The Undiscovered Secret of the Nuclear Age

There has been heard across this nation and the world a swelling sound that echoes from the depths of one common human experience: the universal longing for peace. We have begun to see a public response in the national and international peace movements, in the forums of government, and in recent meetings of the American Catholic bishops. But there is a profound need to explore the nature of a personal response to that universal cry for peace.

Any personal response to the challenge of peace is first of all an act of faith in a living God who has transformed death into life in the person of Jesus Christ. Faith determined every step in the life of Christ. His faith was rooted in the understanding that the God of love is ever-present and waiting for the act of faith and compassion that can open up the reality of what Jesus called the kingdom of God: a world in which the human family knows justice and peace as an ever-flowing, ever-expanding reality. That reality is always at hand and can come to life through our conversion to a compassionate faith in a loving, caring God.

Our open hearts and a commitment to prayer are the means by which we discern our particular role in the reality of God's kingdom. Each of us is called to respond in our own way to the call of faith. When Jesus told us to seek first the kingdom of heaven, he gave no maps or blueprints. He told us to love our enemies, to do good to those who hate us, to sell what we have, to feed the poor, and to follow him all the way to the cross. He promised that we would share his life and his death, and after that his new life; he promised that God would provide for those who seek the kingdom first. He promised the resurrection, but only after the crucifixion.

I believe that these promises challenge us to take action based on faith. I do not believe that they call us all to any one action.

Yet to say that not everyone is called to the same action is not to say that action must be easy. Jesus calls us to take risks, to make difficult choices. This is our cross, the point where we can die a little to self and be reborn in the Spirit's life of compassion.

I believe that we can all find the actions to which we are called by meditating on Jesus' teachings and then by beginning to live them. Those teachings point us toward a commitment to a life of nonviolence, a way of living that comes from the very heart of the gospel and has Jesus as its model. It involves not only the absence of war and a moratorium on nuclear weapons, but divesting ourselves of language that wounds; of power and privilege that control and exploit; and of greed that uses the lion's share of the world's goods.

There is no denying that any nonviolent process brings its own kind of suffering and even death. But it is different from the suffering and death brought on by war in that it comes from saying no to the killing of others. American scripture scholar John L. McKenzie has said, "If Jesus taught us anything, he taught us how to die, not how to kill." Refusing to kill, disarming for peace, creates a transforming, nonviolent power—but it comes at the price of suffering, a suffering out of love.

The price of peace is no less costly than that of war. If we want peace, my friends, we have to be willing to suffer and perhaps die for it out of love for our brothers and sisters. At its root the power of nonviolence is that sacrificial love so clearly evident in the life of Jesus.

The Call to the Cross
Today we know as little of the power and the methods of nonviolence as we knew of the power of the atom a century ago. I believe the power of nonviolence is in its depths an infinite power because it is based on love, the love of an infinite God. It is a power capable of sustaining us in our struggle through to a nuclear-free world. If we give ourselves over to that power, and practice it through a living nonviolence, we will also experience suffering.

We are told by our Lord: "Blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called children of God" (Matthew 5:9). The gospel calls us to be peacemakers, to practice a divine way of reconciliation. But the next beatitude in Matthew's sequence implies that peacemaking may also be blessed because the persecution which it provokes is the further way into the kingdom: "Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of right. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:10).

In Mark's gospel our Lord said, "If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let that person renounce self and take up the cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save one's own life will lose it; but anyone who loses one's life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it" (Mark 8:34-35).

The point of Jesus' teaching is inescapable: as his followers, we cannot avoid the cross given to each one of us. Jesus' first call in the gospel is to love God and one's neighbor. But when he gives flesh to that commandment by the more specific call to the cross, and by his own death, I am afraid that like most of you I prefer to think in abstract terms, not in the specific context in which our Lord lived and died. And yet a life of nonviolence is "taking up the cross," "losing one's life" for the truth of the gospel, for that love of God in which we are all one. A personal response to peace is a commitment to the sacredness of life, not just to the survival of the global human family, but to the sacredness of each individual person. All peace issues are commonly wed in that respect for all human life.

"Thou shalt not kill," we are taught—however "civilized" the violence. Because each of us is made in the image of God, human life is sacred. Jesus accepted his own death on the cross rather than allow his disciples to take up the sword and kill in his defense. More importantly, Jesus refused to use the power of God—the legions of angels of Matthew's gospel—to coerce his opponents.

The sacredness of human life is a truth, I believe, embedded in the hearts of all of us, obscured only by years of our uncritical acceptance of the propaganda of war and such social expedients as the legislation of abortion, the encroachment of infanticide and euthanasia. Many in our nation today practice a kind of selective respect for life; some recognize the insanity of war, but are blind to the systematic destruction of the life of the unborn; others are appalled by abortion, but find security in the potential destruction of millions of human lives through the use of nuclear weapons. How can we as a nation expect our cries for peace to be credible in the eyes of the world when we maintain this schizophrenic moral state?

A personal response to peace is also a commitment to trust. In his great encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Pope John said that "The fundamental principle on which our present peace depends," namely "equality of arms," can be replaced gradually by another "which declares that the true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms but in mutual trust alone."

I do not believe that we are the only nation in the world to cherish our homes, to love our children, to yearn for peace and feel compassion for human misery. Nor do I believe that all the people of Russia are pounding their shoes in the forums of the world in a universal cry for war. The mutual trust of which Pope John spoke is a trust that is grounded in the cardinal virtues of charity and love, a love the transforming power of which is the undiscovered secret of the nuclear age.

Finally, a personal response to the challenge of peace is a commitment to witness to that faith, hope, and love of which Christ is the ultimate example. I cannot believe that others—those in our personal lives and the nations of the world—will remain unchanged as we struggle to truly live the peace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Raymond Hunthausen was the Roman Catholic archbishop of Seattle, Washington, when this article appeared. In April 1982 he refused to pay the portion of his federal tax that would fund the arms race, and encouraged Christians in his archdiocese to prayerfully consider war tax resistance for the sake of peace.