Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

I'm John, Father John Deere, and today I'm speaking for part two of our conversation with social justice activist and advocate, Sister Simone Campbell.

This is a project of www .beatitudescenter .org, where you can find many other podcasts and regular Zoom programs on the nonviolence of Jesus and practicing nonviolence and working for justice, disarmament, and peace.

So let's begin, as we always do, with a little prayer.

And I invite you, wherever you are, just to pause for a moment and take a deep breath.

And just to relax and notice how you're feeling.

Let's all recenter ourselves.

And again, enter into the presence of the God of peace who loves you infinitely and personally and loves everyone everywhere.

And let's welcome the nonviolent Jesus.

and his Holy Spirit here with us and ask for the grace to follow him more faithfully and to do God's will.

God of peace, thank you for all the blessings of life, love, and peace that you give us.

Be with us now as we reflect together with Sister Simone on your call to follow the nonviolent Jesus and to work for justice and disarmament and creation.

and to welcome your reign of peace and nonviolence.

Bless us, inspire us, disarm us, strengthen us, and send us out to do your will, to do our part in helping to end poverty, injustice, racism, greed, war, genocide, fascism, nuclear weapons, and the destruction of the beautiful creation, that we might be your holy beatitude people.

your holy peacemakers, and truly welcome your reign of universal love, nonviolence, and peace on earth.

We ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So it's a pleasure to welcome back my friend Sister Simone Campbell, one of the strongest voices and leading organizers.

for social and economic justice in the United States.

So this is part two of our two -part conversation.

If you weren't able to listen to the first part, I invite you to go back and listen to that first, which was terrific, posted last week.

We're just going to take up from where we left off, but just a brief introduction again.

Sister Simone Campbell is a Roman Catholic sister of social service, a religious leader, attorney, author, and recipient of the 2022 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She worked for 17 years as executive director of NETWORK, the National Catholic Lobby for Social Justice, and was leader of Nuns on the Bus.

And her policy work was critical in the passing of the Affordable Care Act.

Before that, she worked for 18 years at the Oakland Community Law Center, which she founded.

the award -winning author of two great books, None on the Bus and Hunger for Hope.

So Sister Simone Campbell, welcome back to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast.

Great to be with you.

So we're going to take up where we left off, and I was so moved by your reflections the last time about all your lifelong advocacy, your work as a lawyer on behalf of the working poor, and how that led you to network and then to really to...

to publicly engage everybody on all sides in the government to help achieve the Affordable Care Act.

And really then through Nuns on the Bus and so many other projects and your books to become a public figure for justice, which is what we need.

And then I got your book, Simone, Hunger for Hope.

Prophetic Communities, Contemplation, and the Common Good, published by Orbis, which I hope everyone will get.

And it walks through some of the basic themes, as I see it, Simone, that have motivated you and have supported you in this amazing work you've done.

When we last talked and I was saying, well, how do we do this?

How do we stand up publicly and practice nonviolence and be nonviolent?

But even...

enter into nonviolent conflict resolution with people who oppose us, you immediately started speaking about your contemplative practice.

And that's what you begin the book with, which I was very moved by.

So tell us more about that and how that connects to all work for justice and peace.

And so, I mean, what do you do?

What is your contemplative practice?

What do you encourage people to do?

And then after that, Or during this, I want to also hear about how you have a Zen practice, which I also have.

And I learned from Merton, which has made a huge difference in all this.

Well, okay.

So my practice is every morning, well, I take weekends off.

Monday through Friday, I have a half hour of basically Zen sitting, which is being quiet, emptying.

myself, opening myself.

I think of it as deep listening, as being quiet so that other things can bubble up.

And then I do a half hour of some reading.

That's my morning tradition.

But during the day, then if I'm in a a situation or engaged with somebody, I try to bring the same sense of quiet, listening, attentiveness to whoever I'm with as I do to the divine in the morning.

And it's the tradition of listening that I find so important and so imperative if we're going to be able to...

create collaborations, coalitions, if we are going to create change, because what's required is understanding what is happening in the other person as much as what's happening in me.

Does that make sense?

It does, and it's critically important.

So let me ask you, in terms of all the people listening, What concrete suggestions you have to encourage people in this time when very few people seem to be listening to other people about how to do it.

Because what was so important to me was that, okay, I've got a personal, private, contemplative Zen practice of sitting and deep listening every morning.

But then you said, and then I live out my day in that.

And I continue, in a sense, to the practice of deep listening.

What advice do you have for others about how they can do that in their day to day?

Just try it.

Be at it.

But you know what it what it takes, John, for me is to I have to be in a I have to feel secure in myself to be willing to open myself up to other points of view.

And if I'm having these days.

I get riled about a whole bunch of stuff.

If I'm riled, I can't do this.

So I have to find a way to kind of like a lightning rod to get that energy off and gone and then be curious about another.

And it's that curiosity.

We talked really briefly about nuns on the bus, but, you know.

We did, what, seven tours.

And the bus itself became literally a vehicle of curiosity.

Because our goal was to bring a message, yeah, but our goal was to learn from the people we met along the road.

And if we think of ourselves as learners, as opposed to...

controllers or dominators or any of this other stuff it's way easier to have curiosity for the other because that's my job is to be curious to learn and then to share and see for me holy curiosity goes along with sacred gossip where i share what i've heard so that the combination allows for a weaving together that's very different than usual political discourse.

Wow, that's beautiful.

Thank you.

I always say wow, I'm trying not to.

I'm very moved.

You know, there was a funny story you told about a friend of ours who was interviewing you in your book.

You tell the story.

What's your favorite story of Jesus?

I don't have any.

Who are you asking about?

And you said, well, I like the Holy Spirit.

And that was just beautiful because that's the charism of your order.

And you talk about Pentecost and you've already talked.

in your journey about Pentecostal moments.

And isn't that the heart of the Christian story that we carry on in the spirit of the nonviolent Jesus?

Tell me about that.

And living, you know, these Pentecostal moments and living according to the Holy Spirit, you know, the image is so powerful.

They're set on fire, and then they're set out, and they have to speak out publicly.

about Jesus and the gospel, which means justice and discernment.

So tell me about that connection.

Tell us about Pentecost today.

Oh my gosh.

Well, okay.

So my community is, we're dedicated to the Holy Spirit.

So the medal we wear is the Holy Spirit, says come Holy Spirit.

And our big feast is Pentecost.

But what I have learned in...

living this life for so long is that Pentecost really is about the flourishing of the Spirit in places that are challenging or where I'm striving to understand or I'm, you know, could be a little tough.

Or potential conflict.

Pentecost is often about conflict.

You know, and remember the story of Pentecost is that the apostles are all afraid.

They're in the upper room.

They don't know what to do.

And the spirit comes on.

And then Peter and the apostles get up on the roof and they start preaching to people and people understand them in their own language.

Now, the thing is, is the apostles didn't learn other languages.

So for me, what that says is I don't need to know your language.

But I need to be able to listen well enough and communicate well enough that what I say might touch you.

It's my language to your language.

And that's the important thing.

And the Pentecost is about the fire of the spirit.

It's that you can't contain it.

You can't just stay in the upper room.

You got to move on.

You got to be engaged.

You have to be a part of it.

Though I was giving a retreat.

I love being fire.

I love being fire.

For me, that spiritual experience of being fire is just so, so exciting, so seductive.

Anyway, so I was giving a retreat to a bunch of sisters.

I had never done an eight -day retreat before.

I did this summer, and at one point I said to the group, oh, don't you just want to be fire?

And this one sister said, oh, absolutely not.

It just made me laugh.

I thought, each of us has her own special calling.

They're like, can we get another retreat leader?

You know, you're reminding me of my friend and teacher, Daniel Berrigan, who on a bad day once when the bishops voted unanimously to support the bombing of Afghanistan shortly after September 11th, he said, they're all like firemen at Pentecost putting out the fire of the Holy Spirit.

I never forgot that because who would even think of that?

