Laura Vilines/Student LifeBest known for their televised discussions covering everything from masturbation to fetishes, Rabbi Hyim Shafner, Father Gary Braun, and Father Mike Kinman, the three men of WUTV’s “Missionary Positions” recently forewent the sex talk in lieu of a timelier topic-the present conflict with Iraq.
Student Life gathered questions from faculty and students, but in the presence of three great minds who also happen to be friends, inspiration took over and few questions were asked. What emerged, however, was equally interesting.
Student Life: In the 1960s, the nonviolent peace movement took its discipline and organization from the leadership of religious figures. Do we have that same discipline and organization today?
Father Mike Kinman: Three of my great heroes of the faith are Martin Luther King, Ghandi, and Jesus Christ, all of whom were non violent activists, and there’s the word active in there. What made the nonviolent movements in the United States in the 1960s so powerful were the discipline and the training and the absolute resolution to love in the face of hatred. It’s so difficult because now the numbers are so huge. How do you train millions of people all over the world to do non-violent active resistance?
Father Gary Braun: What’s the difference now? Religious leaders have all pretty much come out against this. It’s interesting that it seems almost like a given within religious circles by and large to be against the war. It doesn’t seem radical.
FMK: A lot more talk though.
Rabbi Hyim Shafner: But there isn’t that….
FGB: Less activism? That’s probably somewhat true on this campus. Why are people not risking their lives more? Why aren’t they going to jail more?
RHS: You know, that’s asking a bigger question about religious leaders. I mean for instance, in Judaism obviously, peace is everything, but at the same time, I don’t think that it’s pacifist. There are times to make war. There are times to defend people. Whether this is one of those times or not, I’m not sure.
FGB: What seems to be absent is just civil disobedience. George W. Bush knows the whole world is protesting against this war and he doesn’t give two squats about it. Civil disobedience speaks, and that’s what the 60s was full of. People were going to jail all the time. We burned our draft cards, we burned our bras, we burned everything we had on. Nobody’s doing that. I do think your generation feels the despair, of knowing that it might not make a difference…
FMK: One difference, in terms of religious leaders, is that the place of church as an institution in society has gone way out to the margins since the 50s and 60s. They’re not looking to us for guidance right now, and other leaders from other places are emerging.
RHS: We live in a world where everything comes and goes so fast. There’s nothing of importance because everything is gone so quickly.
FGB: Yeah. What changes peoples’ minds is what we haven’t figured out yet. Nobody’s going to change their mind. Bumper stickers don’t change minds.
FMK: Part of me wants to say we’ve lost a sense of dialogue, but then I’m not entirely sure we ever had it. Now I see people basically saying “This is my opinion and I’m going to shout it at you.” That’s not a conversation.
FGB: But why would anyone want to have a conversation with you when you’re wearing that button? (gesturing to Father Mike’s anti-war button). Do you think I’d see that and then have a conversation with you where I try to talk you into a war?
FMK: Even if you could convince me that Saddam is doing horrible things to his own people, then I still couldn’t be convinced this is right. . . My belief that this is wrong is not situational; it is based on principle.
RHS: If I really felt that he was an aggressor against others or that this was really self defense, I’d be OK with the war. But, over the last few months, I’ve become less and less for the war, because I feel like it’s all becoming less and less clear that Iraq is really an aggressor. This can’t be a matter of ego.
SL: In a recent New York Times editorial, Jimmy Carter wrote, “…as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards.” What is a just war, and do you agree with Carter?
FGB: You’ve got to remember that the just war theory was put out by St. Augustus and St. Aquinas. It wasn’t used to justify war. It was meant to stop war. A war is always evil. It’s always an abomination of humanity. What the Jewish tradition has given us, and I think what we need to do on campus someday to unite our traditions, would be, if there is a war, we need to lament it. We need to lament that humanity can’t figure this shit out yet.
RHS: You know what? This is what we should do. We should do something like that. It’s about a little bit of self sacrifice.
FMK: There’s not a sense of sacrifice. And sacrifice connects us. There’s the sense that I get, that intellectually, people know that this is really big and really serious and this is bad and terrible and horrible.
FGB: But you never hear lament in their vocabulary. That is what’s missing so badly, in my opinion.
RHS: What about the sacrifices?
RHS: We should have a vigil in the quad.
FGB: We should carry a big casket in and put on it humanity, and put it right in the middle and beat our breasts and do what you guys do all the time [to Rabbi Shaffner], wail! (laughter)
RHS: Maybe we should pick a time right now. We’ll kiss and hug and sing a little. We’ll make love not war.
FGB: So yeah, we’ll be sad.
RHS: Never mind the hugging and kissing, we’ll just be sad
FGB: Let’s put a wailing wall and put little messages in it.
RHS: Oh, that’s nice.
FGB: Were you making fun of me?
RHS: No that’s great! That’s a great idea. No, that’s what we’ll do and we’ll do a silence. We can do candlelight.
FGB: Let’s wail. We’ll get some music that’s really wailing. (Begins to wail.)
RHS: The Bible says a lot about war. The Bible itself says what’s more important than what you accomplish with war is what you accomplish through living.
FMK: What I think this is is an incredible opportunity, to reach across and love. When war starts what I’m telling my students is, don’t sit front of the TV and watch it. Don’t sit there and watch CNN and watch bomb drops for six hours. Take that energy, that time that you have and the best thing you can do is use it for something constructive and something good. That’s what battles war, is people standing up for good and for justice and for mercy and for love.
RHS: So let’s do this, let’s pick a day.
Father Mike, Rabbi Shafner, and Father Gary will present “5 Silent Minutes of Reflection” on Tuesday, March 25 on the Swamp at 10 p.m. All students are invited.