Fiona’s Blog

The writer Graham Carey has asked if I would post up the ’declaration’ he has written on nonviolence. Since Gorwel and I try to live according to nonviolent principles and practices, I have agreed to do this, in support of a way of being in the world that counters the usual ’strong-arm’ approaches to problem-solving. I am particularly in support of this statement : ‘We take nonviolence primarily to mean the fullest intention not to cause physical or psychological harm to another person’. This reflects the idea that nonviolent approaches begin right at the heart of our ordinary lives. It makes sense that if individuals change, then so does society. Growth from the roots up. The word ‘intention’ is important, I think. Nonviolence is an orientation – often very challenging. It is, as Graham says below, an active rather than passive position to take. Failing at times is inevitable. Nonviolence is not a stick to beat ourselves with. It is a path to walk. I personally would broaden this statement by saying: ‘We take nonviolence primarily to mean the fullest intention not to cause physical or psychological harm to any other creature, human or non-human‘. This reflects my own position on nonviolence, based on what my life has shown me about being part of an extended community of sentient subjects who all show signs of feeling pain and fear and of wanting to live out a natural life-span. I find myself in accord with Buddhist values and the Bodhisattva ideal (‘May all beings be happy! May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering!’) and Gandhian ahimsa.

So what follows is Graham Carey’s document and vision. Though we may vary slightly in our emphases, I can unequivocally declare, with him, that I am FOR NONVIOLENCE.

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Henceforth, the only honourable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions …

This is the great political question of our times, and before dealing with other issues one must take a position on it. Before anything can be done, two questions must be put: ‘Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly, want to be killed or assaulted? Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly, want to kill or assault?’ Albert Camus (1946)
1. We are not all pacifists, but we declare ourselves as individuals dedicated to personal and institutional nonviolence.

2. Millions recognise the long-term futility of war. Powerful armies fail to subjugate determined small populations. The operation of human love, the most urgent requirement for the continuation of life on earth, cannot achieve its revolutionary potential where there is intimidation and threat. It is useful publicly to make this declaration as set out here. And the time to do this is now.

3. We honour all struggles for justice within a libertarian feminist agenda. To commit to a nonviolent life-style is to identify with the greatest of causes, because it can infuse into every parental, sexual, educational and political context an entirely new approach to social problems. We take nonviolence to mean the fullest intention not to cause physical or psychological harm to another person, either by armed conflict or by abuse of wealth. To be nonviolent does not mean to be unassertive. Loving physical restraint may be necessary. Jesus angrily overturned the money-changers’ tables.

4. Legislative majorities for nonviolence may be impossible – but it is ennobling for individuals, of any religion or none, to make this declaration with integrity. We especially challenge Christians to make this choice. To love everyone without exception is our true calling.

5. ‘Pacifism’ suggests passivity. The word ‘peace’ is susceptible to misuse; nonviolence is clearer. It takes courage to fight, as well as to declare for nonviolence. Nonviolence can have a high cost: we recall the courageous Gandhi-led salt marchers; we know how the Peace Community of San Jose in Colombia is incurring brutality and loss of life through its passive, dignified resistance to armed force. The choice of nonviolence resulted in many years of imprisonment for Nelson Mandela and others of the African National Congress; Mandela had previously inspired the younger ANC members to ‘throw away your guns’.

6. We question the political usefulness of war and find it ethically and ecologically unsustainable. Human propensity for military action fails to take account of the massive environmental and economic cost of preparing for war. Sophisticated technology can pioneer wholly educational, cultural and economic resistance to aggression and make political nonviolence a new priority.

7. Nonviolence is simple: it can be understood across all linguistic and political barriers; it can be communicated by body language – even with the eyes. It suggests an opposition to certain dangerous civil technologies such as nuclear power, and the untested technologies which disperse electro-magnetic fields into human and animal settlements and bring about mutations at the biological molecular level. Nonviolence is also not simple: we cannot promise never to violate with language or otherwise harm others close to us or distant. There are medical conditions which cause rage and killing. Nevertheless, we remain dedicated.

8. The judicial ‘punishment’ of capital execution is spiritually worse than acts of war, promo-ting a spurious legitimacy specific to an individual person using the full force of law, popular agreement, and democracy. It excludes the possibility of redemption; it assumes the infallibility of the legal process. We harm foetuses and babies in their gestation and birthing through non-essential caesarian and also electronic and other interventions.

9. We continually celebrate the revolutionary nonviolent lives and works of Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha and Martin Luther King – and countless others – in Jewish, Islamic and Hindu religious traditions and in non-religious traditions. The detailed records of these lives are of unsurpassed value to the development of human sustainability and hope.
10. All forms of communication are useful to propagate this ideal, especially email and websites. This Declaration has no copyright; passing it on is a significant political and religious act. Front doors and tee-shirts can display two words: FOR NON-VIOLENCE.

