiers, many of them, feel hopeless that this war will be eternal, there is no end, that this occupation and this oppression will never end. They feel trapped by it.
Shannon W.:It's been their whole life. Their whole life has been this, isn't it?
Lorin P.:this isn't it? Yes, I guess as an Israeli, but also, in particular, as a member of the military, standing day after day at a checkpoint and harassing people, and sometimes hitting people and sometimes arresting people, and sometimes violence breaks out. People get killed, and it's for every Israeli that's killed, five or 10 Palestinians are killed, and so on. That's been pretty much the ratio for decades. And so there's. So I would, in each case I would talk with the soldier anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes and say you know, could you imagine someday living together with the Palestinians? Is that a possibility? And usually by the end of an hour I at least had planted the idea that if they could learn to live together, this violence would stop. And at least I was able, in each case, able to get them to recognize or to see a little bit of hope.
Lorin P.:But part of the reason I'm telling the story is that what our media doesn't report on is how frustrated and hopeless and despairing the soldiers, some of the soldiers, are. Now there's some that are all into violence. That's true of any army, american soldiers as well as Israeli soldiers but the majority are uncomfortable with what's going on and longing for a way out. And you know I didn't end the occupation, but I think there's a couple of soldiers who finally began to realize that they don't need to be enemies.
Shannon W.:Yeah, you were there, you were present, you had the conversations, you played the part you could play, and what you're sharing right now, I think, also makes a difference, lauren.
Shannon W.:It's a really important reminder that the Israeli soldiers, for example, have been conscripted into that army and that they may not want to be there, and I would argue that, whether they want to be there or not, they are victims of the same occupation that the Palestinians are, that everyone in that situation is a victim, and to be able to look on them with some compassion and recognize that they are also carrying out the bidding of empire.
Shannon W.:You know, and this has occurred to me with the russian occupation of ukraine and the way that our media has reported this and very much an us versus them Ukrainians good guys, russians bad guys, russian soldiers bad and at the same time, we know that the Russian soldiers that are being sent to Ukraine, that very likely there's a significant percentage of them who would not choose to be there, who would not choose that to be their fight, and when we refuse to see that about them, we're not seeing the whole picture and we're dehumanizing a human being, which is exactly what nonviolence is wanting to teach us to push back against right, because it's powerful entities that would love for us to dehumanize one another and to continue to fight their wars on their behalf. So, by humanizing one another, that is another form of resistance. And, lastly, I would say that by you going and speaking with the Israeli officers and by the Israeli officers speaking with you, that's another form of rehumanizing one another. Yes.
Shannon W.:Is there any other takeaway that you would share about nonviolent accompaniment?
Lorin P.:On a little different. There is something else I wanted to say, and that is that the suicide rate for American veterans is twice the suicide rate for non-veterans, and it's about 4,000 extra suicides occur each year among veterans.
Lorin P.:Extra meaning above the national rate or national average, however you want to say it. So there's about 8,000 veterans suicides a year. This is the statistics from the year 2012. The Congress authorized the Veterans Administration to keep statistics on how many veterans were committing suicide and after one year they realized that was a disaster, that they didn't want the American public to realize how many of our veterans killed themselves.
Shannon W.:Aha, so they stopped presenting the data.
Lorin P.:They told the VA they couldn't collect that data anymore or couldn't track it.
Shannon W.:Because they didn't like what it said.
Lorin P.:Yes, and so that's what's called moral injury. Yeah, when a human being is told to go out and kill so-and-so and he pulls the trigger and he watched the body crumple and fall and writhe on the ground and bleed and die, there's no way that a memory can be erased, much too powerful and uh. And so he spends the next 40, 50 years trying to convince himself that he had no choice and that internal struggle is endless and hopeless. So the number of veterans who kill themselves is actually quite a bit larger than the number of soldiers who were killed in the war.
Shannon W.:Wow, that's really potent, isn't it?
Lorin P.:Yeah. So we say we lost what is it? 7,000-something in Iraq and Afghanistan, mostly in Iraq, I think. But in the same years we lost 30,000 veterans to suicide.
Shannon W.:Yeah, incredible. That's just another example of the it's kind of a crude way of putting it but that the perpetrators are also the victims, you know.
Lorin P.:Yeah, and so it's the term that I see being used. I don't know if you've run into this, but the term is moral injury.
Shannon W.:Yes, I have, and I think it's becoming more common and more talked about over time.
Lorin P.:And I'm sure that it's true for Israeli soldiers as well as American soldiers.
Shannon W.:And what you said about. Well, they spend the next 40, 50 years trying to convince themselves that they had no choice, and I mean there's an argument for that. They may have not felt they had a choice at that time, but for them to live with that for the rest of their lives, that's a hard burden to bear. That's a lot we're asking of our soldiers. In fact, there's something that you had written in one of your tax resistance letters that I read and it was let me see if I can find that.
