Wisdom In Speaking

Wednesday of the Thirty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute. You will even be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed. By your perseverance, you will secure your lives." Luke 21:14-19

Piety

Down By the Riverside

Gonna lay down my sword and shield

Down by the riverside (3 times)
Gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside
Ain't gonna study war no more.

refrain

I ain't gonna study war no more,
I ain't gonna study war no more,
Study war no more.

Study
“I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.”

Jesus seems to be advising his disciples to engage in non-violent resistance.  In his trial, Jesus himself will be a model of this behavior.  In modern events, the most famous modern leaders of such civil disobedience may have been Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil right movement in the 1960, the Polish Trade Union Solidarity and the Indian independence movement from the British led by Mahatma Gandhi who remarked: "There are many causes that I am prepared to die for, but no causes that I am prepared to kill for."

A study published by Foreign Affairs[i] magazine concluded that nonviolent movements were twice as likely to succeed as were violent movements, and that nonviolent movements often significantly increased the chances of a more peaceful and democratic government emerging in the aftermath.

Pictures of huge demonstrations in public squares have become a staple of

international news broadcasts, and Time magazine named “the protester” as its Person of the Year for 2011 according to Drop Your Weapons: When and Why Civil Resistance Works by By Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. 

Two thousand years after Jesus encouraged his followers toward civil disobedience, maybe the world is getting the message?

The superior success rate of nonviolent movements is even more impressive when you consider that such movements were pretty rare prior to the 20th century. If you want to learn to use violence well, there are books, treatises, military academies, martial arts schools, etc.  We have the military/service academies like West Point and Annapolis but do we have a Peace Academy?  Where do we provide the opportunity to learn nonviolent methods of resistance to evil acts? They are few and far between if you want to beat your swords into plowshares.

What if we took a fraction of the resources we use to study violence, and used them instead to find ways to stop people from doing evil peacefully? When he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sounded a similar theme: "Therefore, I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict."

Action

Servant of God Dorothy Day, Obl. S.B., was co-founder of a community of

activists who published a newspaper while feeding, sheltering and living with the poor of New York City.  She was a modern-day model of the non-violent protest and civil disobedience Jesus advocated.  The group and its paper, both called The Catholic Worker, set forth a radical Christian vision of a world made more humane and more "just" through active love, sacrifice, personal freedom, pacifism and resistance of what they saw as the dehumanizing features of capitalism and nationalism.

Day converted to Catholicism as a 30-year-old unwed mother. In 1933, she and an eccentric French thinker and vagabond, Peter Maurin, formed the Worker movement.  During the hunger strikes in Washington, D.C. in December 1932, she noted that she was filled with pride watching the marchers, but she couldn't do much with her conversion. In her autobiography, she wrote: "I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?" Later, she visited the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in northeast D.C. to offer a prayer to find a way to use her gifts and talents to help her fellow workers and the poor. You can read more about that in her autobiography The Long Loneliness.

She found that way in the Gospels and her piety and study sustained her action throughout her life.  

Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others to these efforts.

But neither will we be carping in our criticism. We love our country and we love our President. We have been the only country in the world where men of all nations have taken refuge from oppression. We recognize that while in the order of intention we have tried to stand for peace, for love of our brother, in the order of execution we have failed as Americans in living up to our principles.

Dorothy Day died on this date in 1980 and her sainthood cause remains active today. She was jailed often in her life and was one of the most famous non-violent protestors in America.  Her life was portrayed in the movie Entertaining Angels and starred Moira Kelly and Martin Sheen.

Today, as you reflect on this Gospel, offer a prayer to find a way to use your gifts and talents to help your fellow workers and the poor. ”By your perseverance, you will secure your lives.”

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[i] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/2014-06-16/drop-your-weapons