During a period of terrible riots some years ago in Gandhi’s home state of Gujarat a “Hindu” mob descended on a rural village.  Almost all the village men were out in the fields.  The women reacted quickly however, and took in their Muslim neighbors to hide them from the mob.  As they lived mostly in one-room cottages, it often meant “hiding” them in the puja corner, underneath their household altar.  The mob stormed up to home after home screaming, “You are hiding Muslims in there!”  “Yes,” the women calmly replied.  “We are coming in to get them!”  Then the women, one after the other said, “First kill me, then only you may enter.”  Every Muslim in the village was saved that day.

My good friend Alain Richard and I were commiserating in an out-of-the-way restaurant in San Francisco just before he went back to his native France after many years’work as a leading nonviolent activist. The topic of our commiseration was how unhelpful the word nonviolence often is,and how no one has come up with a good substitute. But Alain had found a brilliant way to describe nonviolence without calling it that when he was giving workshops in rural Africa some time back. Forget nonviolence, he [Alain Richard] told me: “I switched over to asking them, have any of you ever used inner, moral power against physical force?” Sure enough, he told me, hands shot up. One woman offered this story: Her husband used to beat her a lot. Once, though, something snapped inside her, and instead of trying to protect herself she stood up and looked him right in the eye and said, “Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?” He never struck her again.

As part of wrapping up the second Christian millennium, Time Magazine ran profiles of one hundred key people who, in the editors’ opinions, had left their marks on that embattled century. It was not inspiring. What they did with Gandhi was shockingly bad, but they did manage to relate an eye-opening story about Nelson Mandela. [11] When the young Mandela stepped onto the quay with a boatload of other prisoners at the infamous Robben Island, where he was to spend so many years of his life, guards shouting “Huck! Huck!” tried to herd the new arrivals like cattle, to force them to trot up to the prison and submit them to other humiliations; but Mandela and a friend refused and kept on walking calmly though the guards threatened, “Do you want me to kill you?” Once inside, the head warder, Captain Gericke, went a little too far, calling Mandela “boy.” “Look here,” Mandela calmly told the startled Gericke, “I must warn you, I’ll take you to the highest authority and you will be poor as a dormouse by the time I finish with you.” [12]

“Incredibly,” Time reported, Gericke backed off.

But is this so incredible? Don’t bullies frequently cave in when they meet with unexpected resistance? We’ve all seen examples of this, and in the next chapters we’ll not only see a few more but will start working out their scientific explanation.

Let’s follow the lead the Time writers missed.  A quarter of a century later, Mandela became the first president of a free South Africa. As most of us remember, during his inauguration speech he paused, turned to his arch enemy, F. W. de Klerk, took his hand, and said, “I am proud to hold your hand—for us to go forward together. . . . Let us work together to end division.”

[11] Andre Brink, “Time Magazine’s 100 Leaders and Revolutionaries of the 20th Century,” Time 151, no. 14, 1998, 188–90.

[12] Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela (New York:Harper & Row, 1990), 218–20.

Karen Ridd was one of them. In 1989 Karen and four other international volunteers were working with a group called Peace Brigades International (PBI) when they were suddenly arrested by the Salvadoran National Guard. Three of the five were Spanish nationals, and they were promptly deported, leaving Karen, who was Canadian, and her friend Marcela Rodriguez, who was from Columbia, to face whatever was coming. Fortunately, Karen had had time to call the Canadian consul and alert another PBI volunteer who happened to call in at the right moment. This was some comfort, as was the civility—at first—of the soldiers; but no one from the team had had to face arrest before (to date, no international volunteer has been killed in Central America despite the enormous violence all around them) and from another room Marcela heard the soldiers describing them as “terrorists from the Episcopal church.”1 Their spirits did not improve when the two women, along with other detainees, were loaded onto a truck, taken to an army barracks, blindfolded, and subjected to five hours’ interrogation about their alleged connection with the guerilla FMLN, while sounds of torture and the sobbing of victims came from nearby rooms. Karen knew that PBI would quickly alert their worldwide network about the arrests, but she also knew that time was short—there was no telling what would happen in that barracks if someone didn’t get them out before nightfall.