Shannon W.:It was the same paragraph where you said I object to paying someone else to kill in my name. You said I object to our political leaders abusing our soldiers, using them to impose our economic empire instead of to defend our country. Going back to what you were saying about empire as well, yeah, that it is a form of abuse to send our soldiers to impose empire, and I don't know what the answer is, but I certainly think that naming moral injury is part of the answer. So at least it's being recognized, you know, and much, much love to the soldiers who go and fight and believe they are doing the right thing for their country and end up wounded in their own ways for the rest of their lives.
Lorin P.:It's a very sad thing so one of the things that when I was teaching was when we got into this discussion about soldiers in war and so on, and I said, in your interactions in the rest of your life, as you interact with various people, you will occasionally encounter soldiers or veterans. Please be gentle, please remember that they're fighting this battle. Don't make it worse for them. They're already killing themselves. Please be merciful, don't rub it in their face. Offer them forgiveness, offer them reconciliation.
Shannon W.:Thank you for that, lauren. I'm seeing images of the soldiers coming home from Vietnam and this may have happened with Iraq, afghanistan, many other conflicts that soldiers come home and already suffering from their experiences and they're at the receiving end of the ire of a lot of angry people, angry anti-war activists. And if we can just remember to have some compassion.
Lorin P.:You know, this got driven home to me in a very unusual way 1966, I had fallen in love with Laksana. I occasionally was able to spend some time in Bangkok. She had a job occasionally was able to spend some time in Bangkok. She had a job. She worked in a very high-class restaurant that presented Thai food but also Thai culture, thai dance and so on, and I used to go and pick her up every night and I would hang out in the kitchen with the Thai cooks and I spoke. I was fluent in Thai, so you know they were fine with having me just sitting on a stool in the corner waiting.
Lorin P.:But one night this Caucasian young man walks in and he's obviously upset and he sees me and he starts talking and he's an American soldier, he's from Tennessee, he was from Tennessee. Every week 20,000 GIs were flown from Vietnam to Bangkok for one week of R&R, rest and recuperation and he and he's really upset and almost in tears and I guess I asked him what's wrong. I don't remember the details of the conversation but what he told me was he had just killed an old Vietnamese woman by accident, by mistake. Oh no.
Lorin P.:His unit was given orders to clean a village out of any Viet Cong fighters. So the procedure was as they came to each house in the village they would shout out in Vietnamese come out with your hands raised. And apparently in some houses people would do that. But if no one came out then they threw a hand grenade into the house and after it exploded then they would go into the house to see if there was anyone there. And so he had gone into a house and found an old Vietnamese woman in the corner bleeding to death. You know she was still alive, but there was nothing he could do to save her and he was struggling terribly, he was in tears and he was having a really hard time forgiving himself for having killed this old woman.
Lorin P.:And you know he realized one, his Vietnamese. His accent is probably so bad that they couldn't understand what the words meant. You know, I've known Peace Corps volunteers after two years in Thailand, the locals, thai is a tonal language and if you don't get the tones right it doesn't mean anything, it just means nothing. It's pure garbage, chaos. And so it's hard for me to believe that the Vietnamese vietnamese by american soldiers was intelligible to most vietnamese. It's rather unlikely. And the other issue I think he realized is that the woman was probably, even if she did understand the words, the shouts, the commands, she was probably too terrified to do anything. She was hiding in the corner, hoping, praying, that nothing would happen, and I guess ever since. That was 1966, that's a year before Oxana and I got married, but that memory has always stayed with me, the boy from Tennessee who was so devastated by having killed an old woman, that is moral injury.
Lorin P.:Yes.
Shannon W.:Thank you for the reminder, lauren, because it continues. That didn't die with Vietnam, with that war. Yeah, I just want to take a breath and just recognize the depth of what we're talking about and what you've witnessed and where you've been and who you've known and what you've seen also. So I know that we're nearing the end of our conversation. We've been talking for a while. I do want to ask if there's anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to share. You did mention you maybe want to talk about nonviolent economics. Are you still interested in sharing something about that?
Lorin P.:Yes, okay. So what to do with money investments? Well, all economic systems invest. It's called progress, I suppose it doesn't matter whether it's a capitalist or a socialist or a communist system. Investment is part of how the world, how civilization, progresses. But that doesn't mean that all investments are nonviolent. Some may be nonviolent, but some are violent. So the first thing I realized is that the stock market basically says to all the corporate leaders you will be judged by how much profit you make. That's all that matters. We don't care how you make the money, we don't care if you lie, if you cheat, you steal, you exploit, you pollute, you oppress people, do whatever. But you're going to be judged only by the amount of money you made. So my answer is never invest in stocks, because the criteria of funding a corporation through stocks is giving them permission to do all these things that are violent. Instead, there are socially responsible funds. Instead, there are socially responsible funds. I've been investing in a Calvert social bond fund for 50 years Well, at least since 1975. I guess it's not quite 50 years.
