Walking Down the Line

Early on the morning of Ash Wednesday, 1983, people gathered in our living room overlooking the railroad tracks at the entrance to the Trident submarine base. We gathered in a quiet circle around four photographs of victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We read from the Scriptures. We placed ashes on one another's foreheads, and each of us prayed for a blessed Lent for us all.

At the end of the prayer service three of us put on our coats and gloves and nervously - quietly - left the house. We did not know when we would be back, because we intended to enter the submarine base and walk down the railroad tracks in a prayerful pilgrimage, an Ash Wednesday pilgrimage of penitence for the existence of the nuclear weapons shipped upon these tracks.

The three of us - Karol, Mary, and I - are reluctant protesters. None of us desires the court experience, nor the spending of time in jail. We have come over a long time to the belief that our nuclear madness is such that only a different kind of madness can counter it at all. This different kind of madness must be the madness of love, the foolishness of God. Our faith is that if people act as best they can to ring an alarm, to share the full truth of what is happening to us, and are willing to sacrifice their own lives in the process, then God will bring good from those actions. We do not know what that good will be, but we act in the faith that God can use the most imperfect action or person for good.

A look in our pockets would have told anyone how imperfect we were: bundles of leaflets and cards with points of international law typed on them; packages of Kleenex and a pharmacopoeia of cold remedies; a Band-aid box with a few aspirin, a bottle of mercurochrome, and Band-aids; a pocket Bible, a baby picture, a rosary, Lifesavers, freezer tape for mounting the international law cards.

When we left the prayer meeting with three support people to help us enter the base, we were dry-mouthed and wobbly-kneed. As we trudged down the tracks toward the entrance, we felt both anxiety about all going well in the next few minutes, and incredulousness that we were in fact here. How did we get to this place?

How did I get to this place? I had pondered this question over the weeks and months leading up to this Ash Wednesday. What brought me to scramble over barbed wire and put myself inside a fence designed to keep me out? Why do I find myself again at odds with the court system and likely to spend time in jail? When I try to answer those questions, I remember a series of walks in my life, walks which have given me some insight, walks which have opened just a bit of the paradoxical world of the kingdom of God. The age-old image of life as a walk, a pilgrimage, comes into mind. This pilgrimage is part of a longer one that began in my childhood and has no ending in sight.

I remember a series of walks during my ninth and tenth years. Most of those walks took place in a little gray stone church in Bern, Switzerland. The English-speaking community of Bern attended this church (now nameless in my mind). The Sunday school met first for Bible study and recitation. After this was over we went outside and lined up at the front of the church behind our banner, two by two, and the child who had remembered the most Bible verses carried the banner in front of the rest of us. And then we walked - we walked very proudly - down the aisle singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" or "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus." It was a glorious moment, one of high solemnity in my week. I felt sure that to follow Jesus was to stand up and be counted, to do something meaningful, and to know that it would not be easy. The easiness didn't matter. The faithfulness did.

Later, in Germany during the 1961 Berlin crisis, I remember walking from my high school dormitory to classes and back, reflecting on the dog tags I'd been issued to identify my remains if we were attacked, and thinking that perhaps this was the sacrifice we were called upon to make to preserve the Free World - to die in our high school to protect the world from communism. It seemed a reasonable sacrifice to make. I had not lived long in my own country, but I had learned all about it, and I loved it. I knew that it stood for freedom and justice; I knew that the Soviet Union stood for repression and atheism. It made sense to give my life, if that was required, to preserve the freedom of the world.

I remember a later day's walk with a friend across the campus of the University of Wisconsin during the Cuban missile crisis. I didn't understand the crisis very well, but I felt profoundly the fear of death; we looked to the sky as if we could see a missile coming toward us, and we wanted to live.

I had learned that there was much to improve in my own country: I was busy working to support the civil rights movement, and to share food and clothing with people who were persecuted because they wanted to vote. Such persecution was incredible to me. If so much was wrong in my own country, which I'd thought was perfect, could there not also be much that was right in the Soviet Union? Perhaps governments were similar in nature the world over, as I already knew people were the same. Perhaps all governments, including my own, were prone to sacrifice people for the sake of power; perhaps patriotism had to do with loving the land, serving its people, and working to change the wrong one saw.

