High Quality
Open the downloaded document, and select print from the file menu (PDF reader required).
Peaceful Ventures
Issue 9, Spring 2010
A newsletter from Shalom House -- a community of proactive Christian peacemakers started by Circle of Hope
Dear friends,
The end of 2009 closed with some map-making around here and 2010 began with asense of direction. When November comesaround each year, we set aside time to lookback on the year, as well as to pray anddiscern where God is leading is in the comingyear. We call it our mapping time. By thebeginning of January we have identifiedaspects of our life and work that need to beadjusted and we have written down our goalsfor the next year. Here are just a few of thingswe’d like to be about and do in 2010.
Cultivate peacemaking among people of Circle of Hope
by developing more wayspeople can connect with us. In Feb. wehosted a pot-luck with the people in our church who are the
Circle of Peacemakers.
We largely connect with them through our peace listserv (which you can sing up for onour website at www.shalomhouse.us). We letthem know about upcoming events. We haveonline discussions about things like, the U.S.military’s role in providing aid to Haiti after theearthquake or how to respond to “flash mobs”of young people in our city who are either gathering to hang out or cause trouble,depending on who you talk to. So we invitedour larger Circle of Peacemakers to take our conversations offline and bring them face-to-face. We celebrated Emily’s one-year mark inher 2-year commitment with Shalom Houseand thanked God for her passion anddedication. We shared with them our 2010map and asked how people wanted to engagein peacemaking withus. We’ve got folksinterested in everything from helping us withour website to traveling with us abroad thissummer.
Do the societal peacemaking work of Shalom House as a community
through athought-out focus that the communitymembers develop together along with theguidance team. Right now we are workingtogether as a community on
Encountering Militarism
. You’ll read more about it in thisnewsletter.
Move to the rhythms we are establishing tosustain us, build community, carry out our work and prepare ourselves aspeacemakers.
We are continuing our monthlydiscussion times, which took on the newname,
Peace Talks
, with the start of the NewYear. Training ourselves in practical tools innonviolent peacemaking and saturatingourselves in the histories and stories of peoplethe world over, are also crucial things we willseek out this year. And alongside of thispreparation, we will create teach-ins on theGospel of Peace for Circle of Hope folks andother friends. Anchoring our lives and work inJesus’ call for peace must be at the heart of what we are about and what we do.We also continue to set aside time in our busylives to retreat. Most recently we retreatedtogether right here at home. We spent 24hours making curtains for a dinning room,eating Eritrean food, hanging out, praying andchatting. In this set a part time, with a leisurepace, an openness to the present, the ideasstarted to flow and we received the inspirationfor the theme of our 2
nd
annual Shalom Housefestival. In May, we will celebrate
Peacemaking as Vocation
with our friends andfamily of Circle of Hope. There will be moresongs written about the living out of peacemaking. There will be awards given outto real, life peacemakers who we’ve comeacross in our journey. There will be plenty of good food and the message of hope, whichwe must carry with us in the daily strugglesand suffering the world goes through. In our next newsletter, we’ll let you know how it went!
Secure a place among God's world-widepeace movement.
This summer Shalomerswill go on an international learning delegationto both, learn of the extent of U.S. militarismas the default response to internationalconflicts, and to meet nonviolent peacemakersin a place of daily, extreme violence. We willcome back to our church community withlessons learned and stories to share that willhelp us as a community in Philadelphia liveout the Gospel of Peace. We plan to makethese international learning delegations ayearly habit!So, we’re excited and energized by the visionthat was developed out of our time of mapping. We know that it is through thepresence of God and the turning over of our work, vision and lives to God, that we aresustained.
Peace be with you,Mimi and Emily
Shalom Houseis goingpaperless!
We need your emailaddress! We have begundistributing our quarterlynewsletter in electronicformat. To update your information, please emailus at:peace@shalomhouse.us
,with “Newsletter” in thesubject line.
If we confrontmilitarism, closedown seedy gunshops, or shoplocally butcannot look atglossyrecruiters, flag-waving counter-protesters, andcorporate CEOswith deep lovefor them in ourhearts, we aremissing the point.Let’s tear downthe gates of hell,but withconstantchecking ofourselves inhumility andprayer that wemay fully take onthe truepeace
and thegood news that Jesus has tobring.
