Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Deuteronomy 6:4-8
The matrix of nonviolence
When we open the desktop case of a computer, we see all its principal components fixed on a board called the motherboard. The physical storage or the hard drive, the operating memory or RAM, the processor, the sound and the video cards work by themselves and in relation with other components as long as they are connected to the motherboard. A change in the motherboard makes all other components obsolete, because they do not adapt to the new board; for example, the motherboard of a PC is different from the motherboard of a Macintosh.
We believe that Nonviolent Communication is the new motherboard for the world and society at large, a new social order. Upon this new matrix lies a new law, a new ethic, a new way to educate, a new way to relate to ourselves, to others and to our planet. We also believe that on this very matrix lies a new religion, that is, a new way of relating to God.
Similar to the theory of the Anonymous Christians of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, we have come to discover that many known facts, even without the knowledge of this new matrix, have on their own accord realized that they have operated inadequately under the principle of violence. Within the law there are those who question retributive justice and want to replace it with restorative justice. In philosophy Socrates saw indoctrination as a violent way of educating people, instead he used maieutic – the art of helping to give birth to new ideas – with his disciples as a way of reaching the latent wisdom in each person and that each person would discover this for himself with the help of a philosopher or psychotherapist who facilitates or helps the person give birth to this knowledge, that is, to become aware of it.
Similarly, Carl Rogers puts forward his non-directive psychotherapy against the directive and therefore violent method with the understanding that the solution to each person’s problem is within himself. Ethics questions the principle of just war and believes that there can be a world beyond good and evil. Additionally there is no longer a question of a heteronomous morality based on moral principles and rules established by one for all, but an autonomous morality based on the primacy of moral conscience, well-formed and informed, above all other instances. Brazilian sociologist Paulo Freire believes in a sort of maieutic way of bringing literacy to rural areas, while Teilhard de Chardin and Walter Wink believe in a different way of relating to God, a new religion.
Religion or revelation
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. John 3:16
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1John 4:10
Christianity is not a religion because religion, from the word “religare”, refers to the efforts, deeds and liturgies that human beings perform to relate with this superior and omnipotent being to obtain His favor so that He is on our side against our enemies'. Christianity is instead a revelation in as much as the kick-off given by this same God who, because He is love, first loved us. The initiative was, therefore, from God who so loved us that He sent us His Son. Following this same philosophy, Jesus chose his disciples, he was not chosen by them (John 15:16).
Contrary to Judaism which is negative with commandments that tell us what we should not do, Christianity is positive because it is based on the commandment of love. Judaism is to avoid evil while Christianity is to do good because one is NOT good just because he avoids evil. In fact, the human initiative in Judaism, as in all other religions, is based on the famous golden rule of which all beliefs on this planet have a version: Do not do to others what you do not want others do to you.
The Christian golden rule, however, is positive: In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
Christianity is the “religion” of initiative for we do not expect others to come to us -- instead, we go out to them moved solely by the intention of loving them.
“Love is repaid with love” – Or, in the context of the NVC philosophy, the compassion we use with ourselves and with others produces in others compassion that they, in turn, will use with themselves and with us. In this way a circle is formed which progressively widens its reach like the circles formed on water when a rock is thrown in the middle of a lake. If, as they say, laughter is contagious then love is even more so.
Nonviolent Christianity
The initials NVC which stand for Non - Violent - Communication may as well stand for Non - Violent - Christianity. Christianity is in fact nonviolent in its essence and in its historical origin. No one would deny that the concept of active nonviolence has its origin in the doctrine and praxis of Jesus of Nazareth. It is true that Christianity has not always been nonviolent throughout its two millennia of history; we cannot hide the realities like the Crusades, and its concept of just war, as well as the Inquisition or the violent ways chosen by some to impose and protect the true doctrines.
Historically, Christianity has not followed the path of its Master and Founder, Jesus of Nazareth, neither in his human demeanor nor in his gospel. Especially after the rule of Emperor Constantine, the Church was akin to the dominant power, and on many occasions followed blindly the Babylonian myth as if it was a gospel; and if in some ways she followed the other, the true Gospel of Christ, she read it in light of the Babylonian myth.
