Mary
Theresa
Times Union, August 7,
2016
Time for silence,
speaking
By Sister Megan
Rice
There is a time to be silent, to
listen, to learn and discern the truth. And there is a time to speak, to our
sisters, brothers and all in the web of life in this global village, to be true
to ourselves.
For me, the time to be silent lasted
many years. I was born in Manhattan in 1930. My family lived next door to a
mathematical biologist who worked in the physics department of Columbia
University, a few blocks away.
In the late 1930s, what he was engaged
in was kept a dark secret from us, even from his wife and daughter. We didn't
know then that he worked on the Manhattan Project, which would produce the first
atomic bomb.
On Aug. 6, 1945, my sister and I were
at summer camp in Maine, when our mother called us and said she had just seen
the headline on the Daily News: "Bomb Dropped on Japan. The War
is Over!"
"Thank God!" she said. "Uncle Walter
will not have to be involved in the invasion of Japan."
On August 9, three days after
Hiroshima, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Six weeks later, Uncle Walter,
a newly commissioned 1st lieutenant in the Marines, arrived in that city in
occupied Japan. There he met the Jesuit bishop, Paul Yamaguchi, on his return to
Nagasaki. In a Jeep, my uncle drove the bishop to his ruined cathedral, where
his mother and sister had been attending Mass when their lives
were extinguished.
My uncle, like many Hibakusha, the
survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stayed silent before they could speak
and act.
I waited until 1980, when my mother and
I marched from the United Nations to Central Park for the abolition of nuclear
weapons. My awareness grew through the peace communities and civil resistance at
the government's nuclear test site in the Nevada desert where 1,000 weapons of
mass destruction were detonated. There, on sacred land ceded by treaty to the
Western Shoshone people, I reflected upon their stories and wisdom, and about
pollution of water, air and soil by radioactive fallout.
The world continues to feel the effects
in physical and psychic disease from the fallout of
these weapons.
We can now speak our known truth:
Nuclear weapons and war no more on this sacred planet. Please join us in silence
and in speaking, to be true to ourselves.
Sister Megan Rice, Roman Catholic
nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, lives in Washington, D.C. From 1962
to 2004, she was a teacher in Nigeria and Ghana. In 2012, she and two fellow
pacifists splashed blood on a uranium facility at the Oak Ridge nuclear
reservation in Tennessee. In May, she was released from serving two years in
prison. She will speak at the 17th annual Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference,
which is dedicated to the power of truth-telling, on Friday and Saturday, August
14-15, at the National Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine in Fonda. Information at
www.kateripeaceconference.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment