Nonviolence on Trial

by Robert W. Hillegass

Overview

In this pamphlet I will give an account of some personal experiences with nonviolent thinking and acting that took place over a nine-year period of my life. I will try to trace the understandings and leadings that drew me, step by step, into a public peace witness and to recall the tensions and fulfillments that arose in the course of participating in nonviolent resistance actions. Then I want to describe the process by which I learned that truth can be mediated through action, in the absence of a fully formed faith position. For if there is anything distinctive about my experience, it lies in the fact that I discovered what I believed by acting rather than through prior reading or meditation, or even through the nurturing role of meeting for worship. For me, acting out a nonviolent witness for peace provided both the stimulus and the direction to rediscover the Quaker Peace Testimony, with its roots in gospel nonviolence.

Why this oblique path? First, it seems that some kinds of truth can only be known through direct experience, and this is signally true, I believe, of the mysterious power of nonviolence. But the "why" also goes to the need for integrating knowing, feeling, and acting – for wholistic being, a necessary pre-condition of spirituality. (In light of this, Friends may question whether we advance spirituality by maintaining separate committees for Ministry and Counsel and Peace and Social Concerns, for example. Do such organizational conveniences somehow convey the suggestion that our living – or even persons – can be categorized into the functions of "meditation" and "concerned action"'? If acting can be a form of prayer, mustn't knowing "experimentally" also include knowing through acting?)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940150929517
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	10/27/2015
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #274
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	215 KB

About the Author

“The earliest seeds for this exploration of nonviolence,” writes Robert Hillegass, “were sown at Swarthmore College,” which he attended as a World War II veteran there to learn that “each of us is responsible for life” and that “the retrieval of meaning from experience through words is the chief business of liberal education.”

Eight years as a teacher of English at George School (1952-l960) bought the author a closer knowledge of Friends’ values and ways including the work camp program which sent students and staff abroad to help rebuild war-tom countries.

Robert Hillegass points to other formative experiences: marriage and fatherhood (his four daughters are grown), eleven years as a textbook editor and membership in Wellesley Meeting, where discussions with a small “peace group” led to formulation of some of the social and economic viewpoints expressed here. The author currently acts as co-convener of New England Yearly Meeting’s Working Party on Faith and Witness.

But the author stresses that the chief preparation for this account was his participation in the nonviolent direct actions of the peace group Ailanthus, which he views as both the ground and chief support of his public witness. These actions led to a number of trials and several imprisonments, A Friends Journal article, “Nonviolence Behind Bars,” (March 15, 1986) grew from a jail log kept on one of these occasions. Friends who had read the jail log encouraged the author to give this more complete account of his experience with nonviolence.