But this was not so in the beginning with Jesus of Nazareth, and until the fifth century. Jesus, in fact, was the first human being to confront the Babylonian myth of redemptive violence and proved with his own death that violence is not desired by God. Violence not only does not redeem, but it also turns into a vicious circle that moves like a hurricane, creating more violence along its path, increasing spirally and exponentially with each act of violence practiced.
With his death, Jesus proved that only nonviolence is redemptive. That is why Jesus, the founder of Christianity, is also the founder of nonviolence. We already had the occasion to explain Jesus’ proactive ideas of nonviolence, a term that many thought was created by Gandhi who achieved India’s independence by nonviolent means. According to Martin Luther King, Gandhi did not create the concept of nonviolence, but was the first person in history to raise and lead the ethical love of Jesus beyond the interactions between individuals, making it into a powerful and effective social force at large scale.
Gandhi even said, “Everyone knows that Jesus was nonviolent, only the Christians do not”, true enough that this is not a sarcastic criticism of Christianity. Christians in fact never gave importance to Jesus’ nonviolence and they themselves laughed at the saying of turning the other cheek by interpreting it as an innocent and naïve utopic idealism. Gandhi himself was certainly referring to Jesus when speaking for the cause of independence of India when he said, “For this ideal, I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill”.
Jesus and the Temple of Jerusalem
(…) Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!” John 2:15-16
Jesus entered Jerusalem “ridiculously”, one could say, riding on a donkey (Luke 19:28-40), an animal of peace and of the poor, for it serves to carry loads to marketplace, even to this day in Ethiopia. The horse, on the other hand, is an animal of war and of the rich, for it serves only for ostentation and war. Maybe people laughed because someone who intended to be a king came riding on a donkey instead of on a horse… but in so doing Jesus laughed at the violence and the system of government, he had neither fear nor shame in being acclaimed a king mounted on a donkey.
Much has been written about the expulsion of the merchants from the Temple, from which some dare to say that at last Jesus was also violent. First, it is necessary to take note that the least historic of all the gospels is precisely that of Saint John; of this incident, the synoptic evangelists Mark, Matthew and Luke make no account.
As for the Gospel of John mentioned above, the problem began with the erroneous translation that St. Jerome made of the original Greek. “All” refers according to the Greek original to the oxen and sheep that Jesus expelled with the whip and not the sellers. So the text should be read as, “Making a whip of cord and he drove all the sheep and cattle from the Temple”. In fact, when he came to the sellers of doves, he did not drive them out with the whip, but by telling them to take their goods out of there. The impact of entering Jerusalem riding on a donkey instead of a horse would have been deflated if Jesus had used the whip to flog people instead of the animals.
It is true of course that Jesus was angry, but he did not act violently, his rage, on this occasion as in others, was just and justified; in this case it was to defend the true religion, and in other cases to defend the poor, the widows, the sick and the destitute against those who took advantage of them. Contrary to our anger, which we exhibit when our interests are affected, Jesus never got angry, nor did anything for his own sake, to advance his own self-interest, he had none.
His was a prophetic gesture, in the style of the Old Testament prophets who never tired of repeating that what God wants is love, mercy and compassion rather than sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). Like many prophets before him, Jesus questioned and opposed the whole violent sacrificial system. The religion, or relationship, that Jesus came to establish is the relationship of love that existed between the people and God during the crossing of the desert.
Jesus tells the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-42) that God is not worshiped in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim, but everywhere because God is spirit and the only condition is to be in the truth. Jesus in the temple performed a symbolic act to invite believers to cease participating in the sacrificial system, since it absolved or exempted believers from converting in their minds and hearts.