-Josiah Lash,Shalom House blogFeb 23, 2010
Encountering Militarism
2010 has found us running head-on into our new focus. With theconnections and activities set inmotion last year with gun violencereduction in Philadelphia, ShalomHouse has transitioned its mainfocus to looking at militarism in our country and our culture. AsChristians we are called to workout our conflicts nonviolently. AsChristians who live in the midst of the most war-making, militarized nation in the world, we needtospeak to this militarism, resist it and demonstrate
alter natives.InJanuary Shalom Houseparticipated
in anall-night vigil on the eve of the day
commemorating Dr. MartinLuther KingJr. With others at Circle of Hope wespent the evening looking atthe evils of
militarism, materialism, and r acism. We
areencouraged by Dr. King’switness for
Chr ist in speaking out against the
exploitative violence of the Vietnam war.
We see many parallels between Dr.
King’s and our current resistance.
Striving to bring to light the reality of militarism as our collective normative culture, we arranged afilmscreening of the documentary Why We Fight. This filmlooks at the development of the military industrial complex; itdissects war-making as profiteering, and revisits PresidentEisenhower’s warning against the development of suchthings, directly linking these trends and the US’s involvementin Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 70 people attended the filmscr eening, and we held a lively monthly Peace Talk thefollowing week to continue the discussion. We continued tolookat the varied and sometimes conflicting motives behindcreating and sustaining wars.The long awaited Shalom Housebook club found itsfooting andhas taken off this season as well.
, written by Andr ew Bacevich,is a look at how themilitary andcultural perceptionsof war havemorphed to matchpolitical andcorporate interests over the lasthalf-century. We have held two of the three discussions on this bookso far. It is an important read for anyone who wants a criticalaccount of how our massivestanding military came to be, andhow the entanglement of military,civil society, and values haveentangled themselves.
As part of the resistance built into our encounteringmilitarism, in February we took a group of almost 20 people
to the Army Experience Center (AEC). At $12 million, this
stateof the art technology center does the work of 7 regional
recruiting offices, fully equipped with over 30 networkedcomputers and video game consoles, and 3 combatsimulators. During our afternoon at the AEC some of our groupwere able to see the battle simulators of blackhawkhelicopters, hummvees with life-like artillery, and faux-missions and faux-enemies. The overall tone of our conversation following the experience was 1 - It’s no wonder young people are attracted to this and 2 - How did we, as asociety and the church, allow the military to become the bestanswer for a lack of opportunities (job training, money for college, travel, community)? These are some of thequestions that guide us as we continue working towardspeace.The
Truth Commission on Conscience in War,
inspired by thedocumentary
Soldiers of Conscience
,and held at the historic RiversideChurch in Manhattan, presentedtestimony from war veterans,professionals and religious leadersregarding the moral injury of war andthe right to selective conscientiousobjection. We organized a group of community members from Circle of Hope to go to the truth commission toadd to our awareness the knowledge of those who have stood firm in their convictions against war and violence, and who have paiddearly for it. We are working with partners in the Philadelphiaarea to continue a deeper conversation on this topic.As we struggle with the questions of war and violence wehave focused most of our conversations so far this season onraising awareness of the pervasiveness of militarism in our culture and the reality of war for all involved. With the springwe are shifting our efforts to digging up examples of thosewho are finding alternative to war, those who have said “nomore!” in light of their roles in the military machine. We hopeto gather even more creative alternatives to provideopportunities, to resist violence and war-making, and to showthe power of the love of Jesus for peace and truereconciliation.Learning Delegation Opportunities:-Witness for Peace (www.witnessforpeace.org) and ChristianPeacemaker Teams (www.cpt.org) are both organizations
that organize trips around the world to learn from those whoar e working in areas of conflict learning from peacemakersand displaced peoples. There are a variety of delegationthrough these groups to central and south America, as wellasthe Middle East. Please check their websites for moreinf ormation. Shalom House is considering a delegation withWFP that ties into our focus on militarism. We’ll be excitedtoshare this experience with you.
-Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Coalition of Human
Rights)
The Migrant Trail,May 31- June 6, 2010
is a 75-mile journey from Sásabe,Sonora to Tucson, Arizona in
solidarity with our migrant sisters and brothers who have
walked this trail and lost their lives. We bear witness to the
lives that are lost, the families who mourn, and the
communities that suffer thedivisions that borders wreak on
all of us.
"But I tell you who hear me:Love your enemies, do goodtothose who hate you, blessthose who curse you, prayfor those who mistreat you.”
Community Living: Spirituality
Shalom House is an endeavor in common living andcommon mission. We work to support each other in our personal journeys of faith and peacemaking. We worktogether to compliment each others’ strengths andweaknesses, seeking to bring the peaceful Kingdom of God to our home, our community, and our world.Through our conflicts and our fellowship, our creationand our consumption, our work and our play we hope torealize the peaceful and loving ways Jesus calls us tolive.We are continually seeking additional people to
join us
in this endeavor of living together and working together for peace, for God’s kingdom on earth. If you would liketo learn more about living and working at Shalom Houseor our application process, please do not hesitate tocontact us. Shalom House community members andthe Guidance Team are faithfully awaiting those whohave yet to find our doors.In the meantime we have taken this time of having fewcommunity members to tapinto the friends, partnersand resources that surround us. The people of Circle of Hope and our extended networks have worked with usin planning events, writing for our blog, offering helpwith our garden or our website, monetary donations thathave allowed us to keep going with fewer communitymembers than we expected. We are appreciative of allthe ways the people around us have supported thiswork and prayed with us over the past several months.
If you would like to become more involved with the work of Shalom House, if you have a skill, time, or money togive, please call us (215-474-1195) or email us( peace@shalomhouse.us
) to let us know!
Partnering with Shalom House
We are in Holy Week right now,walking with Jesus in his last daysbefore his execution on Good Fridayand his resurrection on Sunday.During Lent, the 40 days leading upthese moments, we have beentaking this time trying to get rid of obstructions that keep us from God,so that we can get closer to God,and be transformed and reconciledto God.We take the season of Lent quiteseriously around here at Circle of Hope and Shalom House. Thereare things to let go and to take on.This requires the disciple of 40 daysof fasting and intentionality. Itrequires changing our schedulesand daily routines. And thebeautiful thing about theserequirements is that they start toturn into liberation. We freeourselves from the things thatenslave us to ourselves and to thethings that tear us down.Ash Wednesday, Emily and I metwith many others in the meetingspace of our Frankford and Norriscongregation. We sat in silence,named our obstructions, burnedthem and took on the ashes. As thebeginning of Lent came aroundEmily and I were both expressingthe same desire. We needed morebalanced lives. So, Emily gave upFacebook. She wanted a breakfrom seeing the world through thelens of Facebook, and she wantedto redistribute the way she uses her time to create space for things likereading and reflection. Mimi gaveup “overtasking,” setting the limit of 9 hours of work and tasking a day.Anything not done by then, had towait until the next day, and the restof the time was to be spent living lifein other ways besides work.We are now taking theseobstructions, the fast from them, andthe moments we have met God over the last 6 weeks and going throughHoly Week with Jesus. We gather each night with our larger Circle of Hope community, in the upper rooms of our meeting spaces.One of our pastors explains HolyWeek in this way:
We are following along with Paul’s desire inPhilippians 3:10-11: I want to know Christ and the power of hisresurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so,somehow, to attain to theresurrection from the dead. We aredeliberately slowing down and turning toward Jesus. We want toknow Christ. We intend to share hissufferings. We need to die with him.We desire to know the power of hisresurrection.
On Good Friday, Circle of Hope willwalk, pray and meditate through thestations of the cross in our neighborhoods. On Sunday beforethe sun rises we will gather on ahilltop in Fairmount Park,overlooking the Schuylkill River andPhiladelphia, to celebrate theresurrection. It is the discipline,intentionality, fasting, love,togetherness of this season of Lentthat exemplifies the life we strive for at Shalom House as a community of Jesus-followers seeking to reconcileourselves to God and to humanity.
Add a Comment