Noli Irritare Leones

Around twenty years ago, I was a volunteer at an urban ministry drop-in center (with which my old friend Jim Burklo was also involved). At this time, we were operating out of an office in a local Episcopal Church, with a minister, a couple of interns, a couple of other office staff, and several volunteers like myself who would be at the drop-in center at one time or another during the week. I worked swing shift at the time, and so was able to be at the drop-in center at least a couple of mornings each week.

One morning, when I arrived, one of the staff told me that he had had to do something he’d hoped never to have to do: he had called the police. Evidently one of the people who sometimes frequented the drop-in center had gotten in a fight with another man, and had pulled a knife. He had left when the police were called, and the knife, as I remember it, had somehow (I am not sure how) wound up on the roof of the church.

After a while, everyone on staff had needed to leave the office on one errand or another (or else was simply not in that day, most people being part time), and I was left to mind the office by myself for a little while. As I stood in the small passage outside the drop-in center door, I saw the man who had been banished earlier – I’ll call him Guy With Knife – return to the church grounds. He appeared to be heading toward the place where I had been told his knife had wound up.

Next to me stood a little girl, five years old. In my memory, she stretches as high as she can stand, perhaps on tiptoe, to reach a drinking fountain. She knew nothing about Guy With Knife, and I’m not sure her mother knew either, since her mother was gone I knew not where. I stood there trying to decide what I could do. I couldn’t think how to get Guy With Knife to leave the property. My best move, I thought, was to stay glued to the most helpless person there, the five-year-old girl, and not leave her side until someone had showed up who had a better idea than me about what to do with Guy With Knife.

As usually happens in such cases, nothing really did happen. One of the part time staffers showed up, and I told him Guy With Knife was back. Some of the street people checked the situation out, and told me that Guy With Knife had retrieved his knife and left the premises right afterward. The girl’s mother eventually showed up and left with the girl.

I’ll never know what I would, or could, have done if Guy With Knife had actually showed up at the office brandishing the knife (stay between him and the little girl at all times no matter what was my only plan).

I’m not, in fact, a thoroughly non-resistant Quaker. I’ve been attacked a couple of times, since I started attending Quaker meeting – forcible groping and attempted mugging – and each time I pushed as much as I needed to get free. This level of force, I think, is in keeping with the Quaker Peace Testimony. We utterly abjure all fighting with outward weapons, but using minimal, non-lethal force to keep yourself and others out of danger is fair. So whether I’d be allowed to wrestle away the knife of Guy With Knife if I thought I had a serious shot at it (not so likely, since I’d be smaller, weaker, and unpracticed at such things) isn’t a serious moral issue. At the same time, I stand in a tradition where we don’t so much prepare ourselves to fight guys with knives as to find alternatives to violence.

Now a guy with a gun has taken it into his head to kill Amish schoolgirls, as peaceful a people as you can find. I’m reading the comments on other blogs, and noticing people’s reaction to the fact that it was Amish who were attacked. At Feministe, everstar asks “And am I the only one for whom the whole thing is somehow that much more horrible because it happened to the Amish?” Apparently not; another commenter says that she has been thinking the same thing, and an article on the shootings takes pains to point out that

the Amish live a peaceful, turn-the-other-cheek existence in an 18th-century world with no automobiles and no electrical appliances.

But even now, when peaceful Amish people have been shot while minding their own business, some commenter at Hugo’s blog (not with Hugo’s agreement) feels compelled to drag out, against the Amish, of all people, that tired old line, “We all sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.” The same line I saw used elsewhere on the net, also today, in a post in favor of waterboarding, one which I’m not sure I can bring myself to link. To my relief, others, neither pacifist not non-resistant themselves, express respect for their principles.

The Amish don’t rely on rough men to do violence on their behalf. They hold to a faith which has been tested in the past by persecution, and they remain non-resistant because they think there is something greater beyond this life.

Stoltzfus said the victims’ families will be sustained by their faith.

“We think it was God’s plan and we’re going to have to pick up the pieces and keep going,” he said. “A funeral to us is a much more important thing than the day of birth because we believe in the hereafter. The children are better off than their survivors.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Memory, News and Commentary, Peace Testimony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.