Furthermore, the sacrifices had been in fact transformed into a shameful and corrupt business during the time of the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. Since they were owners of large flocks, they instructed the temple guards to inspect and reject the sacrificial animals that were brought to the temple so that people could not offer their own animals, because the inspectors always found some defects in them and declared them unfit to be offered to God. In this way, people had to buy new sacrificial animals at the temple, those that were coming from Annas’ and Caiaphas’ flocks.
The ancient nomadism of the people of Israel was conducive to a nomadic spirituality, that is, in not grasping onto false security and thus always depending on God. It was this type of spirituality that inspired the people during the years of the desert crossing to the Promised Land. Jesus in his “modus vivendi” returned to these times, in fact he was himself a nomad, he never settled down and had nowhere to lay his head. (Luke 9:58)
The sedentary lifestyle led to the creation of structures of power and the use of religion as the justifier or spiritual mentorship of these same structures. They locked God, who before was spirit, into the Temple where only the priests had access to Him, as only they had the key, and set themselves as intermediaries between God and men, selling salvation at high cost to the people.
Some time before Jesus, the Essenes had already taken notice of this fallacy so they broke away from the main stream Judaism because they considered it corrupt, and formed a community on the shores of the Dead Sea; in this community, salvation was obtained through the conversion of life by physical and ritual purification, by means of water, the symbol of spiritual purification.
The Essenic movement was an elitist one as salvation was offered only for some; so what John the Baptist did was to democratize salvation by bringing it out of the Qumran community and making it available to all by means of a baptism of water, symbol of a heart and mind purification and conversion. Being the son of a priest and therefore a priest himself, John rebelled against the Temple, since the free baptism he was proposing would replace the costly offering of animals in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins.
Finally, Jesus in the beginning also followed the steps of the Baptist, and that is why we see him further down the river baptizing at the same time as John (John 3:22-26). However, after the death of John the Baptist, Jesus brings salvation to the towns and villages by the laying on of hands. Jesus’ religion is a street religion and not of the temple, or synagogue, or church, for these quickly establish themselves as structures of power, and not even of specific places like the Jordan River as in the case of John. Salvation is offered by Jesus wherever humans live and need it.
At the time Jesus was dying on the cross, more than three thousand lambs and goats were being slaughtered in the temple; after Jesus’ sacrifice, the temple sacrifices ended because the Temple veil was torn at the same time as the Lord’s death. The Temple which at the time of Jesus had just been rebuilt by Herod and was at its height of beauty and splendor (Mark 15:38), was later destroyed by the Romans and to this day has never been rebuilt.
It is interesting to know that the word “Guadalupe” means “the one who crushes the serpent”; it is a reference to the god Quetzalcoatl, or stone serpent, to which the Aztecs used to offer human sacrifices. In 1487, due to the dedication of the new temple in Tenochtilan, about 80,000 captives were sacrificed in a single ceremony which lasted four days. Interestingly, with the arrival of Christianity there, human sacrifices also ended.
Religion without sacrifice
NVC opposes the theology, philosophy and psychology of sacrificing oneself and one’s needs for the sake of others. It regards it as part of the instituted powers, ideology of redemption through violence: in this case violence against oneself. The ultimate sacrifice of a man for his country, his homeland, his flag or his king or a woman's self-sacrifice to attend to the needs of her husband or as a mother to attend to the needs of her children, all perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence which says that violence is needed to achieve goodness.
Any action that is done out of the sense of duty, or obligation, shame or guilt; to buy love or popularity or because one feels responsible for the happiness of the other, goes against NVC philosophy. Anything done out of these reasons has a very high price to pay both by the doer and the receiver of such actions.