PBI had in fact activated its worldwide network, and before long hundreds of people were sending faxes to the Canadian and Colombian embassies, calling and sending e-mail messages to their representatives to urge Karen and Marcela’s immediate release. All this got no response at all from the Colombian embassy, but Canada brought official pressure on the Salvadoran government, no doubt hinting that its extensive trade relations with El Salvador could be compromised if Karen were not released immediately. Whatever it was that got through to whomever was in charge, Karen found herself walking across the barrack grounds toward a waiting embassy official a few hours later, a free woman. But when the soldiers had removed her blindfold inside the barracks she had caught a glimpse of Marcela, face to the wall, a “perfect image of dehumanization.”2 Glad as Karen was to be alive, something tugged at her. Feeling terrible, she made some excuses to the exasperated Canadian official who had come all the way from San Salvador to get her, turned, and walked back into the barracks, not knowing what would happen to her in there, but knowing it could not be worse than walking out on a friend.

The soldiers were startled, and almost as exasperated. They handcuffed her again. In the next room, a soldier banged Marcela’s head into the wall and said that some “white bitch” was stupid enough to walk back in there, and, “Now you’re going to see the treatment a terrorist deserves!” No more mister nice guy. But Karen’s gesture was having a strange effect on the men. They talked to Karen, despite themselves; and she tried to explain why she had returned: “You know what it’s like to be separated from a compañero.” That got to them. Shortly after, they released Karen and Marcela. The two women walked out together under the stars, hand in hand.

A Dutch couple named Vos was among several who took in Jewish children during the Nazi occupation, putting themselves and their own children at considerable risk. The inevitable day came when Mrs. Vos’s mother came to visit, and was understandably upset to find refugees there in the house, endangering her grandchildren. Her daughter explained:

“We find it more important for our children to have parents who have done what they felt they had to do—even if it costs them their lives. It will be better for them—even if we don’t make it. They will know we did what we felt we had to do. This is better than if we first think of our own safety.” [35]

And she agreed.

[35] Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage, 178.

When my spiritual teacher was still living in India, on the Nilgiri Hills, he had a friend who was very much like himself: a compassionate, sensitive nature and strong feelings about justice and fairness. One morning the two of them were walking through the bazaar and came upon a villager with a caged bear. The cage was so small that the poor beast could hardly turn around; it seemed to Sri Easwaran and his friend to be crying out with its eyes. They walked off without speaking. Later that day, Easwaran went to call on his friend and found him trembling with anger. “I’m going to take my gun to the bazaar,” he burst out. “I’m going to set that bear free, and shoot anyone who tries to stop me.”

“Wait a minute,” Easwaran put in hastily, “hold on just a bit; let me see what I can do.”

First, he went to the owner to try to reason with him. It turned out that the man, a simple villager, was from his own state of Kerala, so it wasn’t hard to broach the subject after chatting a while in their native language: “Look here, don’t you think that creature is suffering in such a small cage?”

“Do you think I like to keep him penned up like that?” he explained. “But what can I do? A new cage would cost me more than a month’s earnings.”

“Would you be willing to use a decent cage if I could get one built for you?”

“Of course.”

Next stop: the local carpenter. By luck, he turned out to be a Kerala man also. Easwaran explained the situation and then came to the point: “You give me your rock-bottom price for a new cage.”

“Brother, I have a family to feed; but for you . . .”

Then back to his angry friend: “Suppose we could get a better cage built for so-and-so many rupees and the owner agreed to use it, would you put up the money?”

“Gladly. . . . But that owner will never agree.”

“He’s already agreed.”

Sri Easwaran was as angry as his friend at the sight of the dumb animal’s suffering. It’s important to realize that; but equally important is the key difference in approach. One saw a path to a solution, and quickly took it, while the other was hung up between the choices we’re all too familiar with, the dilemma that teenager Franklin Smith called “living a crazy man or dying a sane one.” And so he fumed, while Sri Easwaran set about writing a happy ending for the bear, for his friend, the carpenter, the owner—and doubtless himself.

