by G. Michael Cordner

Monthly Reflections

During the past several months the Pastoral Care Network for Social Responsibility has been mailing to its members each mouth words that reflect and and consider the present international conflict situation and our response to it.  These are the thoughts and words of persons who have been active members of the network, some for several years.  They are offered not as official words or with the recommendation that other members of the network would necessarily subscribe to them.  Rather, they are offered in the hope that they may prompt our members to think seriously about the issues that confront us all, and that each of us in our own thinking may find within us the response that for us is most consistent with our pastoral identities and tasks.

This month's reflections come from G. Michael Cordner who has served the network for several years as editor of the network newsletter.  Twice during these past years he bas been recognized and honored by the network as the recipient of the Shalom Award.  "Michael" invites you, their reader, to respond to him in reaction to his words.  In what follows here he addresses the question of confronting evil:

Recently in reading a review of the television documentary about conscientious objectors, "The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It," I was challenged by this question: "How do nonviolent people of conscience confront abject evil?

I think of myself as a nonviolent person.  I have adopted a stance in interpersonal conflict in which I have renounced a violent response to that conflict.  I do not arm myself with weapons of violence, and I strive not to attack others with words that demean them.  I value a pacifist response.  I evaluate myself by the degree to which I am able to maintain that response.

I am however also a "person of conscience."  I try to keep my behavior always consistent with the values that I hold.

I do indeed struggle with answering this very question.  What then will be my response when I see evil prevailing between persons, when I am aware that others are willing to kill and destroy those with whom they disagree?  I do not see anything to be gained from denying that evil exists within some persons, and some groups of persons.  l want to honestly examine the world as it exists as a place where evil acts occur.

Because of that value and because of my desire to uphold that value I was present in 1982 when the Pastoral Care Network for Social Responsibility was formed through the leadership and urging of Howard Clinebell.  I have continued to be an active participant in the gatherings of persons of persuasion in the United States, in Australia, Czechoslovakia, and Italy.  I have been encouraged and prompted by the associations with others that have occurred in those places.

I believe that the International Pastoral Care Network for Social Responsibility that has evolved since 1982 is fundamentally and at its heart a network of individual persons, who have come together not to speak for or represent a particular organization or group of those who care pastorally.  Rather have we come together because the network offers us a place and a means to examine ourselves and be examined by one another, to support and be supported by one another, to develop together our individual responses to the world as it is.

Because I speak from within my Christian faith, I look to Jesus to inform the values that I uphold, not because he is the only source or spokesperson for those values, but because his words are the words that have informed me as one who believes in him.  Jesus is recorded in Scripture as having spoken to persons who are about to stone a person whose actions they deem as sinful, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."  With those words he insisted that the persons before him, and indeed all of us through the ages, look first within them/ourselves to criticize and judge, not toward other persons.  My/our own actions must be the focus for my/our examining, not the actions of others.

When we so examine ourselves I believe that we will find a value that holds that all persons, not just those with whom I agree, are of equal value.  Equality between persons does not reflect ties, but a basic and fundamental sense of what it is to be a person, to be a human being.  A world in which persons are divided accordmg to a definition of who is my friend and who is my enemy contradicts that equality.

As a result then, there is no difference between the casualties of war and civilian casualties.  Casualties cannot be justified or excused according to whether they are intentional or accidental, civilian or military.  A casualty is a casualty is a casualty, and casualties are not only to be avoided. They are to be condemned.

My response to "abject evil" is to focus my response and attention not to the causes of evil, or to the presence or absence of evil.  My response is to name evil when it occurs, either within me or between me and others, not to seek vengeance for evil, but to work to heal others from evil that has beset them.  In my pastoral identity, I work to heal hurt where it occurs, not to avenge hurt.  I believe that when I work to heal hurt rather than avenge hurt that I have reduced the power of hurt.  As a group of pastoral care-givers we in the International Network have come together to assist and empower one another in this task.

This then becomes our yardstick against which we measure our actions--to what degree have our actions brought healing for ourselves and for one another?
 

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