Owning Your Inner Violence

Well, I have been slowly making my way through "Engaging the Powers" by Walter Wink, and I come across many passages I would like to put down, but I try not to write down everything, but what I feel is most important or else I would just write down the entire book...haha.

Anyways, here is a passage from chapter 15 called Monitoring Our Inner Violence:
For years nonviolence has been falsely caricatured as anemic, chickenhearted, and passionless, and there have been just enough proponents of it who acted this way to keep the caricature alive. We need to be able to bring anger, power, passion, and an iron intransigence to our nonviolence. Our inner violence, transformed, becomes an indispensable aggressiveness, a sense of strength, that prevents us from blowing our stacks out of a sense of powerlessness or impotence....When we fully know from within that we will not back down, we no longer have to bluster and fume. As Brewster Beach pointed out to me, a person who is well defended does not need to be defensive...Any nonviolence that hides behind the breastworks instead of full-bloodedly facing the enemy is cowardice.

It may be that the ancient archetype of the warrior can be sublimated or transformed into the image of spiritual warrior. There is a profound longing and need for the courage, camaraderie, selflessness, heroism, service, and transcendence that many men have known only through warfare...The challenge before us today is not to obliterate the warrior mentality (which would only drive it deeper into the unconscious, where it would work to produce more wars), but to own, celebrate, and honor it, and channel its expression into nonviolent struggles against the real threats to human survival today: starvation, pollution, despotism, racism economic greed.

Nor is the warrior imagery all masculine. Women need to express their strength and aggressive qualities, just as men need to learn to feel, to be present, to be attentive to process. Both women and men need to be able to experience the spiritual warrior: men, because this can be a way of sublimating the warrior archetype; women, because they need to claim their power. What a contribution to nonviolent struggles it would make if we could learn from warriors the discipline, the toughness, and the willingness to face death for a higher cause that characterize the soldier.

Becoming nonviolent from the heart does not, then, mean abandoning or repressing one's aggressiveness entirely. We will never get rid of the opposites within us; we can only continually lift them up for transformation. We have to own our violence and learn to value it. As Brian Willson put it, "I am a violent person. I'm educated and trained in the United States. I don't have any particular upbringing in nonviolence; it's new for me. Even though I believe in nonviolence and am committed to it, I'm not nonviolent in nature. I had to prepare myself; I had to think a lot about loving people, about loving the police, the people in the military.' Nonviolence is the spiritualization of violence, the overcoming of violent desire. It is not the mere absence of violence, but an effort to transcend, rather than commit, violence.

It may prove beneficial to be forced to face, daily, the humiliating fact that some of us are no less violent than those whose policies we oppose. Maybe then we can love them, since we are no better, and avoid the self-righteousness that ends all dialogue.

We also need to be in touch with our inner violence because our very attempts at nonviolence create violence, both outer and inner. Nonviolent direct action elicits violence; it unmasks the structural violence of an unjust system and forces the system to repent or attack. "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). Increased use of nonviolence will not mean a gradual decrease of the amount of conflict and violence in the world. The goal of nonviolence is not tranquility but God's domination-free order, of which tranquility is merely a by-product. As long as injustice, inequality of opportunity, and hatred exist, we are obligated to initiate conflict in order, if possible, to eradicate it. We cannot be content with reactive nonviolence; it must be proactive, aggressive, militant.

Nonviolent action triggers our own latent inner violence as well. We must learn to assume, as second nature, that this activation of our inner violence is inevitable and monitor it as it arises. Perhaps we cannot eradicate our violence, but only restrain it, and learn to transmute its energies into nonviolence.

Jesus does not make nonviolence a new law, but a new option. Violence also is still an option, and unless we have faced that option, nonviolence will surely be refuge of cowards. You cannot give up what you do not have. If you have not claimed your violence as a strength, as a God-given gift, you cannot freely renounce it.

Nonviolence is clearly the way of Jesus. But we need to offer our violence to God as well, though not in the manner of those soldiers who allegedly kept their sword hands out of the water when they were baptized. Our violence must go "under the waters" so that the new synthesis, the third way, manifest not only our love but also our shadow. We are not paragons of peaceableness, but wounded, violent, frightened people trying to become human. We are not wan saints incapable of evil, but plain people clad in both light and dark, under the banner of love, seeking to be spiritual warriors.

Jesus' third way shows us the path forward: neither repressing our violence, nor acting it out, but letting it be the fuel by which God empowers us to struggle for the nonviolent future.

Nonviolence has little to do with ideas or mere tactics. It is, finally , a way of life, a set of behaviors. And nothing is so hard to change as habitual behavior. NOnviolence is not, the, the task of a season, but of a lifetime.