Steve Kriss

I honked to stop the war again tonight as I was driving with the rush hour traffic on Lincoln Drive. Horns were echoing up and down the drive, reverberating like they had a few weeks ago when I first joined in the action of horn-honking to stop the war. It’s been my only real action that has manifested anything to react to the war in Iraq.

Earlier today while I was at Barnes and Noble I noticed that there was an overwhelming number of books, calling for a halt to the war and for reconsideration of US American actions and responses in the War on Terror. Honking to stop the war on Lincoln Drive feels so safe and even trendy these pre-election days.

Last Friday, while sitting in a lecture with Eddie Gibbs, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Dean Trulear, a professor at Howard University, we discussed the US American tendency to favor what works over what is true. I think that principle applies to our current situation. Initially it seemed like the war on terror that includes the foray into conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would work. It would solve some lingering problems, enlarge the field for emerging Asian democracies and make US Americans feel safer post 9-11. Now it seems that we’re ready to say that what we were doing isn’t or wasn’t really working and we’re starting to say that across party lines and in mixed company.

I don’t really count myself as an anti-war activist. I am committed to nonviolence, not because I believe it is always what works, but because I believe it is what is true (and lovely and beautiful and holy and all those things that early church leader Paul suggested in one of his letters). And what is true is not always easy and doesn’t always “work.”

Contemporary European philosophers would suggest that there’s some sort of disconnect then with what is real, what is true and what works.

What is real these days is that I have to take off my shoes and keep only trial size bottles of liquids with me in my carry-on. And while I was in the airport the loudspeaker reminded me that we were in code orange for terror potentiality. What is real is that a high school friend named Tristan who I played soccer with was killed in the field in Iraq.

None of these things really “work” for me. I don’t feel any safer now that I can’t take mouthwash with me onto an aircraft. I don’t even know what to make of the terror alert colors and how I’d behave differently whether it’s green, yellow or orange. Though I haven’t talked to Tristan for years, I feel mostly just sad that he was killed in the midst of a conflict and cause that’s losing its nobility.

Honking to end the war is easy. I can do it every night. We honk for lesser things in Philly. But I feel like I join a bandwagon, those who know that the war isn’t working, rather than those who would choose nonviolence even when its hard, not because it works but because its true and beautiful and reveals the Creator. In the Broadway musical, Rent, there is a line that suggests, “the opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.” I wonder what those of us who want to incarnate Jesus-inspired nonviolence might be prepared to create?

This week many of us will go to the polls with the war on terror and in Iraq on our mind. And next weekend, Franconia Mennonite Conference will gather as well, affirming its leaders and again affirming the tradition of nonresistant faith that we’ve confessed for decades. Both of these acts whether polling levers or using touch screens or standing to say decades old words of commitments to nonresistance are in this time and setting as easy as honking our horns. They don’t require much reflective action or thought and we can join with others who are doing the same.

As peace-loving Mennonites, it’s easy to get caught up in saying that we knew a war wouldn’t work; that violence never solves anything. I don’t think that’s a sufficient response these days. For those of us who believe that peacemakers are blessed, there’s an invitation to consider what it means to do more than honk horns, go to the polls and affirm confessions of faith that remind us of a nonresistant history. What might (or already does) manifest if and when we embrace the blessed calling from the Sermon on the Mount to be known as the sons and daughters of God? What is it that might take us beyond this reality into at least a glimpse of what is true and lovely and might even be stunningly beautiful?

Last week, after students returned to clean out their desks and men from the community dismantled everything from the ballfield backstops to the roadside fence, an early morning crew with heavy equipment dismantled the boarded-up West Nickel Mines School in Bart Township, Lancaster County. It was carefully hauled away by truck to a landfill with no trace left behind or left along the way to be sold later by some strange entrepreneurial thrill-seeker on E-bay.

