Navigated to #34 with Ken Butigan, author, organizer, activist and nonviolence trainer: “We have been preparing for this moment; we have more power than we think!” - Transcript

#34 with Ken Butigan, author, organizer, activist and nonviolence trainer: “We have been preparing for this moment; we have more power than we think!”

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

I'm John, Father John Deere, and today I'm speaking with my friend, author, longtime activist, and professor of nonviolence, Dr.

Ken Budigan.

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 active nonviolence and working for a more just, more peaceful, more nonviolent world.

So let's begin with a little prayer.

I just invite everyone, wherever you are, just to take a deep breath and to relax and recenter yourself and notice how you're feeling as we're going to begin our conversation.

And I invite you to enter into the presence of the God of peace who loves you infinitely and personally and everyone everywhere.

And let's welcome the risen nonviolent Jesus here with us now 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 on your call to follow the nonviolent Jesus and work for a more nonviolent, more just world.

Bless us, inspire us, disarm us, strengthen us, and send us out to do your will.

and to do our part to help end war and nuclear weapons and poverty and racism and greed and justice and environmental destruction, that we might be your holy peacemakers and welcome your reign of universal love, nonviolence, and peace on earth.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, friends, it's a pleasure to welcome my friend Ken Budigan.

author, organizer, activist, speaker, nonviolence trainer, strategist of movements, leader of Pace Ibene, a longtime peace organization.

Ken just retired as a professor of the practice of peace and justice and conflict studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

He's worked on a whole series of movements for social change for decades, including campaigns to end nuclear weapons, homelessness, the U .S.

wars in Iraq, freedom for East Timor, and ending the U .S.

wars in Central America.

In the 1980s, he was the founder and national coordinator for the Pledge of Resistance, which some old -timers like me may remember, which for a decade mobilized nonviolent action for peace in Central America.

He has worked for over 30 years with Pache Ibene, which has trained tens of thousands of people.

in the practice of nonviolence and the strategies of nonviolent social change.

And together we launched, when I worked with Ken at Pache Bene, Campaign Nonviolence, which is an annual week -long national grassroots movement.

I always joke, Ken, against everything, poverty, war, racism, environmental destruction.

Ken serves on the executive committee.

of Pax Christi International's Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, and he's been a global leader working with the Vatican really regularly, right up till today, to promote gospel nonviolence literally around the world through the Catholic Church.

Ken's the author of seven books, including Pilgrimage Through a Burning World, the story of the nonviolent protest movement at the Nevada test site, and what I consider the greatest practical program, like a how -to manual of nonviolence called From Violence to Wholeness, which you can get if you go to the campaignnonviolence .org website.

He lives in Chicago with his wife, Cynthia, and daughter, Leah.

Ken Buttigan, welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus podcast.

Thank you so much, John.

Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

to have you here.

And there's so much I want to talk about.

I want everyone to know your stories.

So let's start from the beginning.

And in our allotted time we have, I'd just like to ask you to walk through briefly really the great moments of your journey as a peacemaker in the United States over the course of your life as a follower of the nonviolent Jesus.

And let's start with how it all began.

You know, I've heard your stories so many times, but they're always interesting to me.

from being a college student at San Diego USD to going to Oxford and finally going to, almost like a pilgrimage, Ken, to New York City and meeting Daniel Berrigan and asking for his advice.

So how did you get started?

Tell me your journey to nonviolence.

Thank you so much, John, for having me aboard.

It's really exciting to be in a conversation about the nonviolent Jesus.

As somebody who grew up in the Catholic Church, I don't think I ever heard the word nonviolence ever in grade school, in high school, or in college.

All of these were Catholic institutions.

And I distinctly remember wondering about that.

Where is nonviolence in the Catholic Church?

And in my senior year in college at the University of San Diego, I took a walk one morning and I suddenly was walking into the arms of God.

It was not something I had expected, but every step I took was deeper and deeper into the loving arms of God.

blew me away and it changed my life.

That and taking the four required religious studies courses at the school that I had been putting off assiduously my four years at USD.

I took them all at once and the combination of this religious experience and then the theology of God.

changed me.

And so I decided rather than perhaps becoming a professor of art history, I thought about that, the possibility of becoming a lawyer.

I decided that I wanted to put God at the center of my life.

