effectiveness of a peacemaker is determined by how many repressive regimes he angers, Ham Sok-Hon has excellent credentials. Over his long career as an advocate of nonviolence, he was persecuted by the Japanese, the Soviet Russians, and finally by his fellow Koreans.
Born the son of a well-off physician in North Korea, Ham was expelled from one of the country’s best schools in 1916 for protesting Japan’s colonial rule of his homeland. Although a public apology could have gotten him reinstated, Ham refused. He eventually earned a degree in history, however, and taught for a number of years. But his nonviolent resistance to Japanese imperialism never wavered, earning him imprisonment four times in the years leading up to World War II. When the Soviets occupied Korea after the war, Ham also refused to cooperate with them. After he rejected the offer of a professorship at Kim Il-sung University because he realized it was simply a bid for his cooperation, he was arrested, beaten, and nearly executed before managing to escape to South Korea. During the Korean War three years later, he met members of the American Friends Service Committee and became a Quaker. Ham was attracted to the religion because of its pacifism and its lack of exclusionary doctrines. For Ham, there were many different paths to God, and he saw Quakerism, which he thought especially compatible with Buddhism and Taoism, as sharing that conviction.
In South Korea, Ham continued his public witness for peace and democracy, frequently opposing the repressive regimes of South Korean presidents Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan. He was jailed or placed under house arrest many times in retaliation for his criticisms of them.
Ham’s social activism was based on fidelity to what he called the two “roads”: the road to freedom and the road to love. By the first, he meant a political and economic democracy that protects human rights and allows individuals to flourish. By the second, he meant a religious perspective that embraces human suffering and seeks to ameliorate it.
Like Mohandas Gandhi, to whom he was often compared, Ham believed that sometimes the roads to freedom and love are so blocked by evil that force may ultimately be necessary to clear them. But he always considered it a last rather than a first resort. “We should keep to the principle of nonviolence,” he said, “but not leave the people who are struggling. We should try to keep with them and to educate them. In the struggle there are several degrees or states—the best one, the second best one, the third best one. If you feel that it is impossible to follow the best one you should choose the second best or the third one. Just to keep silent and remain unmoved is much worse than to choose the second or even third state. Still, we must always urge the people to use the best method.”
14 March
Walter Brueggemann
1933—
Shalom
Walter Brueggemann is the most insightful Old Testament scholar the United States has produced. Many of his sixty-odd books are required reading in seminaries and religious studies programs across the nation. One of them, The Prophetic Imagination (1978), has become a classic.
But Brueggemann isn’t only a scholar. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, he’s also an astute Christian commentator on current social and political issues who frequently draws parallels between them and lessons from the Old Testament prophets. One of his most valuable contributions has been to remind Christians and others of the deep meaning of the ancient Hebrew word shalom, or “peace.”
In the minds of many today, peace is just an interval between war. But Brueggemann points out that the Old Testament notion of shalom is much richer. It is the “persistent vision of joy, well-being, harmony, and prosperity” often expressed in words such as “love, loyalty, truth, grace, salvation, justice, blessing, and righteousness.” Shalom is a recovery of creation’s wholeness fragmented by violence and cruelty between humans. It is, says Brueggemann, “a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery.”
What Brueggemann’s analysis suggests is that even though shalom is the natural order of things, its recovery depends in part upon the willingness of humans to practice lifestyles that express it in concrete terms. Shalom, he says, is an “incarnational” word. The only shalom we can imagine is one that responds to specific historical realities. To think of it in abstract terms is to fail to take it as a real possibility. But this doesn’t mean that shalom is exclusively situational, much less relative.
Consider the Babylonian captivity, for example, that historical period when, after Babylon conquered the Kingdom of Judah, two generations of Jews endured bitter exile “by the waters of Babylon.” During this period, the prophet Jeremiah recommended a shalom to the captives that spoke specifically to their predicament but that also pointed beyond it to a more general understanding of peace. He advised them to seek the shalom of the city—Babylon—in which they dwelt, for in its shalom they would find their own (Jer 29:7). When it came to the particular historical period in question, Jeremiah’s point was that the Jews could create peace by forgiving and reconciling themselves to their captors. The broader lesson we can take from Jeremiah’s advice is that the willingness to seek reconciliation whenever one has been violated is a necessary condition for shalom. But the specific contours of the reconciliation are fashioned case by case.
In Brueggemann’s hands, the Old Testament notion of shalom becomes an active striving towards community and well-being, which in turn sets the stage for the later Christian understanding of the kingdom of God. In either case, peace, the “dream of God,” is the fulfillment for which all creation yearns. It is our ultimate hope.
15 March
SuAnne Big Crow
15 March 1975—9 February 1992
Happytown
The 3,500-square-mile Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota is the largest and poorest Indian reservation in the United States. Half of its nearly thirty thousand residents live below the national poverty level, with unemployment at around 85 percent. Scores of homes are without electricity and plumbing. The life expectancy, forty-seven years for men and fifty-two for women, is the shortest in the entire Western Hemisphere. As if the living conditions aren’t bad enough, the Sioux who live at Pine Ridge regularly endure local racism and federal indifference. Tussles between whites and Indians aren’t uncommon.
But in 1987, a thirteen-year-old girl named SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated another way of dealing with the hostility directed at her and her people. She did it at a high school basketball game between the girls of Pine Ridge and Leads, a mostly white town about one hundred miles north of the reservation.
The Pine Ridge team traveled to Leads for the game. Although memories of what happened are mixed, the standard version is that fans on the Leads side of the gym began hurling racial epithets the moment the Pine Ridge team walked onto the court. Some hollered “Squaw!” and “Gut-eater!” and the Leads school band started thumping out a fake Indian drumbeat.
Then the unexpected happened, one of those breaks with convention that can defuse violent situations. SuAnne, a member of the Pine Ridge team, took off her warm-up jacket, draped it over her shoulders, and began a Sioux shawl dance while chanting a traditional song. The gym went silent. When she finished the dance, SuAnne grabbed a ball, dribbled to a hoop, and shot a basket. The gym roared with approval.
Even though parts of the story may be mythic, the whole perfectly fits SuAnne Big Crow’s character. As a teenager, she toured the reservation and then the country encouraging Native Americans to avoid the use of drugs and alcohol. She was an outspoken critic of bigotry but always sought to reconcile with racists rather than condemn them. She dreamt of a youth center at Pine Ridge, a place she called “Happytown,” where Sioux
