Raven Foundation Mentioned in One of the Best Columns of 2011
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists has announced its list of nominations for the best newspaper columns of 2011. Included in the list is Robert Koehler’s Sept. 7, 2011 column for Tribune Media, Captives to the Logic of Violence, where Raven Foundation Founder Suzanne Ross is quoted extensively. The launch of the Foundation’s project, Be a Hero for Peace, an effort to reclaim the meaning of 9/11, making it a day of reverence, connection and forgiveness, was also highlighted.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit his website.
Suzanne Ross and her husband Keith founded The Raven Foundation in 2007 to increase awareness of mimetic theory. Her first book, The Wicked Truth: When Good People Do Bad Things, examines the lessons of myth, scapegoating and forgiveness in the hit Broadway musical Wicked. Her second book, The Wicked Truth About Love: The Tangles of Desire, explores patterns of romantic love and how to create a fulfilling relationship.
9/11: Never Forget - Love Never Fails
"Love never fails."
- I Corinthians 13:8
As we launched the “Honor Their Memory: Be a Hero for Peace” project last week, Suzanne and I reflected quite a bit on evil, loss, and meaning.
One of the sayings we will continue to hear as 9/11/2011 approaches is “America will not forget!” How can we? The terrible images from that day are etched in our minds. We will always remember where we were when it happened. We will not forget. There is no doubt about that. The question is, “In what way will we remember 9/11?”
Because we can choose how to remember evil events. We can remember them in ways that lead us to more evil, violence, and destruction. Or we can remember them in ways that lead to healing, reconciliation, and love.
I was beginning my senior year at Linfield College in the small town of McMinnville, Oregon on 9/11/2001. The previous year I changed my major to religious studies in order to explore the meaning of human suffering. That topic may seem to some as an impractical existential concern. Many parents balk when their college student majors in religious studies, but for me there was no choice. I had to do it.
My mother died two weeks before the end of my sophomore year at Linfield. For 10 years she suffered from cancer. It was evil. No other word can describe it. It never should have happened. Sometimes, well meaning people would say things like, “All things work for good in God’s time.”
To that statement, I want to say, “No.” And then I want to say, “Yes.” It’s a paradoxical response, but I think any response to evil must be paradoxical because evil is an existential paradox.
There are things that happen in our world that are evil and should be called evil. The cancer that took my mom was evil. It never should have happened, but it did. Her suffering, the pain she went through, the pain her family went through – it never should have happened. No good came from the cancer. My family and I continue to grieve her death. It’s a loss we will never forget.
That’s the “No” to the above statement.
Here’s the “Yes”: Love overcomes evil. As my mother was dying, I witnessed the most amazing love between her and my dad. I remember my dad holding her, comforting her, and loving her in the sincerest, most heartfelt, way. When my mom was at her lowest, most ignominious point in her life, dad was there. As the cancerous evil took my mom’s life, and as she lay in her hospital bed, her husband of 25 years sat by her side.
During this time, my dad and my mom were both models of how to love. Dad gave love. Mom received love. They loved with courage and they were both heroes in my eyes. My mom died, but the love between my parents never failed.
Love won. And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
That’s how I choose to remember my mom and her experience with cancer. Love overcame an evil that never should have happened.
The evil events of 9/11/2001 happened soon after my mother’s death. I witnessed 9/11 from my college campus. I awoke later than usual on that day. As I walked to the living room of my apartment, my roommates faces were glued to the television screen – their faces blank. “What’s going on?” I asked. After a brief pause, one of my roommates turned his head and told me the news.
Like the rest of the United States, we were all in a state of shock. Some of us went to class; others didn’t. I remember watching the events of that day unfold on the television in our student union. The terrible evil and violence of that day is etched in my mind, but so are the selfless acts of love and heroism. Firefighters, policemen, and countless others sacrificed their lives and health in order to save people they didn’t know. That kind of sacrificial love is courageous; it’s heroic. In the midst of tragic evil, there was love.