The question was perplexing, because clearly there must be some way of defending that which is good. How could one defend the good in a good way, a way that did not destroy people? How could one confront the evil?

Two other walks helped to answer that question for me: a walk through downtown Montgomery, Alabama, with thousands of other people in the spring of 1965; a later walk of sorrow in Atlanta, witnessed from a distance. The Selma to Montgomery march was a signpost for me. It pointed the way to Jesus' sayings. "Do not repay evil with evil, but overcome evil with good." In Selma there were thousands of people all sharing their lives, risking their hopes and dreams, to affirm and defend the truth that we are all one. There was a tremendous power in that flow of human beings walking through the streets. It was a power of love.

That Power loved the people in the march and cared for all of them, feeding and clothing them by the hands of strangers, comforting them with the eyes of the unknown. The Power moved us to risk our lives to come together there; yet there was no sense of danger or of hatred toward those who opposed us. We were there for love. The moment in Selma has always seemed to me a foretaste of the kingdom, where anything is possible because love is present. Later, when Martin Luther King was shot, I saw the other side of that power.

The year 1968 was a time of questioning for many of us in the nonviolent movement. We had had our high moments, but they had not created instant change. Violence against nonviolent demonstrators was on the increase. We often went to class past National Guardsmen who were there because we might protest a government policy. What did nonviolence mean in such a context? Was there any hope at all? In the midst of this questioning, Dr. King was killed. I was stunned. We were all stunned. Was this the end? Was this the way it would all end? Death and sorrow, loneliness and the end of hope.

The day of Dr. King's funeral I sat in the kitchen peeling onions, listening to the end of hope on the radio. During the funeral cortege - or the service, I don't know which - I remember looking around the kitchen through tears of despair, and seeing my two little sons walking solemnly together holding hands. One of my sons, Paul, is white. The other, Mark, is black. Paul was about two, and Mark nearly one. Mark had been with us for most of his life; both of them had been on marches as soon as they could be outdoors.

Paul and Mark were walking around the kitchen hand in hand and singing with the music on the radio: "We Shall Overcome." As I watched them there in the dingy kitchen, an understanding broke through - an understanding of those Bible verses I learned long ago, an understanding of what it might mean to "stand up for Jesus," an understanding of the lives and deaths of Gandhi and King.

The victory was not with the forces of hate that killed Dr. King. Victory was with Dr. King and with the love he served. The giving of his life in love had released that love into history. It would not end, nor would it be lost. His love was broadened and deepened now, and his death freed not only Dr. King but people like me, people like my children, who could live more deeply, understand more fully, serve more completely because of his life and his death. It is the giving of one's life that has power, not the taking of another's.

I was to recognize that same giving of life later, when I walked in a tiny peace march in rainy Vancouver with some hibakusha, atomic bomb victims from Japan. They had survived the holocaust, and now they lived only to share the story. Their forgiveness, their love and compassion, fell like dew on dry roots and brought us strength to begin a campaign against the Trident submarine and missile system.

During the course of that campaign we have begun to learn a little about the giving of our lives, trying to speak with truth and compassion, remembering our own faults, respecting people who differ with us. We do not always succeed. We do keep trying.

Karol and Mary and I walked down the railroad tracks inside the base for an hour. We hung our photographs of hibakusha on railway signals, and we taped our international law cards to train cars. We prayed, and we giggled nervously at times. We were trying as best we could to offer our lives.

Our work here goes on every day, leafletting, speaking, tending gardens and children, writing, trying to become peaceful people, trying to confront our own evil and that of our country with love. The climbing of a fence, the going to court, the spending of time in jail are ways of offering life, of sounding an alarm, of crying out for people to listen. We do not know yet with what we will be charged, or whether charges will be dropped as they were last summer.

If we are charged, we will try to speak the truth in court. If we are sentenced, we will do our best to be truthful in jail. If charges are dropped, we will continue on our pilgrimages, and we will probably find ourselves walking down the line again someday - down the rail line, which can be a line of death or a life line, depending upon who walks it, and how.

Shelley Douglass was co-founder of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, located next to the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington, when this article appeared.