When the Federal Government put out a cartoon saying ‘No Way’ to asylum seekers from Afghanistan, it struck a gong that reverberated around the nation. Some church leaders gathered together to begin a movement, playing off the government’s slogan. They began calling themselves ‘Love Makes A Way’. Here were people who would seek to use nonviolent actions to call attention to the injustices in our asylum seeker system, notably the close to 1000 children in immigration detention.
Drawing upon the inspiration of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, this was an ecumenical coming together of Christians with the backing of ‘Pace e Bene Australia,’ a group dedicated to a spirituality of nonviolence. With leaders across the nation like Perth’s Jarrod McKenna and Sydney’s Justin Whelan, they began training in the kinds of actions they would seek to perform. Their strategy started to take shape: sit-ins in the electorate offices of federal parliamentarians, asking that justice may ‘roll down like waters’.
The movement would hold simultaneous sit-ins at the electorate offices of the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, calling on both sides of politics to make a way for the vulnerable at our door. In a sense they were joining themselves with the prophetic tradition, crying out that society may welcome the stranger, care for the orphan and make space for the widow. In each case the electorate office staff called the police, with each person involved in the protest making a choice whether to stay put. Protestors who remained were then charged with ‘trespass’, meaning they would have their day in court. They would trust that words be given them.
When an Adelaide sit-in eventuated in the electorate office of Jamie Briggs MP, included among those sitting-in was Rabbi Shoshana Kaminsky of Beit Shalom Synagogue. She went on to say ‘I am risking arrest today because the most-repeated teaching in the Hebrew Bible is to treat the stranger with kindness. We Jews trace our roots back to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt 3000 years ago and re-enact the agony of slavery each year at the festival of Passover. The International Refugee law that our government is undermining was written to say ‘never again’ after the Holocaust. I cannot stand idly by and watch my government keep some of the world's most vulnerable children in detention when my faith commands me to act.’
The movement had reached beyond the confines of group boundaries, gaining momentum with an online sharing of the campaign on Facebook and Twitter. But what are the roots of these nonviolent actions? Pace e Bene says it draws on ‘the vision of Jesus, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Shelley Douglass, John Dear and many others.’ As Gandhi said ‘An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.’ Nonviolence in the pursuit of peace recognises that our world is beset by such violence that the only strategy we have is to resist the very strategies of the violent. When our State sanctions draconian policies and actively carries them out, not to act is to be compliant and even perhaps complicit. As Love Makes A Way is fond of quoting King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, ‘Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatise the issue that it can no longer be ignored.’
So we as a community are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths that sanction the use of power to keep the vulnerable at bay. We are encouraged to confront the words that are given precedence in our community. We hear words from our Prime Minister, Mr Abbott: ‘I don't think it's a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door... I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way… If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump the queue, if you take yourself and your family on a leaky boat, that's doing the wrong thing, not the right thing, and we shouldn't encourage it.’ Then we see faith leaders spending a whole day in a politician’s electorate office and we wonder.
One key passage for Christians is the parable of the Good Samaritan. A lawyer asks a question of Jesus regarding the dual commandment to love God and neighbour. He asks ‘who is my neighbour?” Jesus goes on to tell the story of a man mortally wounded, stripped and beaten by a band of robbers. Both priest and levite see him on their way, and yet they each decide to pass by on the other side. The Samaritan stops. He engages. He is ‘moved with pity’.
This movement of the heart leads him to tend the wounds of the man, taking him to an inn where he will be cared for. Jesus concludes that the one who shows mercy is the one who behaves like a neighbour.
In a globalised world of forced migration because of war, discrimination, violence and repression, our response to the question ‘who is my neighbour?’ needs an expansive imagination. In order to to stop and consider, to let ourselves be ‘moved with pity’, we need the prophetic witness of the Love Makes A Way movement. We need the witness of people with an ability to bring the needs of the distressed to the doors of the powerful.
There is at this place of encounter the possibility of transformation. For as with the levite and the priest, what looks like the greed of the strong could be the fear of being too involved, the fear of being changed by the other and their needs. In one direct action by the movement, police officers were moved by the integrity of the group’s actions. With nonviolent action led by the heart, the powers that be are shown a liberating authority and spirit at work. The State is encouraged to imagine a new way of behaving.
As the lawyer in the parable is told ‘Go and do likewise’, so the politician whose office is prayed in is invited to consider the ways they respond to the needs of our asylum seeker neighbours.
Maybe then they too may look to Martin Luther King Jr. writing in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ This is the significance of action and inaction. He went on, ’We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.’ What we do matters. The people involved in King’s nonviolent movement went through training in purification of motives, and what they would accept themselves. They asked these questions: ‘Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?’ and ‘Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?’ King saw nonviolent direct action as helping his brothers and sisters ‘rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.’ It is in this tradition that Love Makes A Way stands. These actions are to help end the monologue from those in power, and begin society’s considered dialogue on the question being put. Why children in detention? Why punishment without crime?
Over fifty years ago, one prophet of peace Thomas Merton wrote to another, his friend Dan Berrigan SJ. ‘The real job is to lay the groundwork for a deep change of heart on the part of the whole nation so that one day it can really go through the metanoia we need for a peaceful world.’ This change of heart will only come if we stop and consider. If we are moved by the faces, the names, and the stories such that our action brings on the kind of crisis King believes will force the community to confront the issue. What is being done in our name?
King in his time was disappointed with the white moderate who says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’ He responds that ‘shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.’ Dan Berrigan writes, ‘We want the peace; but most of us do not want to pay the price of peace. We still dream of a peace that has no cost attached.’
The federal government has created a limbo situation for our asylum seekers, particularly children. Nonviolent direct action through movements such as Love Makes A Way has the effect of helping people stop, and thus it changes hearts. As Dan Berrigan says ‘Every slavery is an invitation to another exodus; every exodus is guided by a dark promise.’ For every asylum seeker we send back on the open seas, we lose a potential teacher, cricketer or Australian of the Year. Love Makes A Way for asylum seekers.
James O'Brien is currently enrolled in a Diploma in English Literature at Sydney University and enjoys writing, football and the cello. This essay is the first prize winner in the 2014 Margaret Dooley Award for Young Writers. Twitter: @jpeob.