That’s how I choose to remember 9/11/2001. I can’t forget the evil and violence, but I remember that evil didn’t have the last word. Love didn’t fail on that day. Love overcame evil. Love won.
As heroic and courageous as love is, it is hard to trust that love never fails. So, we easily get caught up in evil – we punch back. And that’s what the United States did. The problem is that, as Walter Wink claims in his book The Powers that Be, “Evil is contagious. No one grapples with it without contamination” (124). As we are entering the 10th year since 9/11, and as we enter the 10th year of the “War on Terror,” we are beginning to realize that war, violence, and evil cannot win. Evil, violence, and war are contagious. The United States got sucked into its trap and we are suffering the evil done to us and the evil we’ve inflicted upon others.
So, how do we remember the past and move forward?
Our friends at the Metta Center suggest we respond by doing something counter-intuitive and extremely courageous. They are challenging us to respond with the 2,000 year old wisdom of loving our enemies. We at Raven are trying to do our part by encouraging people to “Honor Their Memory – Be a Hero for Peace.” During the next few months, we will have activities on the Raven website that will help do and be just that. We invite you to join us and the Metta Center in this project. The world needs courageous people who trust that “love never fails” and who, in their daily lives, will bravely be heroes for peace.
Honor Their Memory - Be a Hero for Peace
Suzanne Ross explains the focus of the Raven Foundation project "Honor Their Memory - Be a Hero for Peace."
We should not forget 9/11, but how will we remember? Can we provide a different response to violence other than more violence? What are the nonviolent ways to respond to violence that can bring about lasting peace, security, and justice? Join the silent majority that is looking for a better way forward.
A Message from Suzanne
Everyone claims to be for peace, even suicide bombers, warring armies, and violent insurgencies. It’s a nearly universal belief across cultures that violence, properly used by the right people for the right cause, can achieve peace or justice or some other noble goal. Why is that? Because also universally believed is that the obstacles to peace are bad guys or bad nations who must be defeated for peace to be realized.
Human history, both ancient and recent, reveals the problem with this thinking – there is always one more bad guy, one more evil enemy whose defeat justifies the use of violence. Ironically, the good guys are as busy justifying their right to use violence as are the bad guys they are battling. The result is that the only difference between good guys and bad guys is what they say or the color of their uniforms, not what they do
In the ten years since 9/11/01, the United States has engaged in a campaign of aggression in the name of justice and national defense. To preserve the peace we have become an instrument of war. To truly honor the dead, to truly memorialize the heroism of the New York firefighters and passengers and crew of flight 93, to be sincerely grateful for the sacrifices of our armed forces overseas, there is only one worthy response: to abandon the flawed strategy of peace by violence and demand a new heroism from all Americans, the heroism required to build peace by peaceful means.
We invite you to “like” this page to send a message to the world that you are ready to do your part for peace. The United States and the entire world are reaching the level of maturity that peace by peaceful means requires. This 9/11, join the global effort to build a sustainable peaceful future for all the world.
Suzanne Ross
Founder
To learn about the practice and power of nonviolence, visit our inspiring partners at the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education.
At the Gate - By Michael Hardin
"At the Gate" was composed by Michael Hardin just days after 9/11/2001. The song evokes the heroism of that day, along with the pain, fear, and grief. In the 10 years since 9/11, America's military response has spread the pain, fear, and greif of that day to Afghanistan and Iraq. Please join the Raven Foundation in our project to honor the memory of 9/11 with a commitment to establishing peace by peaceful means.
Join the Raven Foundation here:http://www.ravenfoundation.org/soar
Like the Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Raven-Foundation/208056722551942#!/pages/Ho...
At The Gate
© 2001 Michael and Lorri Hardin
At 8:48 this morning, my world crashed without warning
From nowhere came barbarians at the gate
Falling sounds of silence echoed in the violence
Entombed within a rubble heap of hate
Nameless men and women became heroes in my eyes
They bravely gave the finest sacrifice
And when all hope was gone, still they carried on
For strangers there not questioning the price
How are we supposed to pray in a time of war?
