Welcome to the Nonviolent Jesus Podcast.

I'm John, Father John Deere, and today I'd like to reflect with you on the life and lessons of Mahatma Gandhi.

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 a more just, more nonviolent world.

So let's begin with a little prayer.

I invite you wherever you are just to take a deep breath and to relax and recenter yourself.

And together let's enter into the presence of the God of peace who loves you infinitely and personally and everyone everywhere.

And let's welcome the nonviolent Jesus with us here and ask for the grace to follow him ever more faithfully and do God's will of creative, loving nonviolence.

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 Mahatma Gandhi that we might learn more about how 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 that we might do our part to help end poverty, racism, greed, injustice, war.

nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction, that we might be your holy beatitude people, your holy peacemakers, and welcome your reign of universal love, nonviolence, and peace on earth.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Once, long ago, they asked Dr.

King, who is the greatest Christian who ever lived?

And without missing a beat, he said, Gandhi.

And that is such a shocking answer in the American South in the early 60s by a famous Baptist minister.

He's saying that this Hindu is the greatest Christian who ever lived.

I completely agree with Martin King.

Gandhi comes closest to following the nonviolent Jesus.

And I've been following him.

studying Gandhi since I was 20, so I thought I'd offer a few reflections about Gandhi and his life lessons for us.

I began reading the collected writings, the big 100 volumes of all of Gandhi's writings, which was published by the government of India in the late 90s, and I've probably read 25 or...

35 other biographies and books.

And I published Mohandas Gandhi Essential Writings, which I invite everyone to get.

It's a really great anthology of my favorite writings by Gandhi.

I remember when I finished it, my friend Daniel Berrigan said, you've overdosed on Gandhi and need to go to a 12 -step program, which we had a good laugh about.

So as I begin, the key to...

Understand Gandhi, for me, is that Gandhi was not born Gandhi.

He became Gandhi.

And there's such a profound lesson there.

We all have to really work at becoming our true selves before God, becoming the peacemakers we were created and born to be, to become people of nonviolence, stuck in the culture of violence.

And this takes...

real, single -minded, concentrated effort to allow God to disarm us and transform us.

And that's what Gandhi did, perhaps more than anybody.

So I thought I'd walk through the basic lessons or basic moments of Gandhi's life, and then I'll offer 12 lessons.

So as you know, Gandhi was born in India in 1869.

He went to London to get his law degree.

He got a job as a lawyer in South Africa.

He was totally Western, wore a three -piece suit, played the violin.

The only thing that was noticeable about him was that he was a vegetarian.

But he had his big conversion, as you remember in the fabulous movie Gandhi, when he was thrown off the train in South Africa.

For sitting in the first class section, which was reserved for white people only.

And I made a holy pilgrimage with my friends to Peter Maritzburg, South Africa, to that train station, which still stands today.

He's thrown off the train, if you can imagine, about midnight.

And he remains there, sitting on the spot on the edge of the tracks.

until about 8 a .m., wrestling.

He said it was the hardest day of his life.

Do I forget this and just move on, or do I do something about this to fight this injustice and racism?

And that was the beginning, because when he stood up that day in the train station in Peter Moritzburg, he was Gandhi.

And he decided to spend his whole life fighting racism and injustice, which was really the beginnings of apartheid.

And he forms a movement in South Africa, starts studying and practicing nonviolence, using the word ahimsa from the Jains, struggles with, you know, it's such a clumsy word, has a contest to come up with a better word, which he comes up with and he gives the award himself, which is funny because he's a funny guy.

called satyagraha, or truth force, or the pursuit of truth.

But that word really hasn't caught on.

And he organizes marches in civil disobedience, and hundreds and hundreds of people go to prison with him to resist the unjust pass laws.

And you'll remember that from the movie.

And after his campaign wins, he goes back to India.

Along the way in South Africa, he forms an interfaith community.

builds an ashram, adopts total poverty and simplicity.

That's because he visited a Trappist monastery and was so moved by them.

He starts meditating every day and starts reading the Sermon on the Mount and the Bhagavad Gita every day and begins his journey up through probably the early 1910s of professing 14 vows, which is just shocking.

including vows of nonviolence, truth, poverty, chastity, respect for all religions, wearing only clothes he himself made, and fearlessness.

So he has a great victory in the movement in South Africa, moves back to India, starts traveling, learning what's going on, seeing the British occupation and colonial and imperial rule over India.

And slowly begins to really build the grassroots movement of nonviolence.

He's saying India at that time by 1920 had 300 million people.

