You say nothing is created new?
Don’t worry about it. With the mud of the earth,
make a cup from which your brother can drink.
ANTONIO MACHADO
The next time you are in a science museum, visit the hologram exhibit. On a two-dimensional surface, you will see three-dimensional images, often of the eye or of a family sitting around a dining-room table. Such a three-dimensional image is remarkable itself, especially to people who were alive before television, but the more remarkable aspect of holograms is that you can cut them in pieces and look again, and each piece will still contain the whole image. This scientific demonstration makes graphic to even the most pragmatic among us what was always known to mystics: the whole is contained in each of its parts, the macrocosm exists within the microcosm. There are ways in which this is also true of suffering. Since we are all part of a common reality, all suffering is contained in each small experience of suffering. The suffering of each of us—every whale and every distant hungry child—affects us all, and none of us will be truly free until we all are.
So if you choose to defend the rain forest, you will also be working for better health for inner-city kids. Relieving suffering anywhere, or helping to create an environment in which suffering is more likely to be relieved, shifts the balance slightly and affects everything else. In this case, the very air that everyone—inner-city kids included—breathes improves, so health improves. But, also, consciousness changes; the people involved, including us, get closer to an understanding of living right on the planet, which changes political and economic and social behavior, which then affects others in increasing circles like those from a pebble dropped in water. So, although it is good to find a right match for who we are and what we have to offer, it also doesn’t matter where we start; it is all interconnected.
Look around. The world is now offering us extraordinary opportunities to serve. After even the briefest investigation, any of us will find many things we can do to decrease suffering, to empower others to take better care of their lives, and, as geotheologian Thomas Berry says, “to learn to live graciously together on this unique, beautiful, blue planet.” This time of looking for an opportunity, of not knowing where we want to start, encourages us to have what the great Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi called “beginner’s mind.” In the beginner’s mind, he would say, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few. When we are looking for a way to practice compassionate action, opportunities abound; when we consider them with beginner’s mind, we are more likely to find some that are a good match for just who we are.
This chapter contains some suggestions for ways to serve. Some are rather conventional; others are from less frequently followed paths. They are offered not only as specific suggestions but also as stimulants for the imagination, reminders that there are many ways in each of our communities that will allow us to act with fresh ideas and vision and care and love.
“I went to a meeting with about fifteen people when it was first beginning to happen, before it was called AIDS, in the fall of 1982. Each person in the circle said what they thought would be needed, and I just said ‘hospice.’ I thought that people were going to be isolated in their dying, especially isolated because this disease was looking so weird and so scary. I knew that these people were going to be pushed to the periphery and that they were going to be frightened, and they were going to need someone to be there.
“And I was the only person who said that—hospice—so everyone said, ‘Okay, you do that.’ My first surprise was that I was the only one who said it, and my second was that they thought I had the potential to do it. That activated me, I felt charged with it, and I gathered people who felt the same way. We took some hospice training, and so it began.” This is the voice of Peter Lombardi, former volunteer coordinator at the hospice at Mission Hill, Boston.
In many of our communities, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a consequence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has brought us face to face with fear and discrimination and death, our own as well as others’. The statistics alone are staggering: there are as many as 8 to 10 million people infected with HIV worldwide, and the World Health Organization estimates that 1 million people will have developed AIDS by 1991. In New York City, AIDS is now one of the leading causes of death for women of childbearing age; 1 out of every 61 babies there is HIV-infected. Although AIDS first affected gay men most significantly, people of color, for whom services, education, health care, and drug treatment are less available, are now at far greater risk.
Obviously, an immense, internationally organized public health response to the epidemic is needed. The major work of research, education, and treatment has to be handled by governments and institutions. But even if they were responding effectively, there would still be many things each of us could do to help. Loving-kindness and honest acceptance are in short supply.
If you are drawn to help and don’t know where to start, call the AIDS action group in your community (AIDS is in the phone book at the beginning of the A listings, with the acronyms). They will help you discover the many needs in the AIDS community. You may also have friends in the gay or inner-city communities who know of opportunities or other friends who are nurses, doctors, therapists, or counselors; many of our lives are now touched by AIDS.
There are some actions we can all take, such as becoming better educated about AIDS, learning how it is transmitted and how it is not. As the San Francisco AIDS Foundation says, “The best defense against AIDS is information.” We can share accurate information with family, friends, and community—even information that did not used to be considered appropriate to share. Parents especially can talk with their children and encourage the schools to do so.
