The Rock of God's Presence

The little town of Hedley, British Columbia is surrounded by massive craggy mountains. Dry and rocky, they are studded here and there with evergreens and tufts of grass. They show the reds, grays, and browns of naked rock against the electric blue of the Hedley sky.

In 1971 we lived at the foot of one of those mountains. It was a quiet year of mixed pain and joy. In my personal life there was the beginning of a new marriage, the birth of a child; there was also mourning for the end of my first marriage and missing the children who were not with us.

In the political realm there seemed to be violence everywhere. The war in Vietnam was coming home to the cities of the United States; despair provoked by hidden systemic violence erupted and was met by the same overt violence that was being used in Southeast Asia. We lost friends to despair and to suicide. We watched as war escalated. We lived on the edge, the line between sanity and delusion faint and sometimes blurred. When we read the news it often seemed that what we were reading should have been delusion -- maimed children, defoliated crop -- but it was deathly real.

The horror and the hope were close together: Hope grew from seeing people look the horror in the face and try to respond humanly, out of love and compassion. It was a difficult time to be alive because the hope and the pain were so bound up together. It tore me apart to suckle my newborn child and watch other infants being killed on the news broadcast. It was too much to try to encompass such polar opposites within one being.

The mountains of Hedley were my comfort that year. Rocky mountains are not snuggly, don't say nice things, can't be hugged. But in the middle of the night when sleep was impossible, I would go outside and sit on the front porch of our house.

Nights in Hedley are unusually clear; the mountains loom overhead, massive and remote. Beyond them the sky is very black. The stars shine from a great distance. I found that sitting there all alone in the immensity restored a sense of proportion. My personal pain was no less; the agony of humankind did not abate. I still missed my children fiercely, and people still died in the streets of the world. And yet ... somehow the massive mountains, the impersonal sky around me, absorbed and muted the anguish. "I will lift up my eyes to the hills." The hills brought me back to a sense of that which is behind all other reality, that which made heaven and earth, that which continues to exist.

1991: 20 YEARS LATER. The child born in Hedley is 20 years old now. Tom Douglass studies art at Berea College. He marched with us against the war in the Gulf; he supported my peace trip to Iraq in December. One of his classmates was killed in Saudi Arabia. On Tom's bulletin board is a letter from that friend. "Saudi Arabia sucks," it says. "I guess we're here for a good reason, but it doesn't make for fun in the sun." The letter arrived after the news of Mike's death. Tom has it pinned up with a peace button.

In 1991 we live near new mountains. These are the old and worn-down mountains (Tom scornfully calls them hills) of the Southeastern United States. The mountains surround the city of Birmingham, Alabama with lush green. They symbolize the barriers of race and class that divide the city and our country.

When we arrived in Birmingham we were told to visualize the city as a doughnut, with the city proper as the hole in the middle, the mountains forming the dough, and "over the mountain" everything beyond. The mountains cup the city, gently holding the new high-rises downtown, the government housing, the carefully kept homes, and the falling-apart ones.

Inside this doughnut the population is about 70 percent African American. Many of the people here are poor. Wealthier residents of the area move over the mountain, where the population is mostly white. Business moves over the mountain, leaving the city to struggle with a shrinking tax base. In Birmingham, too, we find ourselves looking up to the mountains, but here they symbolize not God's steady presence but the suffering of humankind.

We have lived in Birmingham for nearly two years, trying to listen and learn from other people's stories, trying to understand a new experience. In that time we've become involved in a parish and learned to love its people; we have experienced the Gulf war and the continuing destruction of life at home. I have found more and more questions, fewer and fewer answers.

It isn't that I question the faith that brought me here, or my belief in nonviolence. It's not the old 1970s question of joining the system or picking up the gun. Nonviolence seems to me the only viable option, the only way of survival open to our struggling human race. The questions come as I learn over and over again how little I know, how complicated everything is. How tentative are the tiny steps we take toward justice, and how often they miscarry!

