By the time the regime hit Year Four, its final one in power, it had slaughtered or starved to death an estimated one-fifth of the nation’s population, upwards of two million people. Buddhist monks and nuns—“social parasites” whom Khmer Rouge fanatics especially loathed—were driven into exile, forced at gunpoint to recant their vows, or murdered. Before the Khmer Rouge there were around sixty thousand of them in Cambodia. Afterwards, there were scarcely three thousand.
Preah Maha Ghosananda, whose name in Pali means “Joyful Proclaimer,” had missed the killing years in his native Cambodia. For over a decade, from 1965 to 1978, he lived in deep seclusion in a Buddhist monastery deep in the forests of Thailand. After earning a doctorate from an Indian university, he had gone there to practice meditation. By the time he emerged from his hermitage, the Khmer Rouge had all but eradicated the Buddhist presence in Cambodia. It had also massacred all of Ghosananda’s family.
Thousands of Cambodians had fled to refugee camps just across the Thai border. Ghosananda began visiting them, building temporary hut-temples wherever he went, blessing the people, and offering them consolation. Although a man temperamentally inclined to solitude, study, and meditation, Ghosananda threw himself into alleviating suffering in the world around him and never looked back. “We must find the courage to leave our temples,” he said, “and enter the suffering-filled temples of human experience.”
By the time the Khmer Rouge thugs were overthrown in 1979, Cambodia was in ruins, its economy and infrastructure shattered and its people demoralized. Moreover, guerrilla fighting in the Cambodian jungles between feuding factions continued, and hundreds of thousands of hidden landmines, a legacy from the years of violence, dotted the landscape. In order to inaugurate the spiritual rejuvenation of his homeland, Ghosananda undertook annual Dhammayietra, or “Pilgrimages of Truth” from one end of Cambodia to the other. Dressed in the saffron robes of a monk, he led groups of fellow Buddhists, laypersons as well as monks and nuns, on a “step-by-step” proclamation of peace and healing to some of Cambodia’s most war-torn and damaged areas. Year after year he and his companions risked landmines, guerrilla hostility, weariness, and illness to walk across the land and bring hope and reconciliation to the people they met. At the start of each pilgrimage, Ghosananda announced: “Our journey for peace begins today and every day. Each step is a prayer, each step is a meditation, each step will build a bridge.” Everywhere they went, the Pilgrims of Truth chanted: “Hate can never be appeased by hate; hate can only be appeased by love.”
13 March
Ham Sok-Hon
13 March 1901—4 February 1989
Two Roads
If the effectiveness of a peacemaker is determined by how many repressive regimes he angers, Ham Sok-Hon has excellent credentials. Over his long career as an advocate of nonviolence, he was persecuted by the Japanese, the Soviet Russians, and finally by his fellow Koreans.
Born the son of a well-off physician in North Korea, Ham was expelled from one of the country’s best schools in 1916 for protesting Japan’s colonial rule of his homeland. Although a public apology could have gotten him reinstated, Ham refused. He eventually earned a degree in history, however, and taught for a number of years. But his nonviolent resistance to Japanese imperialism never wavered, earning him imprisonment four times in the years leading up to World War II. When the Soviets occupied Korea after the war, Ham also refused to cooperate with them. After he rejected the offer of a professorship at Kim Il-sung University because he realized it was simply a bid for his cooperation, he was arrested, beaten, and nearly executed before managing to escape to South Korea. During the Korean War three years later, he met members of the American Friends Service Committee and became a Quaker. Ham was attracted to the religion because of its pacifism and its lack of exclusionary doctrines. For Ham, there were many different paths to God, and he saw Quakerism, which he thought especially compatible with Buddhism and Taoism, as sharing that conviction.
In South Korea, Ham continued his public witness for peace and democracy, frequently opposing the repressive regimes of South Korean presidents Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan. He was jailed or placed under house arrest many times in retaliation for his criticisms of them.
Ham’s social activism was based on fidelity to what he called the two “roads”: the road to freedom and the road to love. By the first, he meant a political and economic democracy that protects human rights and allows individuals to flourish. By the second, he meant a religious perspective that embraces human suffering and seeks to ameliorate it.
Like Mohandas Gandhi, to whom he was often compared, Ham believed that sometimes the roads to freedom and love are so blocked by evil that force may ultimately be necessary to clear them. But he always considered it a last rather than a first resort. “We should keep to the principle of nonviolence,” he said, “but not leave the people who are struggling. We should try to keep with them and to educate them. In the struggle there are several degrees or states—the best one, the second best one, the third best one. If you feel that it is impossible to follow the best one you should choose the second best or the third one. Just to keep silent and remain unmoved is much worse than to choose the second or even third state. Still, we must always urge the people to use the best method.”
14 March
Walter Brueggemann
1933—
Shalom
Walter Brueggemann is the most insightful Old Testament scholar the United States has produced. Many of his sixty-odd books are required reading in seminaries and religious studies programs across the nation. One of them, The Prophetic Imagination (1978), has become a classic.
But Brueggemann isn’t only a scholar. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, he’s also an astute Christian commentator on current social and political issues who frequently draws parallels between them and lessons from the Old Testament prophets. One of his most valuable contributions has been to remind Christians and others of the deep meaning of the ancient Hebrew word shalom, or “peace.”
In the minds of many today, peace is just an interval between war. But Brueggemann points out that the Old Testament notion of shalom is much richer. It is the “persistent vision of joy, well-being, harmony, and prosperity” often expressed in words such as “love, loyalty, truth, grace, salvation, justice, blessing, and righteousness.” Shalom is a recovery of creation’s wholeness fragmented by violence and cruelty between humans. It is, says Brueggemann, “a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery.”
What Brueggemann’s analysis suggests is that even though shalom is the natural order of things, its recovery depends in part upon the willingness of humans to practice lifestyles that express it in concrete terms. Shalom, he says, is an “incarnational” word. The only shalom we can imagine is one that responds to specific historical realities. To think of it in abstract terms is to fail to take it as a real possibility. But this doesn’t mean that shalom is exclusively situational, much less relative.
Consider the Babylonian captivity, for example, that historical period when, after Babylon conquered the Kingdom of Judah, two generations of Jews endured bitter exile “by the waters of Babylon.” During this period, the prophet Jeremiah recommended a shalom to the captives that spoke specifically to their predicament but that also pointed beyond it to a more general understanding of peace. He advised them to seek the shalom of the city—Babylon—in which they dwelt, for in its shalom they would find their own (Jer 29:7). When it came to the particular historical period in question, Jeremiah’s point was that the Jews could create peace by forgiving and reconciling themselves to their captors. The broader lesson we can take from Jeremiah’s advice is that the willingness to seek reconciliation whenever one has been violated is a necessary condition for shalom. But the specific contours of the reconciliation are fashioned case by case.
In Brueggemann’s hands, the Old Testament notion