And that meant going and studying more about God.

And that brought me to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley way back in 1977.

And then I began to go on that journey.

In preparing for this conversation, I went back to those days in my mind, and I realized that at one point, even though I wasn't particularly political, my family hadn't been political, I wasn't politicized, I did read in the paper that the University of California Board of Trustees was going to be meeting in San Francisco across the water from Berkeley, where I was, and deciding on continuing to manage the two top nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

And I read that there was going to be a little demonstration.

I'm not sure what prompted me.

I guess I would say it was the Holy Spirit to get on a bus to go over and to join this particular event.

I arrived there thinking there'd be thousands of people.

There were just a handful.

I got there.

And I said, I'm here for the demonstration.

They said, oh, well, go in that room over there.

So I did.

And I said, what's going to happen there?

They said, you're going to have a nonviolence training.

And I said, what's that?

They said, oh, that prepares you to to do this event.

And I said, OK, that's what I'm here for.

So I went in and I met for the first time in my life, Chad Myers, who is a friend of John Deere's as well.

who is a scholar.

But that day he was leading this nonviolence training.

It was a down and dirty one hour nonviolence training preparing us to take this action.

So we did that for an hour.

And then I came out with my little toolbox on nonviolence.

And they said, OK, what we're going to do is we're going to all lie down in front of the doors where the members of the board of trustees who are voting on this.

have to come out and see you lying there as if you were, I guess, in a nuclear war.

Like, I didn't know the term die -in in those days, but that's what it was.

So I said, oh, okay.

And they said, and, you know, you may be arrested.

And I said, oh, okay.

Well, I just got this training.

So anyway, we laid down.

Governor Jerry Brown was the first to walk out, and then a number of other of the board.

members and they had to walk over us.

We were not arrested.

I got up and dusted myself off and won home.

I really didn't do anything around these like this for a couple of years, but it got me thinking about nuclear weapons.

And that led me to a book project at a Center for Ethics and Social Policy, where I was doing some work study job.

And I proposed that I edit a book on the environmental, political, psychological, social, financial consequences of the arms race.

And so they agreed to this proposal.

So I started working on that.

Then after a while, I decided I needed to go get more research done.

So that took me to the East Coast.

And I went from university to university and think tank to think tank.

And like I said, I wasn't particularly political in those days, but I was pretty distressed that nobody could see a way forward to nuclear disarmament.

Everybody thought that was just the way it was going to be.

And what we should do is not only increase nuclear weapons, but also conventional weapons.

So finally, after being in Washington and then Philadelphia, I arrived in New York and I was pretty distressed by this whole thing.

So before I left Berkeley, I was told, well, if you get to New York, go see Daniel Berrigan.

I think he'll be interested in your project.

So they gave me his phone number.

I fished it out of my pocket and I called him up and I said, Father Berrigan, you don't know me.

But I need some spiritual counseling on nuclear weapons.

He happened to be in town.

He invited me to his apartment up in the upper wilds of Manhattan.

And I spent a life -changing three hours with him.

It's rather like when somebody on their hands and knees go up to the top of the Himalayas to the cave and finds the guru there who transmits a whole culture and tradition in the space of three hours.

I was totally blown away.

Dan was facing 10 years in federal.

prison.

And I said to him, look, I'm going back to the West Coast.

What can I do for you?

And he looked me straight in the eyes and he said, don't do anything for me.

Find some people you can pray with and march with.

And in my mind, I said, Dan, you've got this all wrong.

You're the activist.

I'm the academic.

You're the activist.

I'm the academic.

But, you know, for the next several.

That phrase kept going through my right brain.

Find some people you can pray with and march with.

And you know what?

I did.

And I've been at it ever since.

Oh, that's such a great story.

I love hearing that.

As many know, I did the same thing when I first met Dan.

And I've been thinking about it with your story because I wanted to ask him the meaning of life.

I finally was really scared, 21 -year -old, and I said, a young Jesuit novice, I'm sitting at his feet practically in his apartment.

I said, Dan, what's the point of all this?

What do I have to do?

And he said, all you have to do is make your story fit into the story of Jesus.

And it was life -changing for me, Ken.

You know, it was getting...

a word way better than anything I could have imagined from the guru.

And when I think of your life journey, I think that's what you did.