And the British had 30 million people living in India.

He's saying 30 million people cannot rule 300 million people if they refuse to cooperate.

And that was his whole plan, nonviolently, non -cooperating until the British left.

And the British just thought that was the funniest thing ever.

And so through a series of circumstances, in 1919, he calls for a national strike, actually a day of prayer and fasting.

But there's no phones.

It's hard to imagine no computer or no nothing.

They don't even have phones all across India.

And it spread like wildfire beyond everybody's expectation.

And the whole country shut down.

Everything.

Everyone stayed home to nonviolently protest British rule.

And that's right there a great lesson of the power of active nonviolence.

And that's what we need here in the United States to do these days.

In 1922, within three years, he had launched a civil disobedience campaign and over 50 ,000 people had gone to jail, pledging total nonviolence and being all willing to go up to 10 years, and many of them did.

And then Britain arrested Gandhi in 1924, and it was called the Great Trial.

He was sentenced to six years in prison for protesting the British Empire.

Afterwards, he came out weak.

He was always almost dying and always fasting.

And he began going deeper into daily prayer and building a constructive program to serve the poor and really doing some exciting, dramatic fasts to confront, in particular, religious -based injustice against the untouchables and injustice against women.

And then all of this led up to several years of concentrated petitioning God, what do we do to spark the British to leave?

So he's two years training his 80 followers.

They're going to do something, and they're going to be shot and killed, but we're going to be totally nonviolent.

I just don't know yet what we're going to do.

And then he comes and announces, God has told me what to do.

We're going to march to the sea and pick up salt.

And everybody thought that was just ridiculous.

The British laughed.

And he's thinking, you know, we'll get like 10 feet and they're going to open fire and kill us.

But they set off on this 240 -mile walk, doing about 10 miles a day, the 80 trained Satyagrahis, and they're marching to the ocean.

And within hours, The whole country is electrified.

And after several months, when they get to the ocean, he makes salt and picks up some dried salt by the sea.

The whole country engages in civil disobedience.

Now, the British owned the salt industry.

And in this rural poverty, salt was critical to surviving the heat.

So this was a brilliant.

symbolic action of Gandhi's and totally illegal.

And this was 1930.

And some 100 ,000 people were arrested, and they all got 10 years in jail.

And Gandhi was arrested too.

And he kept teaching nonviolence and provoking the British to leave.

By now, in the 1930s, he's spending two hours a day in prayer.

When he gets out, I think this is about 1933.

I'm telling you this because it still shocks me.

I'm thinking he's about 61 or 62, okay?

He and his wife, Kastor, announced to their community the ashram where they have 400 people living.

I went there for a month with Arun Gandhi, who was raised by Gandhi, to India.

I really loved it.

Gandhi says to the community, you know, we're way too rich and comfortable.

And they had nothing.

We're moving to the poorest place in the center of India where no one can get to, which is a village of untouchables.

You know, the lowest caste system.

It was such a shocking thing.

In other words, in his early 60s, he was still going as far as radical as he could.

And so he moves to this place called Warder and sets up a model village.

And he's using the spinning wheel now.

And his idea is to teach every person in the country to take up the spinning wheel, to make their own clothes so they don't rely on the British.

And then they can sell them to one another and have, you know, little communities that can sustain each other.

Then World War II happens.

and he launches the civil disobedience campaign, and he's arrested and imprisoned for life.

His wife dies in prison.

By 1942, think of this, 300 ,000 trained Indians, all trained in Gandhian nonviolence, are in prison with at least 10 -year sentences for opposing British rule and doing civil disobedience.

And their argument is, oh, yeah, you're fighting the...

Nazis to defend democracy.

Well, then you better leave India.

If you believe in democracy, you can't have imperial rule over us.

So he's released and sick.

His wife dies.

And then the United States drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And friends, I just want to insist, and I've been doing this for years, that this is A very important point about Gandhi.

So he's really one of the most well -known respected spiritual leaders in history.

And from the day of August 6, 1945 till the day he died, he spoke about nuclear weapons and the need to abolish them and get rid of them as a critical effort for the spiritual life.

How can we be serving God, worshiping God, following Jesus, saying we're even semi -nonviolent and allow nuclear weapons to exist?

In 1947, the British left India, but a civil war broke out, sparked by some of the...

Jealous leaders in the country split into East Pakistan and West Pakistan, and a million were killed.

Some scholars now say three million were killed.

And there's no guns involved.

So these are all swords, if you can imagine.