We can all examine our fears about AIDS and how those fears are keeping us from helping. Fear permeates the AIDS environment. James Curran, director of the Division of HIV/AIDS at the Centers for Disease Control, speaks of the very estimates of the numbers of people infected with the HIV virus as “very frightening.” The life-styles of the groups most at risk in North America—gay men, intravenous drug users, the poor—are frightening to many others. Patients have begun to be afraid of their doctors and dentists; policemen are afraid of bleeding victims. The entire epidemic, so often in the news, so often affecting people we know or at least hear about, puts us in touch with our fear of death, our fear of the unknown. In a culture where we have tried to mask and ignore death, to keep it invisible inside rosewood coffins, AIDS is disquieting at a profound level.
The good news is that there is something for us all to do. We can all examine our fears and prejudices. We can meet with others and talk about what is disturbing to us, and how we can support positive efforts for treatment, research, care, and, most fundamentally, the attitudes that form the psychological climate. We can explore how fear can lead toward panic, toward the restrictions of individual rights in the name of safety. We can explore the issues of community responsibility at a time of such a health threat. We can share our own fears—for ourselves, our friends, and our children and ask for help in working through them. We can give condoms for Valentine’s Day to break taboos. We can recognize this epidemic as an opportunity to open our hearts to one another and recognize our common humanity.
We can all write to our legislators. Connecticut Governor and former Senator Lowell Weicker, an outspoken advocate for AIDS research and education, says, “You don’t need to be a highly paid, professional lobbyist to make a mark on AIDS spending or policy. Every constituent call is listened to. Every letter is read. Even if they do not change the officeholder’s mind or vote, they send a crucial message that somebody cares and so should they. A constituent’s firsthand experience with the disease can help bridge the gap between AIDS in the abstract and AIDS as an everyday matter of life and death.” Once you become educated about the current AIDS crisis, you may want to write to encourage funding for AIDS education or research, here and in other countries; you may encourage a national health care system that will guarantee coverage to AIDS patients; you may focus on laws to protect people who are HIV positive from discrimination in employment, housing, education, and health care. The more you learn and the more you are able to keep your heart open to this suffering, the more articulate you will become about your concerns.
There are many practical needs in the AIDS community that any of us can take care of, either alone or by forming a direct action group. A group of friends in Cambridge painted a government shelter for persons with AIDS. Others have started housework groups, food banks, or clothing exchanges. Frequently people with AIDS need people to pick up medicine, fix a meal, or call and say they care. They need to hear positive news, be supported in their decisions, and be reminded that they are still valued.
A unique role that has emerged from the special needs of people with AIDS is the buddy, a kind of committed friend or helpmate who volunteers time and understanding. There are now programs that prepare and continue to support people who choose this role, since being a committed friend to a person who is dying can make deep demands and can lead us to confront our own mortality. Peter Lombardi, who started the buddy program in Boston, describes the training as a kind of self-examination in which one asks questions such as, “Who am I right now at this point in my life?” “Why am I here, asking to be part of the buddy program?” “What do I need from this?” Being a buddy can be as simple as making weekly phone calls or visits or providing a ride to the doctor; it can mean grocery shopping, errand running, or light housecleaning. But it can also call forth deep emotion and involvement. Listen to Francis Giambrone speaking about a man to whom he was a buddy: “He would ask questions and he would force me to think about things I hadn’t thought about. He knew he was dying, he admitted it. When he was scared about it, he could talk about it. It was profound.… I knew I was crossing a line, and I knew I would pay for it … and I did. He took me to a lot of scary places … and he opened up my faith again.”
There are other ways as well to make a difference concerning AIDS. Organizations such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) provide opportunities for public action to dramatize the need for change; “die-ins” to publicize the lack of government spending on AIDS are one example. ACT NOW (AIDS Coalition to Network, Organize, and Win) and other organizations publish information and provide networking for individuals and groups working on different aspects of the problem. Such organizations often need volunteer help.
You can still stitch a memorial panel and make a donation to the NAMES Project, which is constructing the growing patchwork quilt that honors and celebrates and remembers many of those who have died from AIDS. In the arts, many extraordinary performances have evoked the emotions brought forth by the disease while sharing helpful information. Funds are always needed by existing AIDS groups, and you can raise them in an endless number of ways, which have already included elegant meals by local chefs, art auctions, theatrical performances, raffles, runs, and a concert by the Grateful Dead and Los Lobos. Try one of these fund-raisers, or allow something entirely new to come forth. Only you know what you can do best to help. As you go, you may be inspired by these words of Rainer Maria Rilke:
… that one can contain
death, the whole of death …
can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.
“The basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing that these are largely fabrications and that there is a genuine reality: the human dimension.” These are the words of the Christian mystic Thomas Merton; their spirit has influenced many American citizens, who believe that if we know one another better we are less likely to create war and suffering.
