In early January, I traveled from Orlando to Michigan for a graduate school residency and ended up having an encounter with a little book that led me here.
The flight from Orlando to Michigan was delayed by something like an hour. During that window of time, I finished reading one of the required texts for the residency and pulled out the next one: Tribes, by Seth Godin.
In it, Seth Godin talks about the need for leaders willing to step out in front and engage others with an idea. He talks about the power of following the trail of an idea that has gripped us with a passion. And he talks about how change can happen in the world when a tribe of people devoted to a singular idea have a place to gather and communicate about it.
I’d been pondering the idea of a dedicated online space to explore nonviolence and my own journey deeper into it for a little while before reading this book. But it wasn’t until Seth Godin framed it in the language of a tribe that something really clicked for me about it.
I wrote in the margins of that book while I was reading:
How can I invite others into their own nonviolent journey, and to share what they’re doing with the rest of the tribe?
Then I put down the book, picked up my pen, and let it fly across the pages of my journal with the following:
What does it take to create a tribe around the journey toward nonviolence?
I think this begins with deciding to go. To do it.
The next step is declaring the vision.
What is this tribe about, and what do we believe can happen? What are we about, and what do we want to see happen in the world?
I sat for a moment and thought about those questions. What would this tribe be about, if it existed? What do people traveling the journey toward nonviolence believe? More pointedly, what had I, in my own journey along this path, come to embrace as the bedrock foundation of my beliefs?
I tapped my pen against my lips for a few moments and stared at the page. Then I wrote, very deliberately, the following:
THE JTN TRIBE IS ABOUT:
- The precious dignity of every human person
- Forgiveness and reconciliation
- Compassionate listening that heals, empowers, and ultimately creates a more loving human family
- Examining the violence in our own hearts and lives in a commitment to confess and repent of our contribution to the world’s destruction and devastation
- An unwavering belief in the unique power of love to overcome and transform violence
- Offering creative, life-giving love in response to any degree of violence or hatred
- Learning with each other and from each other
- Celebrating acts of love and nonviolence within this community and around the world
- Forgiving ourselves and each other when we fail to live this journey well
- [Edited to add -- from Gigi] Responding to violence with curiosity, rather than anger or judgment
- [Edited to add -- from Gigi] Looking out at the world with and through eyes of love
- [Edited to add -- from Sarah] Finding specific situations and places to actively choose and practice nonviolence
This is our manifesto, at least to the extent I was able to craft it on my own. I’d love your feedback and suggestions, too! Personally, if I were to add anything extra to what I wrote in my journal that day, I think it would contain something about the need for divine assistance to accomplish any of this.
It is my plan to explore each of these points in greater detail over the next several weeks. As I write each post, I’ll come back here and link to the new post for each point. And when we’re done with that exercise, I’ll share the original vision I imagined for this community as I dreamed aloud in my journal on that fateful plane ride in January.
In the meantime, is there anything you’d add to the list above? Anything you’d add, change, or remove?
(For future reference, this bulleted declaration will always be nested at the top of the page under the About JTN link. There, I’ll also update the points with links to the posts that explore each one in further depth.)
I believe these are encompassed with some of the above but would like to add to the manifesto of JTN –
When faced with violence respond with curiosity not anger or judgment
Look with and through eyes of love
Great suggestions, Gigi! I will add these to the list. Thanks for sharing, and for stopping by and adding your voice and life to the tribe here.
I love the list you have here and I honestly can’t think of anything that I would add to it.
I really appreciate the fourth bullet point down about examining the violence in our own hearts. While off of work last week, James & I watched “Blood Diamond” together. I had seen it before, so I knew what to expect but the images of the violence in that film always seem to elicit the same reactions from me. When I see these militant revolutionaries slaughtering innocent men, women, and children; when I see them kidnap young boys and brainwash them; when I see them manipulate and maim — I want them to do the same things. Now I’m totally on board with this non-violence thing, but I still wanted them to suffer. Maybe I don’t want to do them violence myself, but I want them to suffer violence. I want them to suffer in the same manner as they’ve caused their victims to suffer.
I was thinking about JTN when I was watching this film — it was hard not to. And I thought, yes: the men exacting these violences, these crimes against other human beings — this means affirming even their dignity as human persons and asking: how is love best interjected into this situation? How can I act in a loving way that will help overcome this violence? What does it really mean to love my enemy?
It gave rise to many thought-provoking and uncomfortable questions. Thank you for providing this space in which we can express and explore these things!!
Oh, my friend. I know that tension of which you speak so well.
I find that same response in myself very often, and it continually pulls me up short and makes me examine my heart toward the oppressor, the violent, the victimizer. Do I believe they, too, are a precious human life? Can I find in myself the capacity to extend them love and sisterhood in the human experience? Do I believe they are capable of transformation? If so, how do I really believe that would happen — through punishment and vindication, or through something more noble and kind?
To be honest, these thoughts are still so new. One year of holding these ideas is such a short amount of time to reformulate 30 years of holding a different view and believing it’s just the way things ought and need to be.
These are tough questions that bring us face to face with the grain of life and soul. I’m glad you’re encountering them for yourself and really holding them inside you. You’re right — they are questions we’ll ask and revisit regularly here, because we need to, and doing it in community will, I hope, be good for all of us holding these same questions.
PS: That movie is incredible, isn’t it? Sheesh.