Maybe unconsciously, you know, we're all learning that to try to fit your story into the story of the nonviolent Jesus.

And what you ended up doing in the 1980s is I was telling my friends here at the recording studio that It's hard to even grasp what you did, Ken, and people won't believe it now, given everything we've done.

But if you can briefly walk us through the story of the Pledge of Resistance and how you helped, we now know, prevent the Reagan administration from a full -on invasion of Nicaragua.

Thanks, John.

Before I tell the story, I will just say to all of us, we are all capable of changing the world.

All of us.

All of us are, as John Deere sometimes says, we're all like little hobbits running around, but we all have this power.

And so I just invite all of us, especially at this historical crisis that we're in, to realize we all have this power.

But what happened with me was I did take Dan Berrigan's command his marching orders seriously.

I found some people to march with and pray with.

And that turned out to be this group of seminarians at the Graduate Theological Union.

We formed a little group we called an affinity group.

We had affinity because we were students, an affinity group called Spirit Affinity Group, which was based in gospel nonviolence.

There we did for two years.

I basically just put my graduate program on hold and just we did one wacky nonviolent action after another about nuclear weapons, but also what was going on in places like El Salvador.

And we also had a had a really powerful action at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where some of my friends had decided to.

entered the Catholic Church, so they were going to be confirmed, and we did that by carrying the nuclear cross from one part of the area to one of the gates, which was this 400 -pound MX missile, and then we chained ourselves to it, and we were arrested.

Cross was taken off to the city dump, which we took as a symbolism of disarmament.

One day, I had an experience where I got a letter from somebody in Nicaragua.

Now, for those who were alive then, you knew that the Reagan administration every day.

said it was going to invade Nicaragua.

It was going to take over Nicaragua because it had had a revolution there.

It wasn't on the same page with the United States and was also carrying out attacks and raids on the people there.

And so I got a letter and I don't know how this person ever got my name or address.

It was addressed to me.

I opened the letter.

It was telling me about the carnage that my government was inflicting on the people of Nicaragua.

And I had read about this.

I'd gone to lectures about this.

I had gone to demonstrations about this.

I knew something about that.

It didn't seem to be telling me anything I didn't know.

But then about three quarters of the way down the letter, it said, We're telling you now, so 10 years from now, you cannot say you did not know.

Do everything in your power to stop this catastrophe.

And that shook me.

Then I looked up and I literally had a vision of this man holding a dying child in front of me.

And then that vision faded.

I said to myself, but I'm only one person.

What can I do?

And then I remembered reading a story in a magazine called Sojourners about a group of 50 people who had committed themselves to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience or legal protest if the U .S.

invaded Nicaragua.

And that they were going to go to the border between Honduras and Nicaragua and try to get in the way of the...

Of the invasion, if they were prevented from doing that, they would go to federal buildings in the United States and engage in that action.

And I said to myself, oh, well, why just 50 people?

Why not 500 people or 5 ,000 people or 5 million people?

And so I sat down for myself.

I wrote a little pledge that committed me to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience of the U .S.

invaded Nicaragua or escalated its military intervention across the region.

And then I began sharing it with people.

And just to cut to the chase, I joined with people in California and then with folks at Sojourners and other places to build a movement.

called the Pledge of Resistance.

Eventually, about 100 ,000 people took that pledge.

This was the days, of course, before the internet.

And we organized ourselves into 400 local groups across the United States.

We had a signal group that would call us out if there was an escalation of military intervention or, God forbid, an invasion.

And as John said, for the next decade or so, Some of us spent our lives engaged in that organizing.

And I will just tell you what I learned from that experience, besides so much from my fellow activists about what it means to be nonviolent, but also the power of nonviolence.

Because we learned at one point from people within the administration that, in fact, because of the actions we were doing, hundreds and then thousands of people engaging in civil disobedience, withdrawing their consent from this policy, that the Reagan administration had definitively decided not to invade Nicaragua.

They changed tactics, they went underground with it, and that tactic also blew up in their face because there was a movement across this country calling them out in a different way.

I learned that we have more power than we think.

And in fact, not only did that prove true in terms of stopping an invasion of Nicaragua, you will know, of course, that the U .S.

invaded Panama, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, other places.

but did not invade Nicaragua.

And we learned from Reagan's people themselves saying it was because of ordinary people power.