What are we supposed to say to the gods above?
How are we supposed to feel, when everything’s surreal?
When all that’s left are the ashes of those we love?
My brave new world of pain, human history’s gone insane
Etched now in a memory full of holes
And everyone was there and everyone was watching
While evil stole the laughter from our souls
How are we supposed to pray in a time of war?
What are we supposed to say to the gods above?
How are we supposed to feel, when everything’s surreal?
When all that’s left are the ashes of those we love?
But I do believe in peace and I do believe in hope
And I do believe we’ll find the strength within
And I do believe in love and I do believe in life
And I do believe that evil will not win
Thousands still lie buried and I’m left to wonder why
All I want to be is anywhere but here
Bereft and I’m left grieving with so many things unsaid
Good-byes are the one thing that I fear
Too long the dust’s been blowing; unrest is what it’s sowing
Spewed out from death’s carnivorous grin
I’ve said all I can say and I’ve felt all I can feel
And I never want to go this way again
How are we supposed to pray in a time of war?
What are we supposed to say to the gods above?
How are we supposed to feel, when everything’s surreal?
When all that’s left are the ashes of those we love?
What are we supposed to say to the gods above?
I do believe in love, and I do believe in life
And I do believe that evil will not triumph
Reflections by Michael Hardin
I was working in NYC (Queens) that day. It was a Tuesday. We had a TV set on in the office tuned to CNN so just after the first plane hit we started watching the news coverage. Needless to say there was no more work done that day. I remember at around 11 am after both towers had fallen standing outside the office looking west to the skyline as great billowing clouds of grey and black filled the horizon and my friend Frank Langone saying "This means war." I couldn't get a hold of Lorri as the cell phones all went dead and knew my daughter Arwen had planned on being in the city that day since it was her 21st birthday. I arrived home around 3 pm, Lorri around 4 or so and we still had no word from our daughter. There was only one TV station (the local PBS station) since all the networks had their broadcast towers on the World Trade Center and they no longer existed. We sat glued to the TV until midnight, when our daughter finally came home and we could breathe again.
On Wednesday September 12th it was a hot day and we had no air conditioning in our home, just an attic fan. So all the windows were open drawing air from the outside. The wind shifted and blew straight across Queens and all night long we could smell smoke, burning rubber and burning flesh. We knew that the ash particles had to contain remnants of those who perished in the fire. It was surreal. Everything was shut down, everyone was in shock; New York City and Long Island had gone quiet.
I had been writing songs for almost a decade and on Thursday the 13th September I was playing my guitar in the afternoon when "At The Gate" just poured out of me. Later that night I played it for Lorri. She thought the lyrics needed reworking, but liked the chorus. So Friday night we went to a restaurant and rewrote the verses. We contacted a local recording studio who wanted $75 an hour. We were broke back then but felt we could spend $300 and so on the 20th we went to the studio and laid down two guitar tracks, our vocals and had enough left for one hour of mixing. My friend Jeff Krantz put the song on-line on the 27th September and it immediately began getting tens of thousands of listeners. I still have scores of e-mails sent to me by fire and police who survived September 11th, from families of those who lost loved ones and many others. Lorri and I felt like the song brought some measure of healing and seemed to resonate with those who were hurting.
That's the story of "At the Gate." A careful listener will find echoes to Simon and Garfunkel and Aldous Huxley as well as a number of ironic puns. One final comment: Although I am a monotheist, the reason for the plural "gods" in the chorus reflects my sense that when we are at war we all want our god to be on our side. Thus, the "gods" are plural like one would find in a Greek or Roman pantheon. And because they are rivalrous and fight with each other, we also imitate them and so fight and maim and kill one another. The bridge, which gets repeated is our faith statement that light and love has and will prevail. "Faith is the bird that sings in the dead of night."
Michael Hardin
Executive Director, Preaching Peace
www.preachingpeace.org
Lancaster, PA