Yeah.

We want to put out the fires of the Holy Spirit, whereas you and I, I hope, are trying to help keep the fire going.

Now, this is a related question, and you brought this up in the book, so I'm putting it on your scene.

It's my fault.

Okay.

Prophetic imagination.

So I want you to talk about that.

It's a very important phrase for me and for my teacher, Daniel Berrigan, and it's basically, you know, With the contemplative Zen practice and the Holy Spirit, you see the world differently.

You see through the eyes of Jesus.

And then you have to prophetically, well, that just means speaking out what you're hearing in your contemplative practice.

So we're really talking public speaking for justice and discernment.

And I just want to ask you, I'm just throwing all these words and images out to you.

You can take them any way you want.

But I think that's a very big part of the work for justice and peace.

You know, growing up when I did as a young Jesuit with the Barragans, I just thought, well, this is a requirement of discipleship today, of living out Pentecost.

You have to go out publicly.

I don't want to speak.

And I've spoken to the whole world for the last 45 years.

But I still don't like it.

And you know that quote that, what's the greatest fear?

This has been studied by Gallup.

Greatest fear of all the people in the United States is public speaking.

Death is second.

Do you know that's the very truth?

People don't know the secret.

Tell me all about that.

What is the secret?

For me, okay, I do a fair amount of public speaking.

But before, okay, I'm prepared.

I'll have an outline.

I'll do something.

But before.

It'll just be a prayer, come Holy Spirit.

And my prayer is not that I say the right thing, but may they hear what they need.

And that frees me then to know that the Spirit will use words for what people need.

I've had people come up to me after a talk I've given and say I said something.

I didn't say that, but that was all right.

That's what they got.

And I think it's the...

We become, it's too easy in speaking, public speaking, to become focused on ourselves as opposed to the needs of the people that you're speaking to.

May they hear what they need.

That's all my prayer is.

And if I'm the vehicle of it, great.

They get some other ideas, even better.

But to be, trust that the Spirit will work with what's given.

Oh, that's so beautiful because, of course, it became a prayer, and then it's not about you, it's about God.

I remember my friend, you probably know her well too, Sister Joan Chittister, telling me not too long ago that her entire life, for all the millions of people she's spoken to, the moment she's walking from the edge of the stage to the microphone.

She's praying, okay, it's you.

It's all about you.

Whatever you want to say, you say through me.

I don't care.

It's not about me.

I'm too old.

I've been there, done that.

And it's taken me a long time to learn that, you know, as a Jesuit race, you know, to get over the ego and the self and to take credit.

That's such baloney.

So tell me then about this beautiful phrase of Walter Brueggemann, which you use in Hunger for Hope, the prophetic imagination.

I know I stole it from him.

You stole it.

I'm calling you out on that.

I'm grateful.

I'm grateful that you are, because I have to properly footnote, I am a lawyer, you know.

Okay, so his book, Prophetic Imagination, was very formative in shaping my understanding of Scripture.

And so he's got one...

little paragraph in the intro to the second edition, 25 years after it was first published, it was published again.

And unbeknownst to myself, I bought the second version and then went to put, after I read it, I was so excited.

It was fabulous.

Went to put it on the shelf.

I did have his first edition too.

And I totally forgotten 25 years earlier.

But anyway, what he says is that the community, nurture is a prophetic imagination and that that community biblically has five characteristics and the first is a long and available memory which is one of the things we struggle with in our country is that we don't have a long and available memory people forget like i forgot that I had his book 25 years earlier.

But that's one thing, that we forget our history.

We forget what we struggled through.

We forget, or we try to erase it, what's happening with the African -American Museum now and erasing the story of our sinful past in slavery.

So it's a long and available memory.

Touching the pain of the world is real.

And what he says is that our temptation is to fix the pain of the world.

And that's not what we're called to, that if we really want to have a prophetic imagination, we have to touch the reality of the pain.

We have to have an active experience of hope.

Not like, oh, yeah, I had hope once.

You know, when I took first vows, I was very hopeful.

No, hope has to continue.

