and protect them from slave catchers; and campaigned strenuously against plans to exile free slaves to Liberia. In everything he did to help his people, his guiding principle was that nonviolently speaking truth to power was the key to resisting oppression.
Jones was well named: Absalom means “Father of Peace.”
25 January
Rufus Jones
25 January 1863—16 June 1948
Building the Beloved Community
The American Quaker Rufus Jones not only wrote important scholarly as well as popular books about mysticism. He was a mystic himself. His life was punctuated by three experiences that he believed were dramatically immediate contacts with the divine. But in addition to traditional mystical experiences, he was convinced that traces of God could be discerned in the everyday lived world and by looking within to discover the “inner light” so valued by the Friends. There was, he believed, only the thinnest of membranes between us and the Divine. “There is a Beyond, a More yet, within us, and it appears to be akin to us.”
What this meant for Jones is that all of reality is a “spiritual Society—a blessed community—which includes God and the cooperative souls, who with Him form the growing Kingdom.” Jones was especially attuned to seeing every human he encountered—including some particularly nasty ones he encountered in Nazi Germany when he went there on a mission, while in his seventies, to rescue Jews—as members of this blessed community, bound to them through the “More yet” within.
For the first half of his adult life, Jones was a prolific writer, journalist, editor, lecturer, and professor. He continued most of these activities in the second half of life—he was a man of unbounded energy—but in 1917, with the founding of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a relief organization that embodied Quakerism’s gospel-based advocacy of nonviolence, Jones the mystic became an activist as well. Between the wars he worked with the AFSC to bring economic and humanitarian relief to war-torn Europe. He traveled to Asia, met Gandhi during a visit to India—the two men were equally impressed with one another—and traveled the United States as head of the AFSC to drum up support for its mission. A year before his death, the AFSC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Jones’s wise steerage of the organization for thirty years was largely responsible for the honor.
Jones once wrote, “I assume that the major business we are here for in this world is to be a rightly fashioned person as an organ of the divine purpose.” Being rightly fashioned for Jones meant cultivating the mystic’s biblical faith, personal conversion, and inner yearning for God while at the same time working in the world for imaginative social transformation that lessens poverty, injustice, and warfare. Doing so honors the More yet within and our fellow humans without. It builds the beloved community.
26 January
Thomas Gumbleton
26 January 1930—
Peace Prelate
In late March 2003, a Roman Catholic prelate was led away in plastic handcuffs by Washington DC police. Along with other religious leaders and two Nobel Peace Prize recipients, he had been protesting the Iraq War in front of the White House. His arrest shocked many Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic, both those who opposed and those who supported the war. But for Thomas Gumbleton, Auxiliary Bishop of Michigan, it was nothing new. He’d been arrested once before, in 1999, also for peace witnessing at the White House.
The official Roman Catholic position on warfare—a position shared by all Christian denominations except a handful of historic peace churches—is that all wars are regrettable but some are morally justifiable if entered into for the right reasons and fought in the right way. But Gumbleton, a longtime pacifist who champions “peacemaking as a way of life,” rejects this position despite being a member of the ecclesial hierarchy. He is one of the few prelates of the Church willing to take a public anti-war stance, much less to be arrested for his convictions.
Gumbleton was consecrated bishop in 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War, and he immediately took advantage of his new position to urge American withdrawal from a conflict that eventually killed fifty thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. At the time, he was the only Catholic bishop who publicly opposed the war.
Also while serving as bishop, Gumbleton became one of the founders of the American branch of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace organization, as well as Bread for the World, an organization that addresses the problem of world hunger. As president of both organizations, he frequently traveled around the world to meet with victims of war and economic injustice. He has consistently spoken out for the protection of human rights and in support of international disarmament, particularly of nuclear weapons. One of his continuous messages is that Christians are confronted with a fundamental choice between what he calls “pax Americana” and pax Christi. The first entails “bombing, killing, wherever we decide.” The second means heeding the life and message of Jesus as revealed in the gospels: “you listen to what Jesus says, you watch how He acts; you follow His life. If Jesus didn’t reject violence . . . you may as well say you know nothing about Jesus of Nazareth. He rejected violence for any reason, any reason whatsoever.”
Gumbleton’s vocal defense of pacifism has made him a persistent thorn in the Vatican’s side, as have his recent public declarations in defense of gay rights. But even in retirement, he continues to encourage people toward “the very profound conversion of mind and heart” to nonviolence.
27 January
Roy Bourgeois
27 January 1938—
Divine Obedience
Louisiana native Roy Bourgeois thought his education was over when he graduated from college. But the next four years as a naval officer, including ground combat in Vietnam that earned him a Purple Heart, taught him a new way of looking at the world. “I left Vietnam wanting to give peacemaking a chance,” he recalls. So he joined the Roman Catholic Maryknoll order, was ordained in 1972, and was sent to Bolivia, where he lived for the next five years. It was in Latin America that he learned yet another lesson: the connection between militarism, violence, and the poor. He discovered that ministering to the oppressed was only half of his calling as a Christian. The other half was resisting the causes of oppression, which in Latin America’s case too often were traceable to U.S.-backed military strongmen who ransacked economies and brutalized citizens.
Eventually Bolivian authorities, angered at Bourgeois’ public calls for justice, sent him packing back to the United States. In 1980, shortly after his return, three nuns and a lay missionary were raped and murdered by El Salvadoran soldiers of the U.S.-supported military junta there. Two of the nuns were Bourgeois’ friends. Their murders, as well as the slaying of Archbishop Óscar Romero and hundreds of others in El Salvador, prompted Bourgeois to take his activism against U.S. foreign policy in Latin America to the national level.
Bourgeois discovered that many members of the officers corps from repressive Latin American countries were trained at the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S.-funded military training facility housed in Fort Benning, Georgia. Bourgeois also learned that SOA students were actually being trained in interrogation techniques and “counterterrorism” tactics. A frightening number of the school’s graduates were implicated in the kidnapping, torture, murder, or disappearance of dissidents in their native countries. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the El Salvadoran murderers of the four women were SOA alums.
Determined to do something to stop U.S. complicity
