As a translator, I am fond of St. Jerome. The cranky early Christian desert monk created the Vulgate Bible and volumes of correspondence on everything from proper scriptural translation to the benefits of asceticism. A story about Jerome, likely apocryphal, sticks with me.
One afternoon, in the midst of prayers, a lion came roaring into the monastery. Some monks fled in fear, others prepared to fight the beast, but St. Jerome sat calmly until the beast came to him, and he pulled a thorn from its paw. The lion immediately relaxed and became a devoted companion to Jerome for the rest of his days.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this story lately — it’s been a tremendously difficult few months, and I don’t feel strong. One by one, I’ve seen communities that I care about, that I am part of, targeted for discrimination — trans folks, immigrants, the disabled, the ill, people of color, my friends and family and loved ones. The lion is rampaging — maybe out of a sense of its own woundedness, but the damage it does is no less real, for all that it feels that people are intent on not recognizing it. Equanimity and calm feel like a far cry from something I’m capable of. These days, I am inclined to scream and rage, not to gently or tenderly assist the thing that is harming the people I love. What good does it do against such pervasive harm to practice nonviolence?
I don’t want to have to let the lion approach me to stop the damage it does. I don’t want to trust that the force of my will is enough to tame the lion when I feel its hot breath on me, and I don’t want to cater to the version of the world its teeth and claws have created. And yet, there is so much political, symbolic, actual strength in that kind of nonviolence. In the introduction to Let the Record Show, an encyclopedic recounting of the work of ACT UP New York, Sarah Schulman draws a line between the actions of the students who sat at the lunch counter of a local Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the AIDS activists who disrupted mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“For one moment,” Schulman writes of the lunch counter protesters, “before being beaten, being threatened with death, facing real violence, and enduring the humiliation of food spilled onto their heads and clothes while being called racial epithets, before being punched and then arrested, these young people created an image that has survived the decades and become emblematic of protest: they created the world that they wanted to see.”
These students at the lunch counter made the violence of segregation visible by putting on display the consequences of their dreams in our real, flawed world. Surely sitting down to eat lunch is not worthy of a death threat? We see the same thing over and over again — people using the violence of the oppressor and their own nonviolence to show the injustices of the world. His own government assassinated St. Oscar Romero for doing his sacred duty of naming the dead and pleading for peace. The AIDS activists Schulman memorializes in the pages of her book created a disruption to everyday life to demonstrate the lack of one in the face of immense, senseless deaths, and they were beaten and arrested for their trouble. Nonviolent direct action casts light on the gap between our world and the world to come.
And yet, I can’t help but think that this form of resistance asks a punishingly high toll from those who practice it. True strength means leaning down even when you’re uncertain of the outcome, when the teeth hold real threat. And the cost of doing this work, of repeatedly putting your self, your body and your humanity on the line, is high. It demands a constant confrontation with all that is dehumanizing and violent, with all the elements of society that wish you dead or disappeared or silent, and it is no wonder so many people come out on the other side of that work feeling less human, silenced and estranged from the world around them. There’s a sense that this work, which we are still in the midst of, will not be completed until we make a world where people can rest and reconcile their experiences with this new place they have given so much to create.