And hope is the communal virtue.

That's what I'm writing about.

So you've got to be in connection community.

The fourth is to have effective, he says, is effective discourse across generations.

And I add, and cultures.

Because if you don't talk across generations, we're not going to have imagination.

We're not going to be able to see in new ways.

We're not going to understand the weaving of our society.

And then the last, which is really distressing because it's hard, is his fifth characteristic of a community that nurtures.

A prophetic imagination is the capacity to sustain long -term tension with the dominant culture.

Isn't that annoying?

But it is that capacity because in the long -term tension is the potential for growth inside an imagination.

Now, I must confess, it's easier for me to do that with our civil society.

Than it is for me to do with the church.

And it's equally true in the church.

Thank you so much, Simone.

That's so powerful.

We could talk all day about that some more and his themes and just I hope everyone will mull over what Simone has said about.

How can we all reclaim the prophetic imagination?

Exactly.

It's all of ours.

It's all of ours.

All of ours.

That's the key, I think, thing Jesus wants us to do.

It's even in the Sermon on the Mount.

Then you get to be like the prophets of old.

If you live the Beatitudes, then you get to do this, rejoice and be glad.

And Dan talked a lot about that.

Now we get to be like Dorothy Day and Dr.

King.

But you were focusing on how all of this flows from community.

Now, you know, when I was young and about in the 80s, we were all forming small group communities to resist Central America, U .S.

war making and nukes and poverty.

There were affinity groups, even in non -church or non -religious activists.

It seems to me that a lot of that is gone, but we need it more than ever today.

And that's what our sisters and brothers in Latin America and Africa learned, the base community movement.

So I want you to talk about community and how we might, how people, if they don't have it, could form it around them as a way to go forward and live out this prophetic imagination, be advocates for justice.

So, for example.

You know, just call like -minded friends together or start a Pucks Christy group or the importance of community in your life.

Dan Berrigan, you know, I watched him for 35 years.

He actually had dozens of communities.

He had communities within communities within communities.

He even had a small peace group that met every other Tuesday night for the last 35 years of his life.

And he never missed a meeting.

There were six of us there.

And that's what sustained him.

But they had the Jesuit community.

Anyway, tell us your thoughts on community, which you write about beautifully in the book.

Well, I think community is at the heart of hope.

I mean, you can't have hope if you don't have community, I think.

And that a lot of the hardship that people are...

laboring through now is for lack of community.

I mean, I don't want to knock podcasts.

This is great.

But we have podcasts.

You can hear anything now.

You can see it on YouTube.

You can redo it.

I can check my phone.

I just got an email from a friend.

Oh, that's great.

But that's not community.

Community is when you're in relationship enough that you rub each other a little bit so that some of my barnacles fall off and maybe some of yours do too.

And then we're able to have fresh, inside fresh capacity to see the world in some different ways.

And I guess one of the things that was always so important for me, wherever I have been doing ministry, is that we create a small community in that context.

For instance, at Network or at the Law Center, We would eat lunch together, whoever was around.

But it wasn't because it was a rule.

It was because of forming community, being connected, caring beyond just the task, knowing you well enough and you're knowing me well enough that we could meet in some meaningful fashion.

That's at the heart of what's missing, I think, right now.

It's individualism and isolation.

I don't want to just nix this AI thing, but AI is going to have to find community somehow.

Well, that's beautiful and very powerful.

Thank you, and I hope we can all, as Simone says, continue to build community.

You've also used the word hope a lot, and that's the name of your book, Hunger for Hope.

I was very moved, too, when you talked about touching the pain and that, you know, I certainly felt on fire with hope as a young kid when I was starting my journey.

And it's very different now.

I was thinking, too, so I want to ask you about hope.

I want you to talk about that and experiencing that and cultivating it.

And I'm reflecting with you to give you a moment here before you get into it.

I was thinking, too, as you spoke about my take on the story of.

The doubting Thomas at the end of the Gospel of John, and we could talk a lot about that, but he doesn't believe until he touches the wounds.

