Nonviolent rage still beats bloody murder - Column

National Catholic Reporter, August 29, 1997 by Carl Kabat

"Do not go gently into that good night/rage, rage against the dying of the light," wrote Dylan Thomas.

There is rage and rage. What kind is the poet commending.?

Violent, destructive rage is useless. I think rather of the rage of bold saints, of those who channel their righteous anger into beneficial action. This was the rage of Jesus and his disciples.

Naming those in authority "whited sepulchers" must have issued from nonviolent, controlled rage. And what else could have induced Archbishop Oscar Romero to defy the military: "As your bishop, I command you to stop killing your brothers and sisters."

Yet there is no public rage and very little private against weapons of mass destruction or those who research and manufacture them and in the process enrich themselves wonderfully. No rage against an economic system that every day condemns 40,000 to death from malnutrition and hunger. No rage against the spoilation of Mother Earth, her water, air and soil being rendered unfit for the living.

Violent rage is easily quelled by the principalities who have at hand a greater violence and an itch to put it to use. Still, the nonviolent rage of Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks and all those who confronted hoses, dogs and sheriffs in the civil rights era became a true adventure in living.

Rollo May has written of the modern tendency to substitute words for passion and action. Yet in the face of certain ugly realities of life, we need more than words; we need nonviolent passion against the violence of nuclearism, racism, sexism, starvation, misery and ecological destruction. There kill more than their victims; they are suicidal of body, spirit and emotion.

Most of us today are catatonic, helpless, mortified at our own powerlessness, reduced to being spectators at a bad game.

What then of rage? Like love, it is a force. As long as it remains controlled and nonviolent, it fuels the soul for the sake of the work we are called to do in the world.

The past cannot be changed, but the present and future are in our hands. In a small way -- and a minority voice we are bound to be -- history is ours to make, the adventure ours to live with passion and zest.

What we can do is so little it seems futile, a zero. Still, the little adds up, like the days and years of a prisoner, a Vaclav Havel, a Nelson Mandela, so many of the nameless heroes of our time -- their days carefully recorded in the calendar of Christ.

In recent days, news of two tragedies reached my cell. A cousin my own age shot himself. And a schoolmate, slightly older than myself, overdosed and died.

Each of these seemed to find life no longer worth living. No adventure, only a vast boredom, life like a locked room, no windows, no air, no exit.

In three Plowshares actions at nuclear installations, I've had an M-1 aimed at my head. As my brother Paul would say, "Well, I'm still around!"

We the people, adventurers all, must not give up.

I conclude with two events, small breaks in the iron regimen of prison. Each was like a thin ray of sunlight struggling through a crack in the door, thrice locked and bolted, of this federal penitentiary.

In the Springfield, Mo., prison, where I formerly dwelt (surely one of the most hideous lockups in the world), a mourning dove made a nest outside the barred window of my cell. Day after day its cooing made a counterpoint to the sorrows and defeats of the prisoners, so often voiceless and numb.

Then someone destroyed the nest.

And this, too, the ensuing silence, had its own meaning.

Then one morning shortly after I arrived in my "habitat for inhumanity" in Colorado, a furry, gentle rabbit, sprung from God knows what cave in creation, hip-hopped into our chapel. It stood there awhile taking it all in, then disappeared.

O freedom! To come and go at sweet will, just like Alice's guide, I thought with a grin. I thought, too: Here we were in God's house and in came this tiny portent, uninvited, ever undeserved. A grace of sorts, a sweetness in our eyes, so deprived of what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called "wet and wilderness."

And I prayed: Would that all living beings might dwell in God's larger dwelling, creation, at long last peaceable and reconciled.

Maybe that's why I'm here, on ice, now and again "raging against the dying of the light." For the most part, though, I am at peace with the rhyme and reasonableness of what I did two years ago on Good Friday in North Dakota.

"Swords into plowshares" is the cry of Isaiah. May the outcry never be stifled until all God's creatures, even the last and the least -- the gentle dove and the rabbit -- stand free of the nuclear blade.