It was horrific mass murder.

And imagine the failure that Gandhi felt like he was.

He said, did I waste my whole life?

Was it a mistake?

Should I have not led?

a whole nation to try to practice nonviolence.

And he went on several fasts to the death to stop the killing and actually stopped the riots in Bangladesh and the mass riots and killings in Calcutta.

And he was on his way to march to Pakistan, you know, to try to end all the killing when he was assassinated.

January 30th, 1948, in New Delhi, as he walked to his five o 'clock evening prayer meeting.

He was 79.

The conspirators, about 10 or 12 of them, who were the far right Hindus, who had been planning for decades to kill Gandhi, and Gandhi actually knew them personally, and knew they were planning to kill him.

Their heirs are now running India today.

So in my book on Mohandas Gandhi Essential Writings, I offer a couple of basic lessons and I'll walk through them just for your reflection and just to mull on these teachings because he's so profound and critical for our own predicament today about what do we do, where do we go, how do we follow the nonviolent Jesus.

So number one, and you just have to forgive me for being such a broken record.

But Gandhi taught morning, noon, and night over and over and over again.

All he said for 50 years was persistent, consistent, steadfast, dedicated, committed, faithful, relentless, truthful, prayerful, loving, troublemaking, illegal, active, creative, provocative, public, daring, nonviolence.

That's it.

That's his message to the world.

Here's a quote.

Nonviolence means avoiding injury to anything on earth in thought, word, or deed.

Wow.

Devotion to nonviolence is the highest expression of humanity's conscious state.

Wow.

Nonviolence is the greatest and most active force in the world.

Now listen to this one.

One person who can...

express total nonviolence in life, exercises a force superior to all the forces of brutality.

I think he proved that, but of course Jesus did.

You know, Jesus, completely powerless on the cross, dying in total nonviolence, continuing to disarm every human heart.

Here's another favorite quote of mine.

My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence.

The more you develop it in your own being, the more infectious it becomes.

It overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the world.

In other words, Gandhi says, if you go deep into this way of non -killing, which is really universal love.

in the pursuit of the truth of our common unity, it will become contagious.

You know, if you're willing to give it on your life and you're just so totally insistent on nonviolence.

So he learned pretty early on, much to his shock in South Africa, that nonviolence, as this clumsy word, for lack of better words, is way beyond the refusal to hurt or kill.

We don't kill anyone, but we give our lives to stop the killing and to transform the violence of the world.

And he saw it as the force of God, that God is totally nonviolent.

It's the method of God, he said, because that's what Jesus did.

And it's the power of God available to us to work for good and transformation for the human race and all the nations.

So Gandhi said that if you engage in the power of nonviolence, force more powerful than all the weapons and nuclear weapons of the world combined.

That's a direct quote.

So that's our path, but few people are choosing it.

We have a way forward.

If all of us Americans could just put down the sword and practice nonviolence with the same steadfast devotion he did, we really could get somewhere and dismantle our weapons and dismantle this whole...

culture of permanent warfare and injustice.

Because Gandhi said nonviolence always works.

Why?

Because it's the method of Jesus on the cross.

Suffering love, in the end, the willingness to give our lives will eventually melt every human heart, you know, and disarm others, including the oppressors, to liberating all of us, oppressed and oppressors.

So Gandhi teaches me That nonviolence begins in the heart where we renounce the violence in ourselves.

Wow, did he work hard on his inner nonviolence.

And then it moves out in active, creative, daily, meticulous nonviolence to all the people around us, our families, our communities, our churches, and then our cities and nation and world.

And Gandhi made a lot of mistakes, but not as many as the rest of us do.

He just wrote about them and learned from them.

He didn't repeat them and tried to practice personally the total nonviolence he wanted for the world and what he wanted in others.

And he said, well, this must be the way of God.

So there's got to be a way to use this to take on the whole British Empire.

Now, Dr.

King said no one had ever really done that before.

had really applied the Sermon on the Mount insistence on nonviolence to an entire nation.

And Gandhi was saying, I'm just beginning to experiment with this.

We can go and do this with every nation in the world.

And he was right.

He got the British to leave nonviolently.

And Dr.

King and the civil rights movement got to bring down segregation nonviolently.

And there have been 85 nonviolent revolutions since then.

So nonviolence.

He's inviting us to be practitioners, teachers, and promoters of nonviolence.

So how are you doing with that?

Number two, Gandhi said around 1900, think about how far ahead of his times he was here, nonviolence is at the center of every world religion.

because it is the way of God.