And some of us really need to touch the wounds of the poor and the pain of the suffering people on the planet before we can be reignited in hope.

And be set on fire again and really believe and say, my Lord and my God, which means he's going to get killed because Diocletian had said only he's to be allowed to be called my Lord and my God.

Then, Simone, I found this incredible statement from Martin Luther King.

Forgive me, I tell everybody about this, so you're stuck with me.

He never talked about hope.

Did you ever notice that about Martin?

He never.

And I always say that's because everything he did worked out.

You know, and he was there was a real burden.

He couldn't figure it out.

Like, oh, my God, people expect me to walk on water.

And then he spoke out against the Vietnam War.

And then he says, we're bringing all the poor to D .C.

to demand justice.

And his days were numbered and he knew it.

And the week.

Before he was killed, he started talking about hope for the first time in his life.

And in Memphis, one of the things he said was, tonight I'm announcing my definition of hope, which is very different than anything I'd ever heard of.

He called it the final refusal to give up.

I'm just not going away, folks.

You're going to have to kill me.

And I find that very powerful.

So tell me about living in hope and maintaining hope and experiencing hope.

And what that all means for us today and this kind of hopeless moment we're facing.

Or maybe it's not hopeless.

Maybe it's a new opportunity.

We don't know.

Yeah, we don't know.

And it can be hopeless if we don't respond.

But for me, it really is critically connected to touching the pain of the world as real.

Let me give you a story.

On the first bus trip in Cincinnati, these two women, Jeannie and Lynn, came and they're a couple and they had just been to Jeannie's sister's funeral.

Jeannie's sister, Margaret, died because she didn't have health care.

This was before the ACA had been fully implemented.

She'd lost her job in the recession.

When she lost her job, she lost her health care.

By the time she was literally carried into the emergency room, she was terminally ill with colon cancer.

And to touch that reality, and they brought me, Jeannie and Lynn brought me her picture.

Touching that picture.

allows me to touch the pain that Margaret lived through and renews my hope, my spirit, that no more Margaret should die for lack of health care.

But it's not a theory.

It's not a removed thing.

It's not something.

It's Margaret.

Margaret fuels my passion that we as a nation take care of all of our people.

The richest nation on earth?

I think we can do it.

But see the connection between being in a relationship with Jeannie and Lynn, having that connectedness, and then being able to touch the pain of the world.

That just sets fire.

It demands a response.

I can't sit still.

That's hope.

That's living in hope.

And then living out that fire, which is the Pentecost again.

Simone, that's so helpful.

Thank you.

I have two big ones to ask you, but I still have a hundred other questions for you.

So we're going to have to do this some other day.

Now, look, forgive me for if this is crossing a boundary, but you wrote an amazing essay in America magazine about being on the Colbert show.

And I want to ask you about that because I've never seen anybody talk about such an experience.

We're really talking here about the ego.

And I think it's very helpful for all of us.

And it was really, to me, an invitation and humility.

I don't remember when it came out or what you remember of it, but I only just read it the other day.

And basically you're going, hey, friends, I was on the Colbert show.

You want to know what that was like?

And so, of course, you know, Simone, full disclosure.

I'm asking this personally because it's stuff I struggle with, my big ego.

And letting go of the self and self -will and doing only God's will and finally learning humility before God, especially if we want to work for God or be filled with the Spirit.

And you write about the whole journey of having to process having been on The Colbert Show.

Wait a second.

Is this my ego run amok getting out of control when I'm supposed to be advocating for the people?

Like Margaret, you just spoke about, who are suffering and dying because of our policies.

And you get mixed up.

And we all get mixed up.

And you kind of have to return to your contemplative practice and surrender all that to God.

I was very moved.

And I thank you for that beautiful sharing.

Do you want to tell us any about that?

Because we're all going through that in different ways.

And we've all been raised.

Not just individualism, but ego and the self.

And that's not working, folks, in the world.

So Jesus calls us to let go of that and not do our self -will, but surrender to God and follow him and live in the fire of the Holy Spirit, which is humility.

Reflect with me on that.