The movie is incredible. I bought it shortly after renting it (must have been 2 years ago now, at least) and I haven’t watched it since. It’s that stirring and powerful. I had no idea how to process all that it made me feel before — I guess I still really don’t. Living here, it seems like we are very inoculated from the kind of violence others in the world experience on a regular basis. Films like this one (“Hotel Rwanda” also comes to mind, as well as a few others) bring the reality into your living room and force you to look at it. It’s very disconcerting sometimes.
I found myself wondering if in the victimizers, there was still some small spark of humanity that could be kindled and made to blaze, or if (as one of the perpetrators in the film noted) they were all “devils”. I want to believe the former, I really do.
Questions like this turn my world upside-down.
So true, Kirsten. They really do turn our world upside-down. I think this tribe will be a place for people willing to hold an experience of the world being turned upside-down but in a slow, deliberate way with support and a place to ask questions along the way.
Another movie that made me feel this way — the stark, difficult realities of the world being broadcast in my own living room — was the movie “Taken.”
Kirsten, I really value the honesty you bring to these experiences and the responses they provoke in you. Even to say, “I want to believe the former, I really do,” is a great place to recognize yourself to be.
I think the essence of the nonviolent journey is that the former is true. We’ll explore some more of that in coming posts on the manifesto points, so let’s keep the conversation on this ongoing!
“Taken” is another great one to illustrate that — really doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of human trafficking and the sheer callousness of those who perpetrate those crimes.
I’m happy to be along here for the journey!! This is so, so important.
How about finding practical places, both close to home and far away, to actively practice/choose nonviolence? I guess that’s assumed in some of the others, but it would be cool to send the tribe on a trip around the world to practice nonviolence? I think it would be cool ;)
I love this, my friend! It makes me think of Shane Claiborne and Jared McKenna, two great men committed to nonviolence and peace in our times. They both have traveled to Iraq to love the citizens there and to demonstrate against the war in very intentional ways.
I wonder what something like this could look like for us. Perhaps it begins with sharing stories from our everydays, and then moving toward some specific actions we take in our own communities on days we set aside for it, and then eventually toward a collective decision to go and do in some way, some how.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Christianne- I love you. I will call you guru ZMJ– Zen Master for Jesus. :) Ha. Catchy huh? Carry on oh enlightened one. I am listening. I am messing with you.
You are a destined leader. I consider myself blessed to walk along with you in my distant capacity.
Love you
T
I’m so glad you’re walking alongside here, too, Tammy.
PS: That ZMJ nickname made me laugh. :)
Nothing to add at this point, but loving it. My Amazon order FINALLY arrived and I am tearing into A Persistent Peace. I am sure I will see some thoughts there.
Peace be with you my friend. I love this space.
So glad you are loving this space, Carl! I am too. :) There’s so much friendship and energy here already, and all of you bring much to the conversation I can’t bring on my own.
I can’t wait to hear what you think of Persistent Peace! Definitely let me know, friend. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and what it provokes in you.
Hey Christianne
I popped back over here to read the conversation you were having with Kirsten. You know one of the most difficult things is to NOT wish “for justice to be served” on the ones who become perpetrators. That is when we must step from human love to agape love because it is beyond where our love will carry us.
We can emotionally identify with a victim but identifying with a perpetrator- that is a whole new animal.
This brings me back to several yrs ago when I was working in the ministry with a friend who was a pastor who knew A LOT of people. The friend was foreign so consequently I met a lot of foreign pastors and evangelists. I saw a lot of crap Christianne, a lot of crap. I encountered one situation with a pastor that was so bad that I could not wink at his doings, so it was not a matter of whether I was going to walk in love or not.
Love did not enter my mind. I went straight to his face and told him that he was a hypocrite. My friend (the pastor) used to tease me about it. He said, “so-n-s0 is afraid of Tammy.” I had zero tolerance for the way I saw this man treat people. But, my friend saw all that evil and walked in love– that is power. That is a love that I did not have.
I am a firm believer that the deepest mystery of the incomprehensible power of God lies in the silence of Christ on the cross.
True power= love, and true love = power.
Jesus did not avenge evil, though He had 100% right and power to do so- yet He held His peace.
Jesus, embraced the man betraying Him, healed the ear of the man apprehending Him, forgave one of His closest friends for denying Him, was nailed by His own people who hated Him, and bled for a world that rejects Him.
……….and i can’t even get along with the one who annoys me. I need help Lord. I need help.
Tammy, you raise SO MANY great thoughts and questions here, I hardly know where to start.
I guess I’ll start with what you said about agape love having to take over because our own love can’t get there. This made me think about how love grows in us. I am thinking at certain points in our journey, when we are at the beginning of it, we really do have to rely on a love greater than our own to handle the things we face that are hard and unmanageable in our own strength. But over time, as God keeps growing us along the journey, it’s like we become more pliable and able to extend at least some degree of agape love from within our own selves.
I guess I’m thinking that we have the capacity to grow in love. Which takes me back to the tagline of the website at the top of the page: this journey really is about opening ourselves to our own capacity to grow in love. It’s essential, and it’s possible. There’s great hope in that, isn’t there?
It’s so hard to hold that tension between justice and love. It’s confusing, and that’s something I want to explore more here. We love a God of justice whose heart is grieved for the pain of victims and who loves and heals them with his lovely, tender touch. His holiness vibrates for justice. And yet the essence of God, as you so beautifully articulated at the end of your comment, is to love with the greatest love imaginable in the face of hatred, rejection, and evil. God doesn’t give up hope on the love he offers to all of us, even as we are rejecting him.
Yeah, Christianne
You are right the more we extend ourselves, the more love become like first nature (I guess you would say)- rather than second nature, even.
We become love with legs on……..love walking. Now there’s a visual for ya.