Watch in 1990, an organization that seeks to close down SOA (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). Every November, thousands of protesters gather at the gates of Fort Benning to remember all those slain by its graduates. They call out the names of victims, and the assembly shouts “Presente!” Hundreds of peace workers, including Bourgois and dozens of priests and nuns, have been arrested in these nonviolent demonstrations. When challenged on his activism, Bourgeois responds, “When a law of my country contradicts the law of God, then I have no choice but to disobey the law of my country. Some call it civil disobedience; I call it divine obedience.”
In a further act of divine obedience, Bourgeois recently challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to ordain women. In 2010, he was excommunicated for participating in a women’s ordination ceremony.
28 January
Isaac of Nineveh
ca. 700
Radical Forgiveness
Recognized by the Orthodox Church as a saint whose feast day is 28 January, little is known about Isaac’s life. His first biography, written in the eighteenth century by an anonymous Arab author, is more hagiography than history. But a few facts seem more or less trustworthy.
Isaac was probably born near present-day Qatar sometime in the eighth century. He appears to have entered a monastery at an early age, accompanied by a brother. His devotion to study and spiritual discipline quickly earned him a reputation as a holy man and teacher, and his brethren soon wanted to elect him abbot. But preferring a solitary life of prayer and meditation, Isaac fled the monastery despite the pleas of his brother and fellow monks and settled in a hermitage near Nineveh. Here too his reputation for sanctity brought him unwanted attention. Soon, against his will, the city elected him bishop.
He lasted five months, increasingly frustrated by his flock’s worldly greediness. The final straw was a financial dispute he was called to resolve. When Isaac appealed to the gospel to suggest that the debtor be given more time to repay his loan, the indignant lender snapped, “Leave your Gospel out of this!” Astounded and saddened, Isaac replied, “If you will not submit to our Lord’s commandments in the Gospel, what remains for me to do here?” Shortly afterwards, he retreated to a monastery in the mountains where he remained until his death.
The advice Isaac offered the intractable creditor is significant because it attests to his strong conviction that forgiveness is one of God’s primary attributes as well as a fundamental human virtue. He was confident that divine love is too strong to allow anyone to be exiled from God forever. Even demons, he insisted, “will not remain in their demonic state.” God will await their conversion and welcome it when it comes. This doctrine of universal salvation or reconciliation with God preached by Isaac was also seen by him as a model for proper human relationships. Radical forgiveness, which requires patience and courage, is the key not only to social harmony but also to individual happiness and rectitude.
For Isaac, the key to cultivating the virtue of forgiveness is simplicity, or what he called “voluntary poverty.” His unhappy experience shepherding a city abuzz with greed and ambition could only have strengthened his Christian belief that lust for possessions encourages an adversarial spirit in which others are seen as threatening competitors or as apples ripe for the plucking. But the interior disquiet and external violence bred by this attitude can be avoided by the cultivation of simple desires. “Nothing gives peace to the mind as much as voluntary poverty,” observed Isaac. “Fire does not blaze among fresh wood, and enthusiasm for God does not break forth into flames in a heart that loves comfort.”
29 January
Romain Rolland
29 January 1866—30 December 1944
Betrayal, Imperialism, War
When war erupted in Europe in 1914, it was greeted with jingoistic enthusiasm by the populaces of all the belligerent nations. Even more remarkable was the equally enthusiastic response of most of the Christian leaders in Germany, France, England, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Each of them all but declared the conflict a holy war. Each of them piously assured their fellow countrymen that God was on their side and encouraged young men to enlist for God and country.
A few people refused to jump on the martial bandwagon, even though they were vilified—at least in the early years of the war, before its futility and waste of human life sunk in—by virtually everyone else. One of them was the French novelist Romain Rolland, Europe’s leading man of letters. Rolland, an ardent pacifist for most of his life, had already condemned warfare in his epic novel Jean-Christophe. But after actual war broke out, Rolland’s pacifism became unfashionable—and, according to many of his countrymen, even treasonous.
But Rolland was undeterred. In 1915 he published Above the Battle, a collection of essays in which he castigated the war as well as its supporters. The book infuriated nearly everyone who read it, not only because of its condemnation of the war but perhaps even more because it accused Christians of hypocrisy and governments of dissimulation.
To Christians who backed the war by saying that it “exalts the virtue of sacrifice,” Rolland responded by saying that they “seek consolation for having betrayed their Master’s orders.” Is there no better way to encourage “the devotion of one people than the devastation of another?” he asked. To national leaders who insisted that the war was a necessary defense against external enemies, Rolland answered: “The worst enemy of each nation is not without, but within its frontiers, and none has the courage to fight against it. It is the monster of a hundred heads, the monster named Imperialism, the will to pride and domination, which seeks to absorb all, or subdue all, or break all, and will suffer no greatness except itself.”
As Rolland saw it, religious hypocrisy and governmental dishonesty are each, separately, bad enough. But when they become allies they invent noble-sounding reasons for going to war that persuade a gullible public to take actions counter to its own good. The church and state alliance rarely suffers from its encouragement of warfare; the ordinary man who enlists to fight and the ordinary wife and children he leaves behind do.
In Above the Battle, Rolland called for the formation of an international tribunal that would hold the religious and secular authorities who pushed Europe into war responsible for their deed and would seek nonviolent resolutions of future international conflicts. Such a body was founded in 1919 as the League of Nations.
30 January
Vallalar
5 October 1823—30 January 1874
Breaking through Caste
For centuries, the caste system in India rigidly segregated unevenly privileged groups of people. Supposedly established by the god Krishna, the system imposed a kind of apartheid that divided people into various hereditary castes that defined their positions in society, whom they could marry, and what sorts of occupations they could pursue. The castes ranged from an elite aristocracy to a large group of “untouchables,” members of the lowest caste considered so unworthy that mere physical contact with them required ritualistic cleansing.
The nineteenth-century Tamil saint who came to be known as Vallalar, or “Great Giver,” waged a campaign against the caste system that earned him the love of generations of untouchables. Born Ramalinga Swamigal and orphaned while still a child, Vallalar was given into the care of his elder brother, a respected scholar. His learning soon surpassed his brother’s.
In a series of mystical encounters with Lord Muruga, a popular native