I don't think it's hard to predict the direction of the world after the Gulf war. In the May 15 Birmingham Post-Herald, I read that Bob Gates had been nominated to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "Bush wants Gates to turn the intelligence community away from its focus on East-West hostilities and toward the looming problems of the breakaway Soviet republics and the rising might of heavily armed Third World powers such as Iraq." Gates, who was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, has recently been working at the White House as deputy director of national security. The future holds more attempts at global domination by the United States, less accountability for government actions.

Another sign of the future is a letter circulated at a recent labor-community organizers' conference sponsored by the Southern Organizing Committee. Distributed by Finsa, a "Private Mexican development firm" specializing in Mexico's maquiladora program, the letter outlines the advantages to businesses of locating factories just across the border: "Please consider that the fully fringed labor costs along the border average $1.50 per hour. Just compare that to your real cost of wages. This equates to almost $20,000 in savings per employee per year." Savings at the cost of jobs in this country, decent wages in Mexico.

We can look forward to more difficult times for labor, for the increasing numbers of the poor, for people of color, and for women. We can expect more jails and fewer helping programs. We can expect that life will get harder for most of us while a few continue to reap the profits.

With the demise of the communist threat, the sides are more clearly drawn. The militarism of the United States has no check upon it now, and I think we will see more and more use of military force as time goes on. The connections between issues become clearer as well. Bolivian coca growers ask their bishop for help in finding an alternate crop before U.S. military intervention, part of the war on drugs, wipes out whole farming communities. Labor in the United States discovers that poor wages and exploitation of workers in Third World countries ultimately means lower wages or unemployment for workers here at home. The interdependence of all beings is made manifest when pollution of coastal waters in South America contaminates fish that then spread cholera among human beings.

The theory we have been talking about is coming alive in our experience. It is a kairos moment, a time when opportunity comes and must be grasped. I think we face a danger peculiar to this moment: the danger that we will not recognize it as unique, but will simply swing into action as we have always done, working each with our own constituency on our own issue, and not learning deeper lessons from each other and from our interaction.

As the issues become visibly unified, we need to become unified. The biblical concept of shalom comes alive for us in a deeper way. We are called to live out our rhetoric as we have not yet done.

BUT WHAT DOES it mean? How do we become one; how do we blend our beliefs and working styles, our own unique truths which need to be shared? How do we love, care for, and confront one another? How do we live shalom so that the Beloved Community is present now in our hands?

The answer will be different for each of us. Each person and each group will have to experiment with these questions. I think the most crucial commitment in this kairos time is to take the questions seriously. For people like me, long involved in mostly white peace movements, the challenge is partly to recognize once again that we have not left behind our white-skin privilege. We still have access to funding more easily than, say, Native American groups. We still fit the mold when we want to try and thus gain credibility with the media and other public institutions more easily. Cultural racism operates in our favor daily, no matter how countercultural or powerless we seem to ourselves.

We hold the power of having set the agenda for our movements and having created ways of working that fulfill our needs and values. One of the hardest issues for us may be letting go of the agenda we have set, allowing the questioning of the group process or the nonviolence training that we have carefully cultivated. Giving up ownership of our turf so that the turf can again become part of the common earth: a spiritual discipline.

Frankly, I don't know if we can do it, any of us. Speaking again about the group of us that I know best, I'm well aware that it's easy for us to adopt jargon that recognizes African-American experience or that assimilates Native American attitudes about land. We incorporate these surface elements and miss the hard rock of the experience from which they grow. Then we go ahead and work on our issues, paying lip service at best to other people's reality.

For us in Birmingham just now, the rock of God's presence is not the mountains but that rock of reality against which our assumptions keep getting smashed. God is present to us in a way that makes rubble of all our certainties, takes away our power, and indeed makes of us little children. The experience of seeing our foolishness and pride is a painful one. The hope is in Jesus' words: Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Beloved Community. Will we allow ourselves to be smashed into that Community?

Shelley Douglass was a Sojourners contributing editor, co-founder of the Ground Zero Community in Poulsbo, Washington, and lived in Birmingham, Alabama when this article appeared.