Peeks [ Persona ] Non-Violence Is Always in Season February 2007

by Dan Shafer
Images by Russell Byrne

Internationally acclaimed “Troubadour of Peace” James Twyman to highlight annual 64-day event aimed at focusing attention on peaceful means of working together and resolving disputes.

The ideals of non-violence are especially associated with Mahatma Gandhi of India and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of the United States. Both men taught and practiced non-violence as a means of social and political change and of spreading the message of peace. Both were assassinated.

For the past nine years Monterey has joined with dozens of other cities and communities around the nation in a 64-day Season for Non-Violence that will commemorate their untimely deaths and attempt to keep their shared message of non-violence alive. This year the Season began on January 30, the 59th anniversary of the death of Gandhi, and will run until April 4, the 39th anniversary of King’s assassination.

Rory and Vicky Elder are leading this celebration in Monterey. Their background in non-violence and its application within the criminal justice system and law enforcement goes back more than three decades.

For the third time in the nine years the Elders have spearheaded the event. On Friday, Feb. 23, internationally known singer, songwriter, author, and peace activist James Twyman will present a two-hour concert and media show in Monterey.

Twyman, who is known as the Peace Troubadour, has traveled to many of the world’s “hot spots,’ sites of violence and war, to sing, pray, and present his message of peace. His appearance in Monterey is the fourth stop on a 16-city tour that will culminate on April 4, the final day of the Season for Non-Violence, in New York City at the United Nations building.

The Monterey observance of the Season for Non-Violence will feature other local events, including an interfaith religious observance and a multi-cultural “stone soup” dinner and sharing session. In addition, the annual “Dare to Care Day,” co-sponsored with the Community of Caring, will highlight the Season for Non-Violence.

This year the Elders are seeking co-sponsorship of the event from local pro-peace and social justice organizations as well as local churches.

How They Got Involved
Although the Elders share the ministry at Unity of Monterey Bay, the Season for Non-Violence is a non-sectarian event. Given their backgrounds, it was almost inevitable that the Elders would become involved in this observance when it started nationally in 1998 under the auspices of the Association for Global New Thought, based in Santa Barbara.

“When the first Season was inaugurated,” Vicky remembers, “we were in ministerial school in Kansas City. Our class wrote a booklet about non-violence in conjunction with the Unity church in Overland Park, Kansas.”

The Elders met when both worked for the California State Attorney General’s office under George Deukmejian, who later became Governor.

During her state-government career, Vicky worked for three different Attorneys General: John Van de Kamp, Dan Lungren, and George Deukmejian. She began her crime-prevention career in 1972 on the staff of one of the first federally funded crime-prevention programs they CAPTURE that focused on citizen involvement and neighborhood watch and crime prevention – two radical new ideas at the time and Vicky was on the leading edge of that effort.

Just before making her career switch to ministry, Vicky was coordinator of a statewide task force called “Violence Prevention: A Vision of Hope,” which included a major focus on community-based policing.

“Those ideas were based firmly on the belief that you aren’t as quick to hurt someone you know as you are a stranger,” she explains.

We were able to forge links between the police and the communities they worked with but to do that we had to go into the communities and work alongside the police. The effort involved intensive training to shift the focus for police from ‘enforcement’ to prevention. They began viewing the public as their partners, replacing the traditional