So I learned that we have this power and we can pull that.

And we do that with that sense of love for all, including those we're resisting.

Thank you so much for telling the story.

And I wanted you to do that because it's so empowering.

I remember those days very well.

I had lived in El Salvador in 85.

I went to Nicaragua with the Jesuits, went up on the border.

We were literally shot at.

I got dengue fever.

And all the while, Ken, I had signed a pledge of resistance and the Jesuits were going to expel me if I got arrested.

But I thought that was, you know, the cost of peace.

Somewhere along the way, we met.

And I want to ask you, if you could, because our time is short, just to walk through a couple of the other great campaigns you were part of as leader.

First, the Nevada test site, where they were blowing up nuclear weapons, 1 ,500 of them in the 50s, and then the underground testing.

And you and Father Louis Vitale and the Nevada Desert Experience and I ended up working on the board with you there for many years.

led waves of civil disobedience.

Tell us about that.

This is a really important campaign, and it's really important for people to know about it.

So in the early 1980s, as the U .S.

involvement in Vietnam had begun to wane, our good friend Father Louis Vitale, who was working, had been exiled basically by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to through Nevada, learned directly that nuclear testing was going on.

On average, once every 18 days from 1951 forward, there was a nuclear bomb going off just north of Las Vegas.

And it was, as Daniel Ellsberg said, it was the most bombed place on the planet.

And so Louis, on the 800th anniversary of St.

Francis's birth in 1981 and 82, just decided to go out there and pray.

And so a few Franciscans, laypeople, priests, sisters, went out and began praying.

And then eventually they started a 40 -day event.

called the Lenten Desert Experience.

And then that morphed into an ongoing campaign with the audacious idea of ending nuclear testing, not just in Nevada, but worldwide.

And that went on for a decade.

And in fact, just to make it clear, that movement brought people from around the world, around the country, and around the world.

And then those people would go home and work on their own test sites.

So that by 1993, there was enough people power generated to get an international comprehensive test ban treaty promulgated and signed by 154 nations.

The United States actually signed it, didn't ratify it, still hasn't ratified it, but has lived according to it.

even under the first and now the second Bush administration, has gone with a moratorium on nuclear testing.

And this is huge.

And I just think we have more power than we think.

And we see this in the case of this really, really important campaign that we need to celebrate and build on.

You know, it's like ancient history now, but it was really quite brilliant, Ken, because it was a Lenten program.

And what happened was parishes, ordinary church people would plan every year, okay, so next Lent, I'm going to go out to Las Vegas for the weekend retreat.

And then it just became this.

I called it Civilist Obedience 101, basic choreography.

You'd have a wonderful retreat, meet hundreds of people from all over the country.

And then on Sunday morning, we'd all drive two hours north into the desert.

And I mean the wild open desert.

The Nevada test site is larger than Rhode Island, as I recall.

And we'd literally cross a line in the little...

County police people had painted a little, I mean, a little yellow line.

And 25 ,000 people were arrested over the years there.

And it became, I think, a Gandhian -level Satyagraha campaign.

Don't you, Ken?

And that's, I mean, it's hard to replicate anything, but it was just one of the great experiences of our lives.

So thank you for sharing that.

Yeah.

If people are interested, I did.

I wrote a study about this called Pilgrimage to a Burning World, published by New York University Press, because it was a deeply spiritual and sacred experience across many different traditions, as well as a very savvy, strategic campaign, and tried to capture that in that book.

Yeah, great book.

So all this time, we're now in the 90s and the 2000s, and you're getting a PhD and you eventually settle into teaching at DePaul in Chicago.

But we had the first Iraq War that you and I were organizing.

It seemed to me like a demonstration every day in January, February, March 1991.

And then the second Iraq War in March 2003.

which we have no idea how many people died.

But the number I've settled on is that we killed 1 .4 million Iraqis over all those years.

And it's hard for people to imagine now.

Again, it seems like ancient history.

And this is, again, asking you to briefly talk about the Declaration of Peace campaign.

We were doing nonstop action, folks.

Ken and I were in and out of jail and all.

But Ken is always going, well, I got to change the country.

I'm going, uh -huh.

Well, good luck with that.

And then you.

So 2003, George W.

Bush, there's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we got to go there.

