1-4th Nov 2007

Mairead Maguire's Presentation To First Global Nonkilling Leadership Forum In Hawaii

THE GLOBAL NONKILLING SPIRIT
SOURCES OF NONKILLING INSPIRATION

I grew up in a Catholic home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and will always be grateful to my mother and father, whose lives of prayer and faith, were passed onto their eight children. We lived in an area which suffered over 30 years of violent conflict, yet my parents’ faith in God and the daily practice of their Christian Religion, and service to others, was always a great strength and inspiration to me.

My love of reading especially the lives of the early Christian mystics, St,Francis and St.Clare, St. John of The Cross, St Teresa of Avila, helped me in my Spiritual Journey. Later in life I was inspired by writings of Gandhi, Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Thich Nahn Hanh, and John Dear.

However, it was not until early l970 that my journey into nonkilling and nonviolence took place. After witnessing State violence perpetrated against members of the community, I was so angered by this injustice, I seriously considered turning to violence in order to stop this injustice. I remember someone saying there was such a thing as a just war, and it was right to use violence when faced with injustice. I read the necessary qualifications for a Just War but found they did not make sense to me. I studied the Bible and found the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and the life of Jesus an inspiring story of nonviolence, and came to agree with the late Fr. John McKenzie who once wrote ‘you cannot read the gospels and not know that Jesus was totally nonviolent’. But above all, I went to the Cross and spent long hours just looking and listening for an answer to my question ‘is it every right to use violence?’. The answer came very clearly to me, Love your enemy and do not kill. For me the Cross is the greatest symbol of nonviolent Love in action, where Jesus challenged injustice and died before he would kill or hurt another human being. The Cross is one my sources of nonkilling inspiration.

Another source comes from within. I believe the Kingdom of God is within every human person and when we take time to be silent and listen we become aware of the presence of love within our own hearts, aware of the beautiful gift of life we are given, and energized and inspired by the Holy Spirit to fulfil our purpose in life by becoming loving, compassionate, nonkilling, human beings.