 |
| Janice Sevre-Duszynska ARCWP Speaks at Vigil outside White House for Nuclear Disarmament |
-->
On Saturday, March 10 from 10
a.m. until noon I participated in a vigil in front of the White House for
nuclear disarmament and the abolition of killer drones. Among the vigil’s sponsors
were The Baltimore Nonviolence Center, Pax Christi, and The Franciscan Action
Network. I had been invited to be one of six speakers. Before I began, I asked
our peace community to name activists who had passed and we joined in with
“Presente.” Then I asked all present to bow their heads and pray for those
killed by our nukes and killer drones. Together we said: “Forgive us. We
remember you.”
My talk follows the link
below to a video of the witness covered by Hispanic television.
https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/ee-uu-/370927/activistas-tratado-prohibicion-armas-nucleares-trump
Good morning. My name
is Janice Sevre-Duszynska and I’m an ordained Roman Catholic Woman Priest.
We heard the Good
News Thursday evening and what a dearly prayed-for surprise it was: Two months
from now, hopefully the U.S. and North Korea will sit down together to talk. We
breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps Mother Earth and her children may be spared
from nuclear holocaust at least until early May. What a way to live…
One might say we’ve
had a very slight taste of the dread that our sisters and brothers endure from
one moment to the next so that it has become the common denominator of their
lives. The little Pakistani girl can detect its humming sound. She remembers it
the last time her aunt and uncle took her to the market. It’s the last time
they called her name, the last time she saw them smiling at her. How they died
and what remained of them is forever imprinted upon her heart and mind.
In Baltimore each
Tuesday evening we protest and bring out our banners on the corner of 33rd
and N. Charles Streets across from Johns Hopkins University. We know their
Applied Physics Laboratory gets up to a billion dollars each year from the
Feds, including for swarming drone research. It’s pretty much off limits to get
any other information about the Lab. Unfortunately not even The Baltimore Sun has
shown much interest in providing data on the Applied Research Lab’s weapons
contracts.
At military bases
across the country we keen, we mourn, we scream out our anguish over the death
of someone else’s child or kin. “Any child is our child” is the motto written
on our souls. At Creech Air Force Base where the buttons are pushed for the
drone to strike and kill on the other side of the world, and drone pilots
practice overhead, Franciscan Jerry Zawada stood outside with his walker at 6
a.m. with others holding this banner (When drones fly, Children die). We were
reminding the workers driving into the base of Gospel Nonviolence. Like others,
Jerry went to jail to rid the world of killer drones.
I’ll never forget
Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker walking with loaves of bread to break with the
military officers at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Like many of the
workers at Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons Complex in Tennessee, Georgia Walker’s
aunts came down with cancer that took their lives. They worked for Social
Security in a building near a nuclear weapons refurbishing plant outside of
Kansas City where two nearby rivers were also contaminated from run off and
puddles.
“Make the connections
between sexism and racism, nationalism militarism and capitalism,” said
Dominican Sister Marge Tuite, one of my mentors in the early 80s. It took years
for her words to permeate with understanding.
Mujerista theologian
Ada Maria Isasi Diaz speaking at Marquette University in the early 80s taught
us: “The personal is the political is the social is the religious.”
My hometown Milwaukee
friend, Jesuit-trained Bob Graf has made the connections, too, as he and others
challenge our church. We say ”NO!” to Jesuit universities that host ROTC and
teach young people reflexive killing, killing without conscience. Some say
these Host ROTC Jesuit universities receive a half million dollars a year from
the Feds.
We activists have
another saint to hear our prayers: Bishop Oscar Romero understood conscience as
well as nonviolence. We will pray for him to intercede with these Jesuit
universities that host ROTC and SHUT THEM DOWN!
This past week an
event took place in Rome, outside the Vatican, for International Women’s Day.
It was the fifth gathering of the Voices for Faith, with women from many
places. Former Irish President Mary McAleese was the lead speaker. She called
the church “an empire of misogyny.”
tThis booklet, Women, Earth, Creator Spirit, written by
theologian and Fordham University Professor, Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, is part of the Madeleva Lecture in
Spirituality from St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. I took it with me
each time I witnessed to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops: twice a year at
their meetings from 2000-2006. I would be dressed in my white alb, red cincture
and purple stole I wore to image a woman priest celebrating Eucharist along
with others at the table.
My soul became
attached to her words that describe the kinship between women and the feminine
with the Earth and the Creator Spirit, Wisdom Sophia.
This is one of my
favorite passages because it gives us a healthy notion of relationship to live
out between two people or more and between groups of people, including
countries. Just two short paragraphs from p. 27.
“A relation structured
according to the dominant-subordinate motif inevitably shortchanges the full
potential for flourishing of everyone caught in its pyramid. By contrast,
women’s experience bears out again and again that the most life-giving exchange
occurs when bonds are reciprocal or mutual. Mutuality is a form of relation marked
by equivalence between persons. It involves a concomitant valuing of each
other, a give and take according to each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and
a common regard marked by trust, affection, and respect for differences—all
this in contrast to competition, domination, or assertions of superiority. It
is a relationship patterned like friendship, an experience often used to
characterize the freedom-connection dialectic at the heart of all mature
caring.
“Feminist thinking
prizes dialectical connectedness that flourishes in a circle of mutuality. This
has obvious implications for the idea of God. If relation is at the heart of
the universe, if mutuality is moral excellence, then the deity of God does not
consists in being over against and superior to, but expresses itself in freely
drawing near and being connected in mutual relation. This is precisely how the
Creator Spirit is present and active in the world.”
I plan to be back at
the June 9th witness to continue the resistance. You are most
welcome to join us.
No comments:
Post a Comment