Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 9

29 September 1901—5 January 1981

Servant of Peace

When many people hear the word peace, they automatically think of the absence of armed conflict or the intervals between wars. But this negative definition of peace only scratches the surface. Genuine peace—the kind that makes for an end to warfare—is a lifestyle that seeks to nurture just relations between people on a daily basis so that well-being may flourish. It involves an inner conversion as well as a certain kind of comportment in the world. It’s not just an occasional cause. It’s a way of life.

Few people have appreciated this more than the Italian nobleman Lanza del Vasto. He spent some months in India before the Second World War learning the principles of nonviolence from Mohandas Gandhi. After the war, he returned to India for a while to work with Gandhi’s disciple Vinoba Bhave. Gandhi was so impressed by del Vasto’s dedication to nonviolence that he gave him the name Shantidas, “Servant of Peace.”

In 1948, del Vasto, his wife, and several friends began an experiment in communal nonviolent living, which they called the Community of the Ark. Located in France, Ark members embraced a simple lifestyle that aimed for self-sufficiency and incorporated nonviolence into every aspect of their life together. Believing that in order to help heal the world’s violence they needed to distance themselves from its baleful influence, del Vasto and his fellow Ark members saw their community as a refuge in which to build their commitment to peace and rejuvenate their spirits. As he once said, “We are accused of going against the times. We are doing that deliberately and with all our strength.” But the community was never intended to be a head-in-the-sand retreat. Del Vasto and his companions were frequently in the thick of public witnesses against war, torture, the nuclear arms race, and militarism, actions for which del Vasto was arrested many times.

Del Vasto’s pivotal meeting with Gandhi convinced him that “the most efficient action and the most significant testimony in favor of nonviolence and truth is living a life in which there is no violence or unfairness, neither hidden violence nor brutal violence; neither legal and permitted unfairness, nor illegal unfairness.” Trained by the Community of the Ark in this kind of life, he and his followers felt empowered to help others find “the nonviolent answer” to the world’s economic and political problems. What matters, he said, is to discover whether there are such things as a nonviolent economy, nonviolent authority, nonviolent justice, nonviolent medicine, farming, and diet. And the necessary condition for all of these social forms of nonviolence “is to make sure that all violence, even of speech, even of thought, even hidden and disguised, has been weeded out of our religious”—that is, inner—“life.” Only then could a world of “peace, strength, and joy”—the motto that the Community of the Ark adopted as its own—be born.