So that's why he took a vow to respect all the religions.

He says nonviolence is at the heart of all spirituality.

It's what it means to be human, to be godly, to be human is to be nonviolent.

And God is a God of nonviolence.

And he was trying to embark on a new spirituality of nonviolence.

And that's why I always think the future.

from a Gandhian perspective, is interfaith nonviolence and discovering the common ground of nonviolence that we all walk.

So he's basically showing us that Hinduism means total act of nonviolence, especially if you follow his take on the Bhagavad Gita.

He's saying through his friend Abdul Ghaffar Khan that Islam is about total nonviolence.

The word means peace.

his friends, many close Jewish friends, that Judaism is all about nonviolence through the magnificent vision of Shalom.

And Buddhism is all about, you know, infinite compassion toward all living beings.

There's no violence involved.

But Gandhi said Christianity is the greatest religion of nonviolence because Jesus was the epitome of nonviolence.

It's just that Christians...

have completely rejected the nonviolence of Jesus and turned it into a state or imperial religion.

That's why he refused to become a Christian.

But he was probably more devoted to Jesus than anybody.

So there's a lot to ponder there, just to start discovering the nonviolence in all the world's religions.

And to read Gandhi on Jesus is very powerful.

Third, Gandhi spent his life in pursuit of truth.

That was the other word that he used morning, noon, and night, truth.

To the point that Gandhi said that truth is God.

We would say God is truth.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

But Gandhi was trying to unpack that for us and said this amazing statement, truth is God.

And he invents the word satyagraha, truth force.

or the persistent clinging to truth, to talk about the human journey as a journey toward the truth.

And every human being has a piece of the truth, but none of us have it all.

And the flip side of truth is total nonviolence.

You can't get to the truth through violence.

And the purpose of nonviolence is to lead to the truth, which is God.

So in his pursuit of the truth, He concluded that, well, we have to be people of nonviolence then because violence doesn't work.

The means are the ends.

You reap what you sow.

And we were created to live together in peace in cultures of nonviolence.

So very beautiful.

You don't hear much about truth these days in the United States, anywhere for that matter.

And we can all think about how, what is truth?

mean for us and how honest do we want to be and how relentless are we in our pursuit of truth.

Number four, in the famous trial of 1922, he had an extraordinary statement.

Gandhi said, non -cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.

I think that's critically important.

In other words, Gandhi said 100 years ago, Things are so bad in the world, evil is now institutionalized at such an unparalleled level that we can destroy the planet, that it's not enough to try to be good and to do good even.

You have to also resist evil, if you see what I mean.

In other words, you can't just say, I'm a peaceful person and I believe in peace.

You know, if that's all you do, Archbishop Tutu would say, you're the problem.

You have to speak up publicly and take action publicly against permanent war.

It's not enough to be against violence.

You have to be public practitioners of active nonviolence.

My friend Ignacio A.

Correa, one of the six Jesuits assassinated in El Salvador in 1989, said to me the day I met him in 1985, that we, the Jesuits here in El Salvador, and this guy wrote the pastoral letters for St.

Oscar Romero, Herr Correa said, we are trying to be for the kingdom of God, but we have learned the hard way through the death squads and tyranny and oppression of Salvador that if you claim to be for the reign of God, you have to stand up publicly against the anti -reign.

That's what Gandhi's talking about.

You want to be good, you have to stand up against institutionalized systemic evil.

Number five, Gandhi said that the way to peace involves risk and sacrifice.

Now this is also critically important.

You see this in the life of Jesus going to the cross.

That if we might think of ourselves as peacemakers or working for peace, but if there's no sacrifice, no risk involved, how real or authentic is it?

How godly is it in a world of total war?

What he's talking about is a willingness to give our lives nonviolently for a new nonviolent world.

He had many sentences like this, just as in the art of violence and war requires a willingness to kill, the art of nonviolence and peace.

requires the willingness to be killed.

I'm not talking about a masochistic death wish to be a martyr.

I'm talking about a willingness before God.

Whatever you want, I will do.

Your will, not mine, even if it would help to give my life for suffering humanity.

The early Christians put it this way.

If you want to follow Jesus, if you want to stand against the Roman Empire, you have to participate in the Paschal Mystery.

the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

And Gandhi really studied and thought a lot about the cross, more than most.

And he says that's the path to peace.

Well, who talks about that now?

If you study Dr.

King's speeches, he's talking about the cross and accepting suffering without retaliating in the nonviolent struggle for justice every single day.

I've looked at his speeches.