"Please do as I requested, ONLY if you can do so with the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck. Marshall Rosenberg
Never give anything that is not from the heart. Marshall Rosenberg
In NVC whatever we do, we do it free of charge, we make no debtors in the act of giving and are not in debt in the act of receiving; whatever we do, we do it out of love and the joy of contributing to our and the other’s happiness. Whatever we do, we do it to make our and the other's lives more wonderful; whatever we do, we do it because we like to do it and because it satisfies our needs and the needs of others. In NVC there are no extrinsic motivations in whatever we do.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. John 10:18
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13
Since for Jesus what is really redemptive is non-violence and since he was against the Temple and its sacrifices, we believe he was also against the whole idea of sacrificing oneself for whatever reason. Despite playing very well into the ideology of “Redemptive violence”, the whole idea of sacrificing oneself makes Christianity a non-less-violent religion than its mother, Judaism. Maybe this is the way the instituted powers look at Christianity and even the way many Christians conceptualize their faith; but it is not the religion that Jesus instituted and certainly Jesus did not look at his own death as a self-inflicted violent act - a sacrifice.
First, as we quote above, Jesus died for us out of his own free will and not because he was destined and required to die either by God the Father or because of the circumstances in which he lived. Second, and in concordance with the principles of NVC, he died for us not because it was required but because he loved us. Third, for NVC, needs, values or ideals are one and the same thing; so, in dying for us Jesus was satisfying his need to love each of us individually and humanity as a whole.
Love Your Neighbor as Yourself . Leviticus 19:18
At the first glance, this commandment seems to be only about the love of neighbor. However, when we look at it closely we discover that the measure by which I am to love my neighbor is my self-esteem, the love I have for myself, I can only conclude that the commandment not only implies that I should love myself, but that the love I am to have for myself is to come first, and then second the love for my neighbor the way I love myself.
For NVC our world is very plentiful and in it there is enough resources to meet everyone’s needs, so in any given circumstances we never have to compromise our needs in order to meet the needs of someone else. If ever my needs are on a collision course with the needs of another person, Nature will surely inspire us with ways or strategies to meet both of our needs.
Religion without Hell without Heaven
No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte
el cielo que me tienes prometido,
ni me mueve el infierno tan temido
para dejar por eso de ofenderte.
Tú me mueves, Señor, muéveme el verte
clavado en una cruz y escarnecido,
muéveme el ver tu cuerpo tan herido,
muéveme tus afrentas y tu muerte.
Muéveme, en fin, tu amor, y en tal manera
que, aunque no hubiera cielo yo te amara
y aunque no hubiera infierno, te temiera.
No me tienes que dar porque te quiera,
pues, aunque lo que espero no esperara,
lo mismo que te quiero te quisiera.
I am not moved, my God, to love you
by the heaven you have promised me
Nor am I moved by the dread of hell
To cease, out of fear, from offending you.
You move me, my God, it moves me to see you
nailed to that cross and mocked
It moves me to see your tortured body.
It moves me to see the anguish of your death.
In sum, your love moves me in such a way that
even if there were no heaven, I would still love you,
and though there were no hell, I would still fear you.
You do not have to give me a reason to love you,
Because even if I were not hoping for all I hope for,
I would love you the same way as I love you now.
Sonnet to Christ crucified by an anonymous Spanish poet of the 16th Century
This sonnet, by an anonymous Spaniard in the sixteenth century, reveals that already in that century there were people who thought that the true religion, that is, their relationship with God should not be motivated by the eagerness to gain Heaven or the fear of going to Hell. As we have learned from NVC, everything we do that is motivated by the fear of punishment or the hope of getting a reward is violent..
Salvation is by faith and not by works. Once we are saved by faith, the Heaven is already “ipso facto” guaranteed, we do not have to earn it; therefore, whatever good works we do is to respond with love and for love to the One who first loved us. Saint Paul had already intuited that Christianity is pure and unconditional grace, but in the centuries that followed the Catholic Church buried this theology and instituted the violent theology of salvation through works, and the purchase and abuse of indulgences.
Just as for nonviolence it was necessary that a Gandhi had to come to make us look back at our nonviolent roots, in this case it was also necessary for a Martin Luther and a schism in the Church to come to reconcile us with the Pauline theology of free salvation by faith and not by works.