And last week, there was a series of murders in West Philadelphia’s Kingsessing neighborhood with no way to remove the memories or bulldoze the buildings. The city’s tally of murders went past 300 in the same week the Amish girls were killed by Charles Carl Roberts. The same week that Roberts’ pastor at Middle Octorara Presbyterian Church suggested that this kind of thing, these kind of murders, this kind of senseless death doesn’t happen in Lancaster County. It happens instead, she suggested 75 miles east in Philadelphia.

For the last year, I have made Philadelphia my home. I have heard the tales of how the city feels slighted, forsaken and feared by its suburban neighbors. I have grown to understand that fear somewhat, having more locks on my house than ever and even this week altered an evening walk after reading the crime report for my zipcode. And I read this week about how Philadelphia is poor, uneducated and violent in an article from the Inquirer. These are the sorts of things that happen in Philadelphia—an infant is the 300th murder; a five year old dies when a bullet finds her inside of her mother’s car; two senior citizens are killed in Kingsessing accidentally; two 17-year olds die. It’s just another week or two in the City of Brotherly Love.

The Sunday after the shootings, I went to hear my pastor at Oxford Circle Mennonite Church, in one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. He spoke of the Amish and the power of forgiveness. He dared us not to beatify the Amish, but beckoned us to live that same life of powerful forgiveness in this city of violence and fear. All many of us can think of is how sad it is that these innocent Amish girls died in Bart Township, that they didn’t deserve it. Pastor Leonard suggested that maybe this is a tipping point, maybe people will pay attention to gun violence now.

But it’ll be two weeks tomorrow and the death count in Philadelphia continues to tally at an alarming rate. And no one, anywhere, seems to care or to even have any sort of clue about what to do. As a staff member of the Mennonite Church, for one of its Philadelphia region entities (Franconia Conference), I am stunned by our ability to coordinate efforts; of my credit union, Mennonite Financial, to disburse funds to help the families; of Blooming Glen Mennonite Church to organize a prayer gathering; of Penn Foundation to compile a list of websites and resources for dealing with trauma and of Mennonite Disaster Service’s ability to corral counselors and set up funds. I am stunned by the outpouring of compassion, of the willingness of hospitals to write off the care for the Amish girls; of the rapid collection of what will likely end up over a million dollars. I don’t begrudge any of it. In fact I am proud (at least as proud as Mennonite clergy should be) about how quickly we organized and helped and processed.

But I wonder, here, in my Mt. Airy carriage house what it would take for us to mobilize in any way at all in response to the violence that’s escalating in this city. Mennonite Central Committee along with leaders from Anabaptist churches here in Philly are hosting a Packing for Peace Conference just up the road in a few weeks. It’s an admirable event, a first step towards equipping to be peacemakers. I am grateful for that.

But I am still so uncomfortable with how we don’t seem to care for this city that lies at our communal doorsteps, lodged between the pristine farmland of Lancaster and the burgeoning suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery Counties. An old book that I’ve been reading about Quaker Philadelphia suggested that the peace church folks who helped establish this city emphasized inner piety rather than outward care beyond their own communities. It was an environment of religious tolerance and grace that led to a lack of responsibility and care that eventually let the fabric of the city not only come apart at the seams, but actually (and continually) be ripped asunder.

So here I am living just blocks away from the historic Germantown Mennonite meetinghouse, within walking distance of Rittenhouse Town, the home of Willliam Rittenhouse, the first North American Mennonite bishop whose legacy of meshing communication and church leadership I live within centuries later. And I am provoked by my pastor’s sermon, his stirring assertion that what happened in Lancaster County might affect what happens to us here.

I hope Pastor Leonard is right. I hope we can find a way to responsibly care for this city that provides the impetus for high land values for those of us who live just beyond its boundaries. And I hope we do it soon. I am not sure I can bear too many more readings of the crime report, of guns being pulled on persons walking a couple of blocks from my house in mid-day and before sunset. I’ve already ventured a look at housing beyond the city’s limits. It’s not that I don’t think a bit of fear and frustration about what has and is happening here is appropriate. I just hope that we can find ways to not only care, but to have some of the powerfully mobilized compassion that I saw two weeks ago that brought forth embodied grace in a situation that seemed only to be hopeless.