In 1987, for example, 120,000 Americans visited the USSR, many of them believing that genuine person-to-person contact would begin to heal divisions between the countries at a time when official diplomacy seemed hopelessly unproductive. Many high school classes traded students for a week or two, during which not a few seventeen-year-olds discovered cross-cultural romance. Groups of doctors studied one another’s techniques for surgery. Counselors of alcoholics came to the United States to study twelve-step programs, and rock musicians played in Moscow what the Soviet press called “proletarian rage against the excesses of the first world.” Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, teachers at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, taught insight meditation in Leningrad. And some people went on their own simply to meet the Soviets and help dissolve the preconceptions that all separated people hold, especially those who have been educated with myths of enemies as the “evil empire.” These were seeds planted that now—in a new era for the Soviets—can flower.
One North American traveler told of getting off a bus in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, on her way east. It was the first Eastern European country she had visited. Although at the time she considered herself politically a progressive, as the bus drove into the city in the late afternoon, the sky was gray, the shop windows were almost empty, and people walked through the streets in heavy, dark overcoats, hunched against the cold. The images were so true to what she had learned growing up in the cold war fifties that all the connotations of Communist she had been taught in her Catholic grammar school came flooding back. She remembered crouching under her desk to protect herself against an atomic bomb and praying for the poor lost souls, “Savior of the World, save Russia.” As she stepped off the bus and toward a stand selling hot cheese pastries, she saw a man walking toward her, a Communist, the Ultimate Other, the enemy. He looked directly at her, right into her American eyes, and said in heavily accented English, “I love you.” There was no more enemy.
When asked to work for nuclear disarmament, social activist Fran Peavey was confronted with this same sense of separation from others. “I thought, ‘How can I possibly work against nuclear weapons from an American bias when nuclear weapons is the whole world. I’ve only organized locally in San Francisco, and mostly I only love people in San Francisco and Idaho. I don’t love people in the rest of the world.’ I had never thought of myself as being very interested in travel—I thought people who traveled were unhappy. But now I had a reason to travel because I needed to have people in my heart whom I loved, in order to work against nuclear weapons. And so I got one of the scariest ideas I’d ever had. I sold my house and bought a smaller house and with some of that money I bought a round-the-world ticket, and I started off. I told everybody I was doing that, but I didn’t tell them what I really needed to do, because I didn’t know whether it was a good thing to do: I sat in parks in cities where I didn’t know anybody and I held a sign saying AMERICAN WILLING TO LISTEN. And I met people, and we talked together, and by the time I came home there were people I cared about in many places in the world and I could work against nuclear weapons. It’s not really enough to love people different from oneself; it’s important to work for our common interest. But I still didn’t know whether I had done a good thing—it seemed like such a strange thing to have to do—until I told other people and they all thought it had been a very good thing.”
If you are not drawn to travel alone to break down barriers, you can also be a citizen diplomat as part of a group, often combining some kind of service work with travel. During the eighties, many people traveled to Nicaragua to help with coffee harvests, give technical support for water and electricity projects, supply tools and spare parts unavailable during the U.S. embargo, teach in the countrywide literacy program, help build the public health system, and learn about the life of the Nicaraguan people. Although in many Third World situations the aim of awakened development projects is to empower local people and not to continue dependence on First World expatriates, there are certain circumstances in which hands-on help is appropriate: in these situations, the understanding, the long-term friendships, and the spirit of solidarity that result are often as important as the immediate aid. In the case of Nicaragua, the local people came to understand that all Americans did not support the official U.S. position against their country, and a network of support and care began to grow that led North Americans to question U.S. policies such as support for the Contras.
Churches, universities, unions, and community groups, as well as organizations developed specifically for solidarity with other regions, often offer opportunities for these people-to-people connections. Sister city or sister parish links are common these days; if one doesn’t exist in your community, it’s possible to start one. Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a sister city in El Salvador. Groups of citizens visit twice a year, taking with them some financial help raised through local telethons, dinners, and other functions, personalized gifts from children and others, and their care and support and encouragement for this group of people living through very difficult times. When their Salvadoran sister town was threatened by the military, the people of Cambridge initiated a successful rapid response campaign, in which residents called and wrote congresspeople in the United States and then President Cristiani in El Salvador to stop the harassment.
There are many issues to consider before setting off as a citizen diplomat—which kind of organization to connect with, the delicate balance between aid and development, the kind of aid that is appropriate, problems of visiting countries with repressive governments, the establishment of true dialogue, and so on. But if this way of working for peace through friendship draws you, there are people and resources that can help you ask the right questions. We have listed some of them in the directory at the end of this book.
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light,
and where there is sadness, joy.