For this Christian poet of the sixteenth century what moved him, the motive of his love for Jesus, is not an interested love, the kind where I give you something in order to get it back with interests, it is rather a free love. It is the answer to the one who loved me first and delivered himself up for me; it is not the fear of hell, nor the eagerness of Heaven, for even if these did not exist, his love would still subsist because it is a love that is moved by compassion and empathy, concepts so dear to NVC.
This sonnet, the most renowned of all Spanish literature, also had the ex-libris of the counter-reformation ironically accepting the postulate of salvation by faith. It had, and is in fact, an encounter of the love of God manifested in the passion, for no one has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13), an unconditional love, for Jesus gave his life for all of us while we are still sinners (Romans 5:8). It is the response of human love, also unconditional, without the “contamination” of Heaven or Hell.
Without doubt all love presupposes a hope, or rather, a purpose. Love, even when understood as a feeling, as in Plato’s banquet, is also a means (in the voice of Socrates) of reaching the absolute good and overcoming the state of being parentless, because human beings are, in themselves, incomplete.
The love of God, however, has neither a beginning nor an end, it is completely free. This sonnet makes a blank sheet of all expectations. He tells Christ that his love is not guided by any interest in the reward of Heaven or the fear of punishment of Hell. Human love is inspired by the suffering of Christ. Therefore, the absolute love of God has the capacity to generate a similar love in us.
It is true that the poet believes and does not deny his faith in life after death, but he insists more than once to manifest his love free of any expectation or retribution, exempting God from all obligations and even from blessings or prosperities that He may bestow upon him during his earthly life. The poet lives of love and for love, he has nothing to ask for in this life or in the next.
Salvation through faith alone
You pay love with love. (Portuguese proverb)
God is love and so all He does is loving. He created us out of love and when we went astray, He loved the world so much that He sent his only Son to save us through him. (John 13, 16) All this love cannot be retributed by deeds or good behavior; God created us and saved us out of free love and this love is always unconditional, it does not requires love from our part.
Consequently, we don’t have to do anything to achieve salvation, which cannot be obtained through our own efforts anyway, otherwise Jesus did not need to come. We can only reach God the Father through the Son (John 14, 6) and without him we can do nothing. (John 15, 5)
Love and do whatever you will, said Saint Augustine. We can only pay God’s love with our own love, not with deeds or good behavior. Deeds and good behavior indeed these will happen but they are not enforced by our strong will in repressing our needs in an effort to comply with the commandments in order to attain Heaven and avoid Hell, but simply as the result of our feedback love for God.
Oftentimes in sermons I like to provoke the people by saying that God only loves those who love Him. The reaction is immediate, the congregation throws at me that God loves everybody the same way, the sinner as much as the saint; that He makes the sun rise for the good and evil alike and sends rain on both the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:45)
But then I say yes, in theory God loves everybody but in practice, or in reality He loves only those who love Him. What I mean by this is that it is only when you echo the love of God, and the only way you can echo or feedback the love of God is by loving Him back, that you feel the effects of God’s love in you and in your life. If you turn your back on God, that is, if you don’t love Him, God cannot force His love on you so you don’t feel the effect of His love. Loving God is accepting His love, not loving God is rejecting His love.
The Sun before reaching us on our planet crosses a vast space but does not heat nor light it; space is black and its temperature is around -300 C. This happens because space is empty, there is nothing in there to receive and reflect back the light and the heat of the Sun. The same with the love of God, only those who receive it and reflect it back to God by retributing love with love will feel the effects of God’s love in their lives.
This leads straight into NVC in the chapter on gratuity and giving from the heart. Let us be reminded of Rosenberg maxims: Don’t do anything that is not from the bottom of your heart. Do as I request only if you can do it with the same joy as a child feeding a hungry duck. Don’t do anything out of any other energy such as: out of duty, or obligation, anger, guilt, shame, to buy the love of others, or heaven, for fear of being punished or Hell, or because you feel responsible for somebody’s happiness and would feel guilty if you don’t do something…
Freely you have received; freely give. (Matthew 10:8) - God did not make us to put us in His debt, we receive from Him with grace and we give to Him not with pay but also with grace.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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