Lorin P.:Pretty close, and they do not invest in weapons, they don't invest in the military, they don't invest in tobacco or liquor or industries that pollute. They're very careful about where they invest. They don't perform better than other investment funds, but they don't perform worse either. In fact, there's some evidence that the socially responsible funds actually, in the end, come out ahead because they're socially responsible.
Shannon W.:They come out ahead because you factor in the social responsibility, and that has its own value. Mm-hmm. Okay.
Lorin P.:And the other suggestion is it's okay to invest in fixed return instruments. So, instead of saying to a CEO if you don't make more money than anybody else, you're going to lose your job, and forcing them to cut corners and cheat and be violent, if you say to them okay, we're going to loan you this money and we want to be paid back a fixed return let's say 3% or 2% or 4% or something then you're not going to be judged by whether you made more money than the next corporation or the next CEO. Don't put your CEOs into a position where they have to compete against each other. Just say okay, we expect you to make 3%, but not more than that, so don't be shooting for 10% or 20% or whatever.
Shannon W.:And that's actually the fund manager who is behind those fixed return investments. Who's pulling those shots?
Lorin P.:The ones that I have invested in recently are just simply CDs. Now I'm compromising my standards here a bit, in that I don't know if anybody offers socially screened certificates of deposit CDs. That would be ideal, would be ideal. But at least avoid the competitive investments where you're. You're saying you have to be better than anybody else, otherwise you lose your job. No, if you make a stated return and it's reasonable, then that's, that's good, that's all I want, and so so I've tried to live ethically for 50 years at least.
Shannon W.:You've tried darn hard, Lauren.
Lorin P.:Well, it's Michael's fault. When you meditate, you think of all kinds of things, anyway, but I do try to think about the implications and consequences of my choices.
Shannon W.:I know you do, lauren, and that's one reason why your reflections on investment are so valuable.
Shannon W.:I think this is another example of something in our society that is so ubiquitous that people may not realize that we have choices and I think we do realize we have choices in where we want to invest our money, but we may not realize how damaging and how violent the structure that the stock market is holding up can be and, at the same time, the only option people have for saving for their retirement in many people's minds anyway is to have an IRA or to have investments in stocks or bonds or what have you.
Shannon W.:So it's helpful to hear about this because, again, our system is structured in such a way that the people with money make more money. It is structured that way, and it can feel disheartening to know that if we want to save for our future or for our family's future, it may seem that the only option that we have is to buy in to this broken system. And we may seem that the only option that we have is to buy in to this broken system, and we may not want to buy into that broken system. I think most of the time, if there's a game we think we need to play, we may not really need to play that game, but it takes some time to dig beneath the surface of sort of the mainstream narratives of these are your choices, and then we go oh well, those must be my only choices then. But that's often not the case. We always have the choice to question.
Lorin P.:Right and tell your listeners if any of them find a critical review of Calvert and or find out other investment houses that that are that have genuine social screening of their investments. I'd appreciate hearing about that, because I haven't I haven't done any recent research to verify.
Shannon W.:Very good, I think you just told the listeners yourself. Well, I know that we are. Yeah, we're basically at the end here. I'm so grateful for your time. As I said, I do see you as a mentor in nonviolence and I'm one of the people who's been affected by those ripples of all those choices that you've made. So thank you, yeah.
Lorin P.:You're welcome, yeah.
Shannon W.:I also want to wish you and Laksana and your children and your grandchildren many blessings.
Lorin P.:Thank you.
Shannon W.:Yeah, and may your lifetime of work ripple out to many blessings for them in the future as well. Thank you so much Much love.
Lorin P.:You're welcome, dear, okay.
Shannon W.:Bye-bye, bye-bye, thanks. Thank you so much, much love. You're welcome, dear. Okay, bye-bye, bye-bye. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Wake Up Human podcast. To connect with my guest, lauren Peters, to get on his email list or to share any info you might dig up on socially screened investments, you can email him at laurenpeters at yahoocom and let him know. You heard him here on the Wake Up Human podcast.
Shannon W.:In the show notes for this episode, as mentioned, I'll include links to the various individuals, organizations and teachings we discussed, and I'll add some links to additional nonviolence resources as well. If you liked this episode and think others would too, please give me a positive review on iTunes or elsewhere and share the episode with others who might enjoy it. This podcast is a labor of love for me and I'm thrilled if it can be a benefit to someone else. Just one last reminder that waking up for our own benefit is powerful, and waking up for the benefit of ourselves and the world is powerful beyond measure. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode of the Wake Up Human podcast.