May I never seek so much to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in pardoning that we are forgiven,
It is in giving that we receive,
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Everybody wants peace. General Norman Schwarzkopf kept the Prayer of St. Francis next to his pillow during the Gulf War, in which reports say that over 100,000 people died. Those who led us into that war, and those who supported it, often with great reluctance, all said they wanted peace but felt that war was their only alternative. Since that war, many of us who believe that the way to peace is not through violence are realizing that long-lasting peace will require not only last-minute demonstrations at air force bases, well-meaning as those may be, but, as Albert Einstein said, a whole new way of thinking, a whole new set of alternatives. For the future we need to find ways to avoid situations in which massive killing appears as the only choice. We need to recognize that war does not begin the moment it is “declared” but is the logical culmination of a set of values and understandings that lead us, inexorably, toward only certain possible responses to a challenge.
If we are to have peaceful coexistence on the planet, we need to reeducate ourselves and share that understanding with others. We need to think about what it means to be part of a common humanity, in which none of us wants to lose our daughters, sons, mothers, or fathers to war or our children to hunger. Then, recognizing that conflict arises even in the most loving families, we need to learn new ways of resolving it: ways that are respectful of and satisfying to everyone involved, that open the path for growth in the future, that respect healthy balances of local self-reliance and international interdependence. As Alexander Pope said over two hundred years ago, “Conflict should always be managed as to remember that the only true end of it is peace.”
This is not a simple task. Meg Gage, executive director of the Peace Development Fund, says, “War doesn’t come just because we have weapons; it’s a whole chain of attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors that leads us there. And all the work to change these is important. It’s not enough to think that if I lead a kind, friendly, and peaceful life, and become a vegetarian, that the world will be peaceful. That’s not enough. And getting rid of weapons isn’t enough. We got rid of the B-1 bomber, and we got the B-2. The challenge is to do all these things at once: work for the elimination of weapons, talk about foreign policy, look at how we see other people in the world as our minions, look at racism and violence in our own lives and in our society, learn and teach nonviolent conflict resolution. There are many parts to this, and whichever one we choose, it helps all the others. We have to get over feeling ridiculous, impotent, about working for peace. It’s true that there is power in the individual humble act. Most of the world is walking down the road in the wrong direction; individual acts won’t stop that, but they can help to slow it down. As Gandhi said, ‘Your act may be very small, it may seem insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it.’ We can each start walking in the other direction.”
How can you start working for peace? You can work in the schools; every community has them. Set up a conflict resolution program, or support the one that already exists. There are models, materials, and people to help you do this. The National Association for Mediation in Education (NAME) has a directory of all the conflict resolution programs in the country and can help you get started.
You can work for change through your congresspeople. Build a group to affect their thinking and leadership as well as their votes. 20/20 Vision is a nationwide network to help people do just that. Each month, project leaders select an action that local citizens can do in twenty minutes; as one of the 20/20 brochures says, it’s a program that allows you to defuse nuclear bombs on your coffee break. Each month members receive a card with brief background information and a suggested twenty-minute action, such as calling a congressperson to ask her or him to be present for certain votes and to vote for certain amendments.
You can create study circles or “salons.” Many of us aren’t involved in particular issues not because we don’t care but because we can’t figure them out. Meeting in groups to find out more about any issue, from politics in the Middle East to the curriculum in your local school, can be informative and build community. Often action for change emerges spontaneously when people begin to feel they know the basics. The Movement for a New Society supplies information and models for taking a group from small to large circles of thought and ending with an action.
You can focus on the military presence in your own community. Find out whether weapons or parts of weapons are manufactured there, and, with enough citizens to form a critical mass, encourage those companies to build something other than a bomb in your backyard. Find out what research is being conducted at nearby universities; let them know that you don’t want those microbes escaping from their lab. Do an environmental impact study and publicize the danger of toxic waste from weapons. Find out what is being transported through your community or dumped there, and publicize it. Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety in New Mexico, when they learned that the federal government planned to make New Mexico the first underground repository for nuclear wastes generated by the weapons industry, published Radiation Rag: “All the news that’s hot to trot, brought to you for 240,000 years.”
Boycott weapons manufacturers. You probably weren’t going to buy weapons anyway, but many of these companies, such as General Electric, manufacture domestic products as well. Shopping for a Better World and Rating America’s Corporate Conscience are two guides that will help you find out who makes what. INFACT reports that their three-year-old boycott against GE decreased revenues from individual consumers by at least $55 million, increased advertising costs, and made it harder to recruit employees. Intensive efforts of activists in Nevada, northern California, and Hawaii convinced Safeway to provide alternatives to GE light bulbs in 300 of their stores nationwide. If you want to know about existing boycotts, subscribe to Boycott Action News, published by Co-op America.
Finally, our lives can be statements of peace. We can learn to live more lovingly, to resolve conflicts without aggression. We can look at racism in our lives and find ways to end it. We can reduce our consumption of mass consumer items that foster dependence on Third World resources. “No blood for oil” would be a stronger argument if we were using less oil. We can recycle, drive less, eat locally produced organic food, plant trees, and begin to live in a way that respects the needs of others. These can be the first steps of many toward peace.