And he's following up on 9 -11 while bombing Afghanistan.

And then Kerry ran against George W.

Bush and the whole country is supporting Bush and the war.

The polls were like 80 percent.

And Ken says.

We're going to call for the whole country, the movement, to go to every local congressional district and sit in and say, stop the war on Iraq.

And you called it Declaration of Peace.

And it practically changed my life because I organized a civil disobedience action in New Mexico and faced a hard year in prison for that.

You really had a huge effect on the whole country, Ken.

Tell us about the Declaration of Peace.

So we had heard that the midterm elections were coming up and those running those campaigns said there is going to be no discussion by the Democrats about the war in Iraq.

That is a non -starter.

We're not going to win on that.

So people like Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid decided there's not going to be any discussion about that.

We had decided that there should be a discussion, but also action.

And so we, inspired by our friend Michael Nagler, who sent me an email on Christmas Day 2005, the idea set a deadline for the U .S.

to be out of Iraq.

It had already been three years.

And if that's not met, The whole country goes and engages in nonviolent action, civil disobedience and so forth.

And so we love that idea.

And my spouse, Cynthia Okayama -Dopke, and I just plunged into organizing this from a back room in our house.

And we, without getting into all the details, one thing that we wanted to say.

was how do we frame it differently?

Because George Bush was saying the two options are cutting and running or staying the course.

And we got with somebody who thinks about these things and said, how about a third way, which is a new course for Iraq or a new course on Iraq?

And we thought, huh, that's a third way to think about this, because the new course should be peace and ending the war and all of that.

But it was a really interesting framing.

So we started, we invited people all across the country to go into congressional offices, and they did.

And they brought this pledge, this declaration.

Will you sign this declaration that unless the war ends by...

September 21st, the International Day of Peace, 2006, we're going to oppose the war and we're going to cut off funding and so forth.

So anyway, to make a long story longer, as those delegations went into these offices and saying, look, we're going to be back and doing civil disobedience if September 21st comes and we don't have a plan to end the war.

Then it was interesting.

They managed to get 12 members of Congress to actually sign the Declaration of Peace, which was great.

But the most important thing was it lodged the framing right in there to the point where Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, the senator from Nevada who was the head of the Senate.

shifted course themselves, put out a press release third week of July saying a new course on Iraq and basically called for the end of the war.

And 350 events took place across the country, civil disobedience and other legal protests.

Some of us got arrested.

the White House, the Senate, and the House in Washington.

John, you got arrested in a really great way in Santa Fe.

But that happened across the country.

The impacts, the day after the midterms, the Democrats won handily.

Not that we're working for the Democrats, but the...

there was a landslide victory in the House, and Bush fired the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, the next day.

So, you know, I'm saying this over and over again.

You know, John and I can talk about this, but every one of us listening, we have this power.

And so if something, if an idea occurs to you that's nonviolent and powerful and creative, I highly encourage you to put it out there and get with others and organize.

It's an amazing story, Ken, because you say, OK, we had 350 events.

Well, those events with hundreds of people going and shutting down the local congressional representative's office, not in D .C., but all over the country.

And that hadn't happened about Iraq.

There was that really big protest in 2003 just before the war started.

But then people just gave up.

And you said, no, we're going to do this.

Here's a tactic.

And so we, 10 of us, went into the post office building in Santa Fe.

We're going to go to the third floor to the senator's office.

And the SWAT team showed up, 50 armed soldiers.

Out of the movies, out of the Terminator or something.

We hadn't done anything.

We walked under the elevator and they said, you're all under arrest.

And we said, we're just going upstairs to see our senator.

And they said, well, you're going to do something notorious because they were pointing at me.

So we had brought the names of all those killed in Iraq that we knew.

We had 10 ,000 names.

And we actually had been carrying them around for months and we stayed in the elevator for eight hours and we read those names out loud all day to the 50 armed soldiers, you know, with machine guns aimed at us.

And the media there, and it was front page news for months and months in New Mexico.

And it was amazing, really kind of life changing.

And it put Iraq on the...

front pages of New Mexico, but that's what happened everywhere.

And I think, Ken, when you say we have power, you know, by just calling upon ordinary people to do what you can, and together we're going to build a people power movement, shifted the support of the war, and the war did end.

It's an amazing story, and you're amazing that you keep insisting we can do this.