Well, that's interesting.

I hadn't thought of that piece in a long time.

But for me, I think that...

Let me say this first.

I think it's harder for males of the species, white males of the species.

Yes.

Because there is a whole cultural, I don't know if it's genetic, whatever it is, there's a layer.

Let's just be real.

You're making me laugh.

Good, good.

I'm glad it's laugh.

That's challenging.

But it's also...

For women, it's also a challenge.

But I think we're trained more to not hold on to our accomplishments, to not tout it.

Let me tell you another story because I don't...

Okay, so the...

In 2022, I was working at my desk and I get a call and this woman says, would you hold for the president of the United States?

Oh, I don't know.

I'm kind of busy right now.

I mean, you know what he's saying, of course.

And then the president gets on the line and he tells me his requisite stories that he always tells me.

Because I know I've told you this before, but I really like the stories.

Then he asked, would I be willing to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

This is Biden we're talking about.

This is Biden.

This is Biden.

And I was like, what I said was, you bring tears to my eyes.

I just, I don't even know how to respond.

And ended up saying, yes, of course, I'm willing.

But I was so...

touched by that but then what I realized what I was most touched by was what it meant to him to do it because he had been part of the health care fight he had been part of nuns on the bus and I mean there's a lot of ways that our lives were variously connected but what would be kind of an embarrassment of riches.

I mean, for me, how do you say, oh, yeah, yeah, I just had this little medal here.

I mean, you have no place to wear the thing, you know?

So it's not like you can show it off.

But what I realized was how, what a gift it was for him to be able to do it.

Because it affirmed the intersections that our lives have had in such very lovely ways.

But do you see how that's different?

It's different than the thing itself.

It's the process of the relationship.

And that's what's so important.

Or focusing on yourself.

You're focusing on him and the relationship there.

And the same with God, I presume, too, as opposed to taking credit for it.

I mean mine, right?

Right, right.

But this is all about...

Being able to be alive for others.

That's what it is.

It's all relationship.

Thank you.

My last question would be, again, this is embarrassing.

I'm going to ask you this ridiculous question, but here goes.

So you've told me your life story.

We've talked about your journey into the order and then your sister and then the...

Oakland Law Center, and then Network, and then Nuns on the Bus, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and your book, and Contemplative Strands, Prophetic Imagination, Community, and Justice, Justice, Justice.

I don't even know how to say this, but here goes.

Where do you see God?

In all of this, how do you see God in this day -to -day journey for justice?

And what suggestions do you have for our listeners who want to carry on and work for justice and peace and creation, but to do it in and for and with and through God and to see God in the process?

It just is.

Okay, another story at the end of a...

After I was the leader of my community, I did seven weeks of Zen in Picture Rock outside of Tucson.

I don't know if you know the retreat house.

Yes.

Gorgeous place.

Anyway, and Pat Hawk, a Redemptorist priest, was my Zen teacher.

And at the end of the retreat, I'm out walking in the desert, and I said, I'm going to go home the next day.

And I'm like, oh, that's beautiful.

I said something to the effect of, I'm going to miss you, God, in this beauty.

And then I said to myself, yes, but you're everywhere, with the emphasis on geography.

And what comes back to me is this, no, Simone, I am everywhere.

And what I learned in that moment is that...

The divine hums us at every moment.

Nothing is separate from the divine.

The divine is creating us at every moment.

And so I can't even imagine how we could possibly ever be separate.

And that the gift is occasionally.

You get to see it.

I get to hear the hum.

Now, I goof around and say, the hymn of the universe, I only have the hum, but it is the essence of what holds us together.

And so if the divine is holding us together at every moment, creating us every moment, then we're never far away.

The only question is eyes to see.

And then that becomes prayer.

May I have eyes to see.

That's how we do it.

Is there anything you would like to add before we end?

Tell you my most intimate spiritual experience?

Yes.

No.

Hey, this has been so powerful and fun.

And I thank you so much, Sister Simone Campbell, for sharing with me today and the last episode too.

And thank you, dear friends, for listening to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast.

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