In my adult life I can think of a no more blatantly unjust action by my country than its current war in Iraq. The untruths and incompetent strategies involved with the war are well known by anyone reading this article. But what troubles me lately is not the immoral and inept actions of our American leadership, but my own conduct in reaction to the war.

I was infuriated with the most recent U.S. invasion of Iraq and almost everyone who supported it. My anger crested on March 18, 2003, the eve of the initial bombing of Bagdad. At the time I was attending 2 churches. One was Catholic—the faith I had been raised in. The other was an Evangelical church located in my troubled neighborhood in north Philadelphia. I had been attracted to the Evangelical church because of its progressive solidarity with the local impoverished community. The church was a source of moral support for me as I struggled to fit in and participate in the life of that community.

The leadership of the Evangelical church called the congregation together to pray and then go downtown in Philadelphia to participate in public gatherings connected to the imminent military action. I had assumed, errantly, that the church was convinced of the immorality of the pre-emptive military strike. It was not. This became evident when a church member publicly questioned why the congregation was headed downtown, and asserted her difficulty with protesting the government, since in the Bible, God himself had been the author of war. The church leadership left her comments unchallenged. Incredulous, I was jumping out of my seat pleading for an opportunity to counter the pro-war statement, but was not given one. I then stormed out of the church and never returned.

And by doing that I accomplished nothing. My anger and arrogant moralizing had divided me from a group of very good people. Looking back I regret what I did, and question the mind-set with which, at times, I have participated in protest. I now share the findings of my soul searching.

Protest to advance peace and justice should never be divisive for several reasons, regardless of the immensity of the evil that it addresses. First, divisiveness itself lies at the root of conflict and injustice. Secondly, protest done with a divisive spirit deprives the protestor of an opportunity for personal transformation. Thirdly, divisiveness renders protest ineffective. All of this is to say that protest for peace and justice needs to be reflective.

Jim Forest, a former editor of The Catholic Worker and long term associate of Dorothy Day, artfully argues for the need for reflection in promoting justice in an article he published in Salt of the Earth: "What I learned about justice from Dorothy Day." There Forest states: "First of all, Dorothy Day taught me that justice begins on our knees."

Forest's next point is just as informative: "Second, Dorothy Day taught me that justice is not just a project for government, do-good agencies, or radical movements designing a new social order in which all the world's problems will be solved. It's for you and me, here and now, right where we are."

I take these points to mean that the pursuit of justice is best done with consciousness of one's own failings, and that it must begin at home with personal conversion. This seems consistent with the principle of subsidiarity that is threaded in Catholic social teaching and puts the individual human person at the apex of just societies and policy. We certainly need fair systems and law, but peace and justice happen most fundamentally because of the way individuals act and treat others—as do conflict and injustice. A change in our own heart is the most important action we can take for peace and justice.

Modem spiritual writers—professional reflectors—back this argument up. Thomas Merton's words in his New Seeds of Contemplation are well known: ". . . instead of hating the people you think are war makers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed— but hate these things in yourself, not in another."

More recently, Richard Rohr makes a similar case in his discussion about efforts to reform unjust systems in his work, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer: "I've seen far too many activists who are not the answer. Their head answer is largely correct but the energy, the style, and the soul are not. . . . They might have the answer, but they are not themselves the answer. In fact they are often part of the problem. That's one reason that most revolutions fail. They self-destruct from within. Jesus and the great spiritual teachers primarily emphasized transformation of consciousness and soul. Unless that happens, there is no revolution."

In reflecting on my participation in protest, I am struck by how rarely it seems to have had an effect. The current war on Iraq again comes to mind and sits at the top of my lists of disappointments. I recall my excitement and hope while walking with 10,000 others down Broad and Markets Streets in Philadelphia on February 15, 2003. That weekend millions of people protested around the world against the intentions of the US government to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. I have read that this protest was the largest in history. Yet it failed—utterly.

I remember wondering why millions of people hitting the streets and jamming up cities across the globe didn't give the U.S. government pause. The failure bothered me deeply because I had been so personally invested in the protest and so moved to be a part of it. In fact, the outcome made me bitter. How many people do you need to scream out the truth before a country sees it?

My thinking at the time was again misdirected. I failed to understand that the real power in bringing about peace and justice is love. If we follow the logic of the spiritual writers, the largest protest in the world failed not because government leaders and people who supported the war were so stubbornly immoral or ignorant, but because those who opposed the war didn't love enough. Those of us who had taken to the streets lacked radical conviction to an alternative social vision. Our protests were not backed by lifestyles that advanced the welfare of the oppressed. We lacked credibility.

I have also come to see that the pursuit of peace and justice is not about being right, but being with. Effective protest puts the protestor in solidarity with the oppressed—and also their oppressors.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Peace is Every Step: "The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives—the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods. We have to look deeply into the situation, and we will see the roots of war. We cannot blame one side or the other. We have to transcend the tendency to take sides."

Solidarity—the polar opposite of divisiveness—is the basis of human transformation. The formula for solidarity is simply the Golden Rule: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. If we want peace and justice, then we should not protest against something or against someone, but for something or for someone.

How often do we change people's hearts by convincing them they are wrong? Don't we move people with compassion and by pointing them toward something we can participate in together that will benefit all of us? Isn't it more efficacious to hold people to something they already value?

The most successful American protest in my lifetime was the civil rights movement. I believe the protest of this movement worked because it was couched as a call to better all of America, rather than just a condemnation of racism. Essentially Martin Luther King, Jr. and his co-protestors sought to move America toward integrity and compliance with its own Constitution—pointedly the 14th Amendment. Their courageous maintenance of non-violence and spirit of forgiveness in the face of brutal treatment gave them phenomenal credibility as protestors. And isn't the 14th Amendment, "equal protection under the law," really just the codification of the Golden Rule?

I recall a protest in the 1980s in Washington, D.C. that challenged the Reagan Administration's policy in Central America. At one point I looked to my side and observed a fellow protestor carrying a poster of Mao Tse-Tung and dragging a tattered American flag in the street. The protestor and I were both against our government's support of rightist dictatorships. But I saw no need to drag the flag in the street and certainly couldn't support the spread of Maoism knowing the suffering it had brought upon the Chinese people. As a group we protestors for peace and justice often discredit our protests.

One of my favorite musicals, South Pacific, is enjoying a popular revival on Broadway. It is a remarkable play and movie given its underlying theme and the time at which it was first released—only 4 years after the end of the Second World War. While Americans were still licking their wounds and weeping over their losses from the war, Rodgers and Hammerstein (and James Michener, who wrote the story) raised the question of whether racial prejudice in American society made us similar in some way to the German and Japanese regimes that we had just defeated. My favorite part of the movie is where the Navy commanders attempt to recruit the local French plantation owner on the island to work for the American cause against the Japanese. The Frenchman challenges the Navy commanders' adamant request with the question: "I know what you are against. What are you for?" (This may not seem like a profound statement, but when you hear an Italian baritone say the words with a contrived French accent—why it just shakes the coconuts right out of your palm trees!)

We protestors for peace and justice are good at expressing what we are against, but we fumble in making clear and credible what we are for. We too often fall short on our conviction for a better world that requires our own transformation. Let's keep hitting the streets, but let's also spend more time on our knees.

Scott Fina

Scott and Barbara Fina are CPF West living in Santa Maria, CA,
with Matthew, Sean and Luke.