Give peace (and charity) a chance

Perhaps we all should be celebrating it.

Gandhi — now gone for 60 years — was the voice of "nonviolence" in a world awash in blood. In many ways he's still that voice. Gandhi felt that if someone hit you, hitting them back simply doubled the violence. In that regard, he sounded a lot like that well-known Jewish moralist born in Bethlehem 20 centuries earlier.

Russian author Leo Tolstoy took Christ's injunction "Resist not evil" completely to heart. It changed his life. He refused to retaliate no matter what. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced it.

The truth is, I believe most decent people try to live that way — at least to a point. Like the hero in the old "Kung Fu" television show, we're willing to turn the other cheek — unless the other guy gets really obnoxious. Along with John Wayne, we say "I'm not gonna hit ya. ... I'm not gonna hit ya," just before we level the guy.

The problem is nonviolence doesn't work as a political philosophy. It doesn't work because politics has nothing as powerful as violence to replace it with.

Violence is so powerful, so filled with passion, that it can only be eliminated by something equally as strong. And that's where religion — not politics — holds all the cards.

We need to change that old song and give Christian charity — not peace — a chance.

Jesus did preach against violence. But more than that, he preached in favor or love.

I like the way the Christian theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, put it:

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity," he wrote, "we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Teilhard had a fanciful notion that the world was actually surrounded with a great band of love. That's a little too wild for me, but I do believe it takes faith in a type of love that's greater than anything we feel under the dome of our skulls. It's takes belief in a love that's great enough to fill the dome of heaven.

The key to defeating violence isn't to bottle it up or offer nonviolence. The key is to replace violence with supernatural, transcendental love.

As for Gandhi, he believed nonviolence was a principle worth dying for. Sadly, that's exactly what happened. He was assassinated in 1948, just weeks before I was born. And though he didn't write a lot about love, what he did say is worth noting.

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love," he said, "that is the prerogative of the brave."

Compassion takes bravery. Violence is cowardice.

I was thinking about that at my grandson's football game the other day. Because we want our children and grandchildren to be resilient, we cheer them in their aggression — on the sports field and in competitions and pageants. Perhaps we'll know we've arrived when we learn to get just as excited and cheer just as loudly not only when they save the game, but when they show the kind of compassionate love that's needed to save the world.

E-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com

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