We live in a violent world. That’s hardly a secret. We have been formed by a culture of war and violence, the nature of which we are mostly unconscious of, and from which we wilfully keep ourselves hidden. Violence is so embedded that it’s impossible to imagine a world without it. That we live in an incarnate world sustained by intrusions of grace, well, that’s a little less obvious—almost imperceptible.

Two days ago our country intentionally remembered war. “Lest We Forget" was on billboards and on the front of buses. We remembered, so to honour the war dead, and we remembered so that we can in some way dispel war, so that at least violence of the scale once experienced, can be named and thwarted. And we hope that in the naming, in the remembering, something like grace and peace may appear.

Of course war cannot create peace and violence is never the cause of grace; but it can, in its gross distortions of social solidarity and communal life, reflect back to us our own propensity toward envy and rivalry, and in this uncovering, perhaps give us the unwelcome gift of seeing ourselves as we truly are—which if it happens is an occasion of mercy.

A personal and writerly goal I repeatedly come short of, which is never less a goal, is to stay awake to those intrusions of grace and occasions of mercy. And such was this past Friday where 30 or so people took the afternoon to study peace, and then took the evening to walk and pray, from City Hall to Canada Place, from the Gandhi Memorial to the War Memorial.

And we sang that old promise: to study war no more. But with the understanding that if we are blind to the nature of violence, and if we miss the intrusions of grace, then war, rivalry, ongoing reciprocal violence will remain our reality.

Once in our history the nature of violence was laid bare through a definitive intrusion of grace. And no one wanted to see. Once, the truth about human and social identity was spoken, and no one wanted to hear. Two thousand years later, through two global wars, the invention of a nuclear end, many genocides, and an imminent ecological disaster, and still we refuse to see and hear.

To take a day to remember and honour those who died fighting for our country is good. But it’s not, and never was, good enough. For if we stop short of trying to authentically identify with not merely our own, but all victims of war, and all the fallen, then we have already forgotten. Because failing to see ourselves as original combatants, failing to understand the (Good Samaritan) point about who our neighbour is simply leaves all the old mechanisms of sacrificial violence in place.

In effect, continuing to believe that war is occasionally necessary and normal, and that violence is in some way part grace, smothers every intrusion of grace; and it is this that even now is ushering in our apocalyptic era. That we Christians, above all, have failed to see and hear the living words of the one we purport to follow, and have even used the texts as justification for war and sacrificial violence—unconsciously giving the nod to Caiaphas over Christ—is perhaps our greatest shame.

Yet, despite our failure there are still intrusions of mercy. And if time is no longer one of them, perhaps violence’s own undoing is. For we are, as no other age has been, witnesses of violence’s growing excesses; and in this, we see its utter ineffectiveness to create or change anything—except, as Rene Girard says, to escalate to extremes. The choice is now plain. To not choose complete repudiation of violence is to choose annihilation. Seeing the truth behind the false reality of violence to the extent that these two alternatives are now clear, is not a prelude to despair, but of hope—a luminous intrusion.

This is in no way a protest or replacement for traditional Remembrance Day observation, it’s simply a way of remembering all victims of war, and honouring and remembering the way of peace.

Here is an Edmonton Journal interview with Scott Key, organizer of the Prayer Walk and Chair of  Edmonton Ecumenical Peace Network.

Nov. 11 Timetable

- 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. All Saint’s Anglican Cathedral (10035 103rd St.): War and Peace, a workshop exploring different ways Christians have interpreted the teachings of Jesus, led by Rev. Tim Chesterton, rector of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church.

- 6 p.m. McDougall United Church (10025 101st St.): Inter-denominational prayer service.

- 7 p.m. City Hall: Public prayer walk for peace begins, with stops at the Gandhi statue, Canada Place and the Jasper Avenue war memorial.

I wanted to expose what I saw as our eroticism of revenge. But then I wondered whether the death of Bin Laden might help heal deep wounds experienced by the families who lost so much.

As many have done, I’ve imagined myself a father, husband, friend, of someone murdered on that horrific day a decade ago. And I am at loss.

By accounts, some are finding a sense of what they call closure, and others consider Bin Laden’s killing a hollow thing, a pyrrhic closure.

And so anything I say from here on must come under the judgement of people who were closest to the tragedy. As it is, I am neither counsellor nor sociologist, I am an expert of nothing much—simply an observer.

What struck me then was not the legitimate desire of justice for the aggrieved, but the fascination that polarized a nation; the great western gallery was suddenly galvanized by the death of one man. There was a surge of nationalism; an instant brotherhood through focused hatred; unification by hostility; coalesced by being on the good, right side.