One of my close friends, David Hartsough, who is white, was sitting in with a small group of civil rights activists at a segregated lunch counter in Virginia in the early sixties. They had been sitting there without getting service for close to two days, harassed almost without letup by an increasingly angry crowd. As neither the sitters nor the proprietors backed down, tension increased. Suddenly David was jerked back off his stool and spun around by a man who hissed at him, “You got one minute to get out of here, or I’m running this through your heart.” David, who had been repeating the Lord’s Prayer to himself before he was pulled off the stool, slowly lifted his eyes from the huge bowie knife held at his chest and saw “the worst look of hate I have ever seen in my life.” “Well,” he found himself thinking, “at least I’ve got a minute,” and he heard himself saying to the man, “Well, brother, you do what you feel you have to; and I’m going to try to love you all the same.” For a few frozen seconds there seemed to be no reaction; then the hand on the knife started shaking. After a few more long seconds it dropped. The man turned and walked out of the lunchroom, surreptitiously wiping a tear from his cheek.

And in fact, Mother Teresa demonstrated her peacemaking power dramatically in 1982 when, upon hearing that an orphanage for disabled children in Beirut had been abandoned to its fate during intense fighting, she announced her intention to enter the city and rescue the children. And so she did: for eight days the mere presence of the diminutive nun, who owned virtually nothing and had access to no state authority, brought the spasm of raging conflict that no UN-brokered force, no Syrian presence, no Israeli armies had been able to control to a strange peace.

Michael Weisser is the cantor of the South Street Temple in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a prominent supporter of democratic issues. In 1992 he and his wife started getting a series of threatening phone calls and hate mail. The police warned him that a prominent local Klansman, Larry Trapp, was behind most of those calls, and though they put a tap on Trapp’s phone they could not quite prove he was the one harassing them. So Weisser was not able to do much to protect himself—by the usual methods.

One day Trapp was yelling at him over the phone and Weisser decided, with his wife’s support, that he had to resolve this for himself. “I was real quiet and calm,” Cantor Weisser recollects. “I knew he had a hard time getting around [Trapp, who has since passed on, was in a wheelchair] and offered him a ride to the grocery store. . . . He just got completely quiet, and all the anger went out of his voice, and he said, ‘I’ve got that taken care of, but thanks for asking.’”

The Weissers had much more in mind, however, than just stopping the harassment. They wanted, if possible, to relieve the hate this man was suffering, who (they later found out) had been disabled for life—by a beating he received from a group of blacks. They now took the initiative, and called him. Not long after, they went to his apartment for a friendly visit, taking a dinner they had made. When he opened his door to meet the Weissers, Trapp pulled two rings off his fingers and handed them over to his still slightly apprehensive guests. They were Nazi rings. He was symbolically, and actually, renouncing the Klan forever.

Larry Trapp, by his own admission, had been one of the most hardcase white supremacists in the country, a man who “wanted to build up the State of Nebraska into a state as hateful as North Carolina and Florida.” Perhaps it is for that very reason that his conversion, compared to some of the other card-carrying supremacists who have made the break, was so complete. “I denounce everything they stand for,” he said of his former Klan associates.

But it’s not the people in the organizations that I hate. . . . If I were to say I hate all Klansmen because they’re Klansmen . . . I would still be a racist. [22]

[22] Daniel Levy, “The Cantor and the Klansman,” Time, February 14, 1992, 14–15. There is also a book on this dramatic episode: Kathryn Watterson, Not by the Sword (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

One fall day in 1943, seventy-two hundred people, virtually the entire Jewish Danish population, were smuggled out under the noses of the occupation by the Danish underground. The motley flotilla, made up of fishing vessels and everything that would float, pitched and tossed in the rough sea, but made Sweden with its huddled, seasick cargo by morning. Then, just when everyone thought they were finally safe, word came that the king of Sweden was afraid to give them asylum—frightened of the Nazi presence. Perhaps he feared it would even jeopardize Sweden’s neutrality.

As it happened, though, a famous Danish physicist was hiding out in Uppsala. When he heard about the dilemma he calmly sent word to the king that if the refugees were not taken in he would turn himself over to the Nazis. The king immediately relented and accepted the refugees. Moved by political expediency or awakened compassion, he responded perfectly to Niels Bohr’s Satyagraha of one.