I think we're so comfortable here, most of us upper class, well -educated white people, that we're not taking risks or feeling the brunt of global oppression.

But we have to be willing to get on the side of the poor and oppressed and the enemy and get out into the trenches and experience and practice nonviolence.

to the point that it's really costly.

We're talking about, to paraphrase Bonhoeffer, costly nonviolence, not cheap nonviolence.

Number six, maybe I'm repeating myself here.

I guess I am.

Gandhi said, this is going a little farther, that nonviolence requires accepting suffering.

So before I was trying to get at risk, which is why I've done so much civil disobedience, but here in this point, Wow, this is so tough to even say.

Gandhi said the practitioner of nonviolence has to court suffering.

You court it.

You're seeking it.

Like Jesus.

For what?

Your personal disarmament and transformation?

For political nonviolent revolution?

And in Gandhi's words, to see God face to face.

Well, wow, is that politically incorrect to talk about accepting suffering?

And you think that's bad?

Listen to this sentence.

Nonviolence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering.

It does not mean meek submission to the will of the evildoer.

It means the pitting of one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant.

Working under this law of our being, It is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save honor, religion, and soul, and lay the foundation for that empire's fall or regeneration.

Of course, he's talking about Jesus there on the cross, who sowed the seeds for the fall of the Roman Empire.

Well, I could go on and on about that, but again, this is the question of how far do we want to go in our nonviolence?

And what are we willing to risk and how far, what are we willing to suffer and how are we willing to lay down our lives?

And so I just invite all of us to go before Jesus in our prayer and reflect on those questions as the world moves closer to the brink.

You know, what are we willing to give?

for the disarmament of the world.

Number seven, Gandhi learned over time that prayer is essential.

If you're serious about peace and justice, he had this beautiful sentence, mute prayer is my greatest weapon.

He was saying that in the thirties, but right now he's this world famous revolutionary and people were going, what?

Mute prayer?

Let's get on with the revolution.

But it was a slow journey for him.

In South Africa, By the time he's in the 1930s, he was spending one hour in silent prayer every morning in the ashram, usually around 3 a .m.

And he'd read a sentence or two from the Bhagavad Gita and the Sermon on the Mount.

I know I went to the place where he did it in Ahmedabad with Arun.

And then he would have a five o 'clock prayer service and they'd read the same readings and have these beautiful songs.

This great Hindu song, his Muslim song of peace, and the Christian hymn to love.

Remember in the movie, he dies as he's walking to the five o 'clock prayer service.

Now, he said in his autobiography that the goal of everything I'm doing is to see God face to face.

That's a very profound statement.

And he is really busy, let's say, leading a revolution.

Everybody in the world wanting to see him so that by the 1930s, he's going, I'm not, I'm not, I need to go deeper into nonviolence.

So he declares Monday his day of silence.

So he doesn't talk to people.

He can sit there and write little notes, but he refused to talk so that he could be like the embodiment of peace.

And he was always training to be assassinated.

He knew the day would come and he wanted to.

Be very nonviolent and in his heart, totally nonviolent and so forgiving.

That leads me to my next point, number eight.

Gandhi was completely dedicated to purity of heart.

Okay, why do I say that?

Well, in those collected writings, I went through all the letters of Gandhi.

I mean, so there's no computer, there's no nothing, but he wrote 20 letters a day for 70 years, if you think about that.

And the government has collected them.

And he's always writing about the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus, but the one verse that puzzled him and challenged him the most, and I've said this on an earlier podcast, I think it's the sixth beatitude, depending on how you count them.

Blessed are the clean of heart, they will see God.

Blessed are the pure of heart, the nonviolent of heart.

So there's that thing.

I want to see God face to face.

My teacher, Jesus, says to do that, I have to have a totally nonviolent heart.

I can't have any more violence inside me, not a hard heart, not aggression, not judgment, self -righteous, anger, all of that has to go.

And he would write throughout his life, how do I do that?

How are you working on having purity of heart?

Well, this is, of course, very great instruction.

And Thomas Merton, said a spectacular thing, in my opinion, about Gandhi in his beautiful book, Gandhi and Nonviolence.

He said, unlike everybody else in all the movements who ever lived, Gandhi's work for peace and justice was the fruit of an inner unity already realized.

So think about that.

The rest of us are going, we're going out there and we're going to make you people be peaceful.

I'm going to force you to be peaceful and be just.

Merton is saying Gandhi.

worked so hard at his inner transformation, allowed God to disarm him so much that he becomes like Jesus, a spiritual explosion.