Then came the voices of past administrations: justice is done, we will be avenged, time is no object. (No mention here that our war on terror has cut down civilian families far surpassing the number of those on 9/11.) Now we are freer and safer and stronger—say the voices—our lives have been returned to us.

There was dancing and chanting in the streets, at state capitals; and at the hallowed centres of Capitol Hill and Ground Zero there was near delirium—all ritual aspects of the sacred mechanism of security and supposed peace through singular reprisal—with the latent lust for ready violence heavy in the air.

It can’t be sustained of course. Now a couple weeks later there are reasoned discussions on the symbolic versus the real. Bin Laden: cipher or malevolent genius. His death: harbinger for peace talks or ersatz victory or catalyst for terror?

But it’s not the event itself—it’s our response to the event that we should consider. And the question we should face is whether we have the self-awareness to see that irrational fanaticisms are not one-sided.

Christianism—that strange brew of nationalism and fundamentalism and resent-driven neoconservatism—and Islamism are twins. They are locked together in an escalation of extremes.

Here, biblical apocalyptic literature begins to make sense. Not as the view of God’s end-time wrath dropped on the heads of the unregenerate, but in the anthropological understanding that our own wrath is visited and revisited upon ourselves by unrestrained reciprocal rivalry.

When scapegoats are fed to the fire like sticks—their power to restrain violence ever decreasing—when the pockets and periods without violence steadily shrink, when military technology has become master, and is its own raison d’etre, when government policies feed the machinery of war, and when governments themselves have lost the means to control violence, total war becomes a daily possibility.

Add to this our acceptance of violence as legitimate for sustaining communal life, our complicit silence that feeds the notion that war is normative—that war is simply a prolongation of policy—and talk of peace is thought to be incomprehensible, passé, or a romantic delusion.  And the apocalyptic spectre grows.

Yet even here, hope is not incompatible. We can recover our souls and our sanity. The way of empathy, kindness, and mercy, born out by leaving violence behind, is the narrow way opened to us and modelled in the life of Jesus.

Salvation is given meaning in the denouncement of violence. And not only in obvious violence, but in the low-key violence of commerce, and in our own grasping skirmishes and daily retaliations.

In detachment, in unlearning envy, in relearning desire through eyes unmoved by fear and death, eyes that delight in us, that gently hold us, that invite us out of “us and them”, to “we”, there is hope and peace.

Last night, on Edmonton’s inaugural Prayer Walk for Peace we wore white doves and we remembered.

I went because on Remembrance Day I wanted to remember our soldiers, but I wanted to remember soldiers on both sides of war. I wanted to remember all victims of war and violence.

We were over a hundred strong. Mennonites, Quakers, other Christians for active nonviolence, brought together, not to demonstrate or to protest Remembrance Day, but to open it up to broader possibilities.

To not only remember, but to light up the message that there is no glory in war, that there is no peace as a result of war, that there are no just wars, no reasonable wars, that to remember only our side, only our own soldiers, is often used as justification for more war.

And so we stood and lit candles on the steps of city hall, considered a world beyond violence at the Gandhi statue by the Library, prayed for our policy makers at Canada Place and sang Francis of Assisi’s hymn–considering our own inner peace–at the war memorial on Jasper Avenue.

See you there next year.

Programs, projects, missions–political or religious–that emphasize group identity or national security, that are premised upon technique and efficiency, diminish our possibilities by fencing ourselves off from reality. And so we turn neighbours into antagonists, see enemies as inhuman, and secure our comfort at the inevitable expense of the poor.

We need people of action–not people of activity. But being a person of action and not merely activity, is always risking being misunderstood, ignored, judged, derided, disliked, or vilified. But an even greater struggle for the true activist is in facing her own self doubts, illusions, disillusions, and self-intoxication. Courage to sit with these, to explore what they might teach, is the necessary work of an activist. The true activist does not lose herself in that embrace, she only learns the truth about herself and is therefore capable of true engagement with the world.

Who has a wide vision? Who acts for human maturity? Who continues to act in the apparent absence of promise? Who acts with faith that our broken acts of compassion are yet redeemable by a larger spirit? Who understands that there is something greater at work, but that this larger spirit is only released through local acts of mercy and charity?

As Christians, our job is to disappear in the world and join the ranks of all those doing the work of personal disarmament, of creative protest, of active peace, of love. That is, as Christians, our job may very well be to become non-Christian.