11. In common with organisations such as the Peace Pledge Union, Pax Christi and Peace News, we face a daunting task in overcoming the fascination with violent behaviour found at every level of society. We differ from simple pacifism: beyond the political and economic structures to do with war and militarism lie the deeper psychological and domestic origins of violence; divorce courts remind us of the almost ‘natural’ extent of abuse that takes place in our homes which, every evening of the year, are flooded by an immense quantity of televised killing and unremitting brutal harm; rude, aggressive, power-driven personalities; and an almost total absence of reflective, mature material from the great wisdom traditions. Fifty years of British television has not produced a single soap or documentary feature based on a community successfully organised on the rule of nonviolence – of which there are hundreds.

12. We do not rely upon a mass decision in this matter; we seek individual, personal commit-ments, which might be revoked in exceptional circumstances. We declare ourselves as a universal sister / brotherhood of intent. The United Nations has passed a resolution declaring October 2nd as an international day that reaffirms the universal relevance of the principle of nonviolence and the desire to secure a culture of peace, tolerance and nonviolence.
Initially:
ROSELLE ANGWIN Buddhist Writer
KAREN ARMSTRONG Non-church Historian of Religion The Great Transformation (2006)
DAI-EN BENNAGE Abbess, Mt Equity Zendo Soto Zen Buddhist Monastery, USA
NORA BARNES Non-church Mother Earth Connections Sustainability Centre, Isle of Eigg
GRAHAM CAREY Anglican, Bradford Diocesan Synod, Main author of this document; 6 Granville BD16 4HW UK Proposal for a New College: a Radical Alternative for Higher Education (with Peter Abbs) (1977)
EMILY JOHNS Atheist Editor Peace News, Artist
A. L. KENNEDY Quaker attender, Costa Book of the Year 2007, Day
BRUCE KENT Roman Catholic, Pax Christi, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
MARK KURLANSKY Jew, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Nonviolence: the History of a Dangerous Idea (2007)
ERVIN LASZLO Three times Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World (2000)
ALASTAIR MCINTOSH Quaker Visiting Speaker on Nonviolence at Sanhdurst Miliary Academy, Professor of Human Ecology, Strathclyde University Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (2004)
PATSY MCKIE Pentecostal New Testament Church of God Mothers against Violence
MARY MIDGLEY Non-church, Philosopher, The Ethical Primate (1994), Wickedness (2001)
DENISE MOLL Anglican, Multifaith spirituality; denise.gandhifdn@phonecoop.coop
MOST REVD DR JOHN NEILL Anglican Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland (Church of Ireland)
RT REVD DANIEL NGORU Anglican Bishop of Kirinyaga, Kenya
MICHEL ODENT Roman Catholic Revolutionary obstetrician and polemicist of the ingathering of love: The Scientification of Love (1999) Dr Miriam Stoppard (Foreword): I found it an irresistible thesis… His teachings became the lynchpin of my writing on pregnancy and birth and I have included a passage about them in every book I have written on the subject since… He holds out the… promise that a study of how we learn to love, starting at the breast a few seconds after birth, may hold a clue to the cause of violence in our society.
DIARMUID O’MURCHU MSC Roman Catholic Theologian Religion in Exile (2000) Transformation of Desire (2007)
FIONA OWEN Quaker Buddhist Musician and poet
SIR GHILLEAN PRANCE FRS VMH Anglican Professor of Biological Sciences, Former Director Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Science Director, the Eden Project
VERONIKA SOPHIA ROBINSON Spiritually based life Mother Founder and Editor The Mother
MERYL ROWLINSON Quaker
ALAN RUSSELL Quaker Second author of this document
ANDREW W SAUL Baptist Editor Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
JONATHAN SCHELL The Fate of the Earth (1982)
STANLEY SWITALA PhD Roman Catholic /Taoist Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner and teacher
VENERABLE TENZIN PALMO Buddhist, Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery, Malaysia
DESMOND TUTU Formerly Archbishop of Cape Town Anglican Nobel Peace Prize Chair Truth & Reconciliation Commission 1996-8
PENNY VINE Non-church Certified Trainer in Non-Violent Communication; penny@vine16.freeserve.co.uk
BOB WALLACE Non-church Earth Connections Sustainability Centre, Isle of Eigg
IN MEMORY OF CHARLES ANTHONY NEALY, EXECUTED BY LETHAL INJECTION BY THE STATE OF TEXAS ON 20 MARCH 2007, DURING THE COMPILATION OF THIS DOCUMENT. AND IN MEMORY OF PAT REGAN, INSPIRATIONAL WORKER FOR MOTHERS AGAINST VIOLENCE, DOUBLE VICTIM, MURDERED ON 1 JUNE 2008 SIX YEARS AFTER THE SHOOTING OF HER SON.
 Signatories have signed on their own behalf, not on that of any organisation. Peace News is the leading English language newspaper dedicated to radical nonviolence: 0207 278 3344 admin@peacenews.info  Graham Carey can be contacted electronically: andrewclarkebd@aol.com  www.nonviolence.morozzo.co.uk  There is no copyright on this precise text  Single-sided A3/A2 poster version available  Offers to email to appropriate organisations welcome  See also The Power of Love by Alastair McIntosh, Resurgence 219 July 2003  Small donations welcome: 01274 568973  Make the Declaration as a personal intention, and on your own initiative gain new cohorts of signatories by any means, eg photocopies, email, new websites, blogs.  Add your own views – shown separate from the original – and inform GC.  Good luck!