He becomes contagious and touches 300 million Indian people and people around the world up to this day.

Very powerful lesson.

Number nine, Gandhi insisted that if you want to work for justice and disarmament and creation, you have to live in solidarity with the poorest of the poor.

You have to become poor, serve the poor, join and constructive programs that relieve and end poverty and promote a just, more just society.

So he gave away all his money and renounced his career, his law firm, created a communal farm, made his own clothes, dressed like the poorest Indian peasants, shared their meager diets, and served and listened to the poor every day for the rest of his life.

And the part of, you know, going to jail and siding with the untouchables was another way to share in the poverty of the masses.

This is a very famous quote, often called the Gandhi talisman, which I end my collection with.

I will give you a talisman.

Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test.

recall the face of the poorest and the weakest person whom you have ever seen, and ask yourself if the next step you contemplate is going to be of any use to that person.

Will that person gain anything by what you're about to do?

Will it restore that person to a little bit more control over his or her own life and destiny?

In other words, will it lead to freedom for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?

Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.

Wow, he wrote that to somebody about five months before he was killed.

Number 10, Gandhi taught the power of nonviolence meant rejecting all worldly power and embracing powerlessness of this new life.

So the afternoon before he was killed, the reporter is interviewing him and says, well, what's your advice?

What have you learned?

What's your greatest teaching?

And he says, without missing the beat, have nothing to do with power.

Reduce yourself to zero.

Those are, again, very profound teachings.

Again, he's talking about Jesus on the cross, what St.

Paul called kenosis, emptying yourself, not grasping at God, letting go of everything and all control, appearing apparently powerless in the eyes of the powerful empire, but on the other hand, becoming an instrument of the power of God, the power of nonviolence to spread through you and disarm.

many people and even nations.

So this is that mysterious thing between power and powerlessness and what is power, the power of God, which is apparent powerlessness, the crucified Jesus, but is more powerful than all the so -called powers and weapons and empires of the world combined.

Maybe I'll just end with one more point.

It's a very hard one for us, but it's at the heart of Hinduism.

which is that as we give our lives for peace and justice, we renounce the fruit of our action.

In other words, and Merton was very big on this, we seek peace, justice, disarmament.

So we're working for the end of all war and the end of the wars in Ukraine and the massacres in Gaza by Israel and funded by the United States and the wars in Africa and nuclear weapons and extreme positive.

poverty and all of it.

But at the same time, interiorly, we let go of the results of our action.

So we're practicing, Gandhi insisted, an inner detachment.

Instead of being successful, hey, I did it, I ended the war.

We're just faithful and letting God work through us.

Instead of saying, I'm going to be effective and do this.

Well, that's what the Pentagon is about.

We risk the ineffectiveness of apparent failure, the life of prayer and suffering love of the nonviolent Jesus on the cross, which is totally disarming, transforming the world.

Instead of trying to be relevant, we practice the irrelevance of the nonviolent Jesus.

So he's talking about really surrendering ourselves to God, trusting that the outcome is in better hands than ours.

It's in the hands of God.

And if we remain faithful to God's way of love and nonviolence and universal compassion and peace, our lives will bear good fruit according to God's will.

That's a very deep and very helpful spiritual practice.

And if we work on that, it'll keep us all faithful to the journey, I think.

Let me end with a story.

And forgive me for my name dropping.

It was the day the George W.

Bush launched.

The war on Iraq, I think that was March 2003.

Might have been March 2002.

So yeah, it was March 2002.

I happened to be with my longtime friend Joan Baez that night in Santa Fe.

And I was complaining to her, as I often do, because she's this elder of nonviolence, in my opinion.

And I was saying, we've tried so much to stop this war, doing this, this, and this.

And I was in so much trouble.

We were having no luck.

And she's listening there.

And I finally stop and pause.

And she goes, well, John, you know what Gandhi would say?

Well, that was electrifying to me because nobody in my life has ever said, well, you know what Gandhi would say, John.

And she gave one of the great quotes of Gandhi, which I invite you to think on.

Full effort is full victory.

Hey, John, full effort is full victory.

So I invite us all to go full on with all we can like Gandhi.

into active creative nonviolence and building a movement of nonviolence and doing our part to welcome God's reign of earth.

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

I hope you can get my Gandhi book as well.

You can hear more podcasts and find other upcoming Zooms at beatitudescenter .org.

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May the God of peace bless you all.

Keep on following the nonviolent Jesus.

See you next time.

Thanks.