Use your voice to help press the U.S and U.K to take action. The U.K. and U.S. have an unparalleled opportunity to take action, since they serve as President of the U.N. Security Council in August and September respectively.

In the mean time opposition leader Suu Kyi, detained for more than 14 of the past 20 years, has been sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest (August 11) after being found guilty of breaking the terms of her detention by sheltering the American “intruder,” John Yettaw.

Aung San Suu Kyi has asked us to “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

I’m a haggard Christian, my belief has been torn, and stitched together, only to be torn once more, it’s a bedraggled thing. And every time I come across an honest quester, I again prepare to look for needle and thread.

I suppose what keeps my faith looped together, to the best of my lights, is not so much theology, sermons, prayer, fasting, meditation, but human exchanges–heart swaps if you like. Sitting across a table from someone so obviously at peace with herself and truly caring about those around her, while at the same time, angry at injustice, is, well, a kind of existential verification of faith that gets me all desirous about being like that.

And this has lead me to an anthropological Christianity, which I’ve been told isn’t real Christianity at all. I’m okay with that. But in fact there is a organic connection between anthropology and theology.

Remembering that all myths have their roots in an actual event or series of events, I see the gospel story as a very bad myth in the sense that it undermines the way myth is supposed to work. Myth that "works" is told from the point of view of the perpetrator at the expense of the victim. Myth clears the oppressor of all charges and hides the truth of the victim by either making her a god, or by dehumanizing her.

I see the Bible as a collection of "mythical" stories with this supra myth-destructive arch that eventually culminates in Jesus, who exposes our violence and our cover-ups by not resisting our lust for sacrificial violence. And the resurrection, if you’re inclined, is like having someone you’ve malevolently excluded, so you could be part of the in-group, seeing you on the street and approaching you without any resentment at all, and hoping you just might want to hang out. The whole Jesus drama was an act of "active nonviolence" understood clearly enough, and reenacted, by the likes of Bacha Khan, Gandhi, and King but not so much the majority of Christendom.

About the Bible: Is it inspired? Yes, like a combination of Emily Dickenson and Sylvia Plath and Dostoevsky. Is it Divine? Well not in any objective Dr. Charles Stanley-esque way. (The brother can take it.) But like others, I’ve had some bubbling up moments that have lead me behind the text to a heart. But I’ve also had that with Ann Sexton poetry, and a few Leonard Cohen tunes. Is it infallible? (Almost a silly question.) Suppose it was. What makes us think we could infallibly grasp it? No, we are all on a boat and all we have is a sea-anchor. The fundamentalist delusion is that we have an anchor that goes all the way down. The relativist delusion is that we don’t have an anchor at all, that nothing attaches itself to the text, or that any meaning at all attaches itself to the text.

Whatever our position, we are incurable meaning makers. For me, I’ve found some dawn-light in extricating myself from the sacrificial God, the wrathful mythical god who clears out this special place that people can get into as long as they agree to cover themselves by the blood sacrifice.

If we can manage to reread the gospel and leave off our inherited substitutionary theory, the reverse is revealed. That is, our crap is exposed. All our–from petty to war-like–ways of scapegoating victims to keep our little group, ideology, church, temple, tribe, nation together, are disclosed and we either retrench or undergo a kind of restorative excision. That is, we either re-tribalize–seek the security of the clan, or volunteer to undergo the mercy of a Disarmed Heart.

If Jesus is about anything, he’s about grinding to ash all those dividing lines that keep us continually finding the problem in someone else. And because there are some people out there living this out, the story’s still true, and I’m still rag-tagging along.

We know that our unconscious motives may, at times, make our nonviolence a form of moral aggression and even a subtle provocation designed (without our awareness) to bring out the evil we hope to find in the adversary, and thus to justify ourselves in our own eyes and in the eyes of "decent people."

The temperament of moral superiority crouches at the door of all our souls. But I believe its sly appeal is especially tempting for the nonviolent activist. And when it slips in unnoticed, as is its bent, the pacifist become the violator.

Well, I’ve felt this spirit creeping around in my own soul. It’s made its slippery entrance. All I can do now is name it–it’s the only way I can remain somewhat free of its control. But if I  loose track of it, forget its there, within, believe I’m free of it, I’ll need a gentle friend to point it out to me.

Because when active nonviolence becomes an avenue to piety it becomes putrid. It relinquishes all creative possibilities and just deepens divisions.

The last thing active nonviolence is out to do is "convert the wicked." Its raison d’être is about reconciliation and reunion. It is only, and always, about the flourishing of humanity.