And meanwhile, our time is kind of coming up to an end.

I would love to have asked you about Campaign Nonviolence.

Folks can look it up.

And about your work with the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative.

We had Marie Dennis on, so people can listen to her.

But let me close by asking you to talk about today.

And you've been telling us we have power.

And your own journey.

as a follower of the nonviolent Jesus and a peacemaker.

Here we're now, as you said to me on the phone last week, we're in this liminal space of just unprecedented global crisis and national collapse, but it's also an opportunity.

So what advice or suggestions do you have for your listeners here about going forward on their own journey as peacemakers?

We are at a crossroads.

And we have the choice, as Dr.

King said, between nonviolence or nonexistence.

And we're at that crossroads.

And as Pope Francis said when he quoted King, he said, now the choice is up to us.

This is a critical, hellacious moment.

I want to think of it the way.

In this way, I would say we've been getting our training for this moment.

All these things we've talked about on this call or all the things you've done, John, in your life, which has been amazing and so varied and so powerful.

I want to submit that those are all have been our training for this moment.

And we do not know.

how this moment is going to go.

I do know we have more power than we think.

So one initiative that I'm engaged with, there are two things.

One at Pachibene, our good friend Rivera's son is organizing Rise and Shine, which every week puts out resources for all of us for dealing with the tsunami that's emanating from the Oval Office.

So please go get those every week from Rivera on the Pache Bene campaign nonviolence website.

A significant campaign right now is One Million Rising.

And this is an initiative that emerged out of the No Kings demonstrations June 14th.

Some of us had the privilege to be part of.

Huge, huge march in Chicago, but all over the country.

And also indivisible.

And they've kind of put their power together and invited people to imagine one million people rising up in non -cooperation with what I call the movement of movements, the sector of sectors, the campaign of campaigns, to say, We withdraw our consent nonviolently in all sorts of ways.

Now, what they're doing, they had 130 ,000 people two weeks ago attend or listen after the fact to a webinar that our good friends Maria Stephan and Daniel Hunter and others organized.

I highly recommend go find One Million Rising.

Watch that video.

The second installment of this is happening on July 30th, Wednesday, July 30th.

Depending on when you're hearing this, it may have already happened.

I highly recommend you go watch that.

What they're asking people to do is, unlike what we did in COVID, we get together in our living rooms and form groups of non -cooperators.

Sharing your concerns about the moment and then...

how we're going to take action in lots of ways to say I'm withdrawing my consent.

And they have a really great, powerful message that says, as I've been saying ad nauseum on this call, we have more power than we think.

And we can pool that power to withdraw what's called the pillars of support that keep the current outrages going.

We can all be part of that.

I think that's going to be very, very important.

So we need each other.

We need to be rooted in prayer.

We need to follow the nonviolent Jesus even through this moment.

We need to read the books of John Deere.

We need to be arm in arm as we create the conditions for the shift.

And what is that condition?

It's really a conversation that we're going to have with our society.

Do we want a society?

that is dehumanizing, disinheriting, dispiriting, dominating, and destructive.

That's what we've got at the moment.

We don't have to have that.

But that means we have to convey that.

And we can do that.

I'd like to close by just quoting one of the great figures of the 20th century, Allen Ginsberg, who said, while I'm here, I'll do the work.

And what's the work?

To ease the pain of living.

Everything else is a drunken dumb show.

While we're here, we'll do the work.

What's the work?

To ease the pain of living, to celebrate the joy of living, to bring the fullness of life that Jesus calls us to, and go forward.

And the big secret is...

All the way through, we're going to be called to do this.

And let's do it with joy and even some kind of happiness.

That's how I want to kind of leave this, John.

Amen, Ken.

Thank you so much, Ken Budigan, for speaking with me today.

And thank you, dear friends, for listening to Ken and me here at the Nonviolent Jesus podcast.

You can hear more podcasts and find other upcoming Zoom programs at BeatitudesCenter .org.

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And if you can, please leave some positive feedback or review at NCR or Apple or Spotify or whatever platform you use.

And most of all, Please help spread the word by telling your friends and colleagues everywhere about these podcasts and these great conversations with visionaries like Ken Budigan.

May the God of peace bless you all.

Keep on following the nonviolent Jesus and see you next time.

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