One evening last September, I stopped uptown for a brief visit with Eileen Egan. Belk)re her retirement from Catholic Relief Services several years back, she had worked for lout decades with refugees in all the world’s most troubled spots. A founding member of Pax Christi in this country, a longtime editor of the Catholic Worker, a biographer of Mother Teresa and a co-worker with her, Egan has spent her life caring for the victims of war and offering nonviolent ways of ending or easing various conflicts.
So it was no surprise that evening that Eileen would be talking about the need for an international team of peacemakers to bring relief supplies to the besieged Muslims in Bosnia. She was not proposing a well-financed or heavily armed convoy of participating governments, but a group of international volunteers, unprotected and unsecured by force of arms, who would have to be willing to face capture and even death, yet who would be strong enough internally and spiritually to carry on their humanitarian mission without the threat of responsive violence. She spoke of how the Israeli pilot Able Nathan had repeated- ly flown such airlifts into Biafra during that terrible civil conflict.
It was not a surprise to hear Eileen Egan talking this way. She is a lifelong adherent of Gandhian nonviolence. But I bad imagined we’d probably talk about other things that evening, perhaps even her own recent mugging, experienced while she was on the way to evening Mass. After all, that was why I was visiting her in a hospital room, where she was recovering from a broken hip, head lacerations, and seven broken ribs. But Eileen’s concerns were with the Bosnians, and unfortunately they still are. When Michael T. Kaufman wrote a piece about her recently for the New York Times (January 23), there was the Bosnian angle again: “You know,” she told Kaufman, “after my operation there was not much pain; I had such wonderful care. But 1kept thinking of all those people in Bosnia…dying of cold.”
It hasn’t been hard this Lent to come up with apocalyptic images on which to meditate: The standoff in Waco, Texas: the World Trade Center bombing; visions from Sudan, Somalia, and India; the Rodney King replay; the Haitian ferry disaster; the unrelenting, coldblooded cleansings in Bosnia….For me they have formed a sort of self-repeating tape, a Bruce Willis film spliced with scenes from Hieronymous Bosch. Yet despite that, I keep returning to my visit with Eileen Egan in the hospital: to her lack of despair, to her compassion.
Ten years ago this spring, the Catholic bishops of the U.S.—sinners all, like the rest of us—published The Challenge of Peace. Unlike some of those on the absolutist wing of the peace movement (or those on the realist extreme of the military-policy establishment), I felt then—and do now the challenge of the bishops’ letter, most keenly in their discussion about developing nonviolent means of conflict resolution. The bishops wrote that “nonviolence is not the way of the weak, the cowardly, or the impatient,” and made it clear that “in its practice, the objective [of nonviolence] is not to avoid causing harm or injury to another creature, but, more positively, to seek the good of the other….Christ’s own teachings and example provide a model way of incorporating the truth, and a refusal to return evil lor evil.”
When I read these words I think of people like Eileen Egan and Alain Richard, a Franciscan at Pace e Bene, a nonviolent center in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the center’s recent newsletter (The Wolf, Winter 1993), Richard asks why there was no nonviolent army ready to step into Somalia: “First of all, the necessary logistics are difficult to mount,” he writes, and “currently, traditional armies are the only ones which have the required logistical capacities.” But deeper than the question of logistics, says Richard, is the question of how we think: “Our culture teaches us that only a physical power can stop another physical force from acting violently.” But like the bishops’ pastoral letter, Richard raises questions about this presumption and starts by providing a number of examples of recent nonviolent actions which successfully turned back violent, physical force. He mentions instances in Guatemala and Sri Lanka, in the Philippines and the former Soviet Union. But such actions were possible only where people were willing to put their own lives on the line: “Only through this way,” concludes Richard, “can a new culture arise on the ashes of weapons and break the violent spiral of physical power.”
For my part, that is a lot to think about this Lent. And the bishops’ letter and Eileen Egan? I still find them challenging.