Beryl Baigent, Welsh-born Canadian poet, has sent a review of my first collection of poems Imagining the Full Hundred. I am very grateful to her. What follows is the review. Thank you very much, Beryl.

Owen, Fiona. IMAGINING THE FULL HUNDRED. Caernarfon, North Wales: Gwasg Pantycelyn (2003). ISBN 1-903314-60-7. Cover Illustration: Malcolm Strongetharm.

Fiona Owen is a poet who resides in Llanfaelog, Anglesey. This beautiful green book with a meditative face of a head-covered woman, sets the tone for her first published volume. The book’s title originates in David Hart’s poem “The snail sets out up the steps.” Fiona’s book title also graces her five-part poem sequence (40) which conveys the deeper message of her work by using an epigrammatic quotation from Gandhi: “I want to realize identity with all life,/ even with such things as crawl upon the earth.” The poet is affirming her own affinity with all living creatures and one may understand the “full hundred” as the Wan Wu, or Ten Thousand Things, of Taoist philosophy. Here we find insects tumbling out of petals during the making of elderflower cordial; bees and ladybirds, a brown mongrel dog, all experience annihilation when a child is treated to ” pictures of Armageddon, when God/ punishes the sinners; ” slugs, worms, wood lice, beetles, and snails are “a community in crisis.”

This central sequence is enfolded by poems which journey from sandy images of the Middle East, where the poet lived from the age of three to sixteen, to the green mountains of North Wales. Fear and dread, where lives of humans and animals coalesce in importance, whether it as a non-swimming mother in the ocean, or a old oil drum full of “not quite dead” dogs, or a scorpion “making its clinging way across the ceiling,” fill the earlier poems with emotion and trauma as the transience of life is explored. The poet identifies with Earth itself in order to empathizes with the suffering of nature. In the form of Rock, which/who expresses how it “fancies the movement of bird,” that is, until an earthquakes puts in an appearance. This poem, along with others, attests to the innocence of nature and to the writer as an integral part of it. Pablo’s incident in the shallows when he was stung by a stonefish (14) demonstrates the impartiality of nature. The poet accepts the natural way, as nature does what it is intended to do and nothing more or nothing less, and life continues to flow.

The unassuming simplicity of Fiona’s language in these poems makes her work accessible to all. Some will no doubt read the ‘stories’ and enjoy the narrative, and others will delve deeper and unearth the philosophy of one who writes because this is her ‘nature.’ And by her writing she blesses all things, from insects to people, from plants to moons, and accordingly she salutes the sacredness of the universe. Her poems are love poems in the mystical tradition. The divine is present in all things, she is reminding us. It is because of this divine energy that one may transmute and take on the characteristic of other aspects of nature. Thus, “When you shave / you make / your top lip shape / into a beak.” The shaver can apparently make a “bird-face” at will but it is not often that one gets to understand why or how (22). In another incident the beard becomes “a forest / [she] loses herself in” while the protagonist is “lunar / lying among roots / and leaves” (23).

Fiona shares with her readers the mysteries of the universe. The moon, for example, can do anything that humans can do and in a poem titled “Moondance” lightens the incredibly serious philosophy the writer is expounding, with unpretentious and original humour. We are aware of the moon dancing and trailing “fingers along the banister” and becoming the Peeping Tom and listening to the private encounter (24). This poem also expresses the alchemical and Hermetic dictum “As above so below,” so none of the significance is lost in the humour.

Fiona Owen demonstrates clarity in her thoughts, uniqueness in her metaphors, and humour and freshness in her poetic imagery. In the penultimate poem of Imagining the Full Hundred, the poet fits it all into a nutshell: “All forms are possible / at every instance. / No shape is an outcast / the mind need only accept” (60). Life ‘just is’ and one could say the same about these poems. Each is complete in itself, each is doing its own work, each poem is a fragile and transcendent moment in an impartial universe.

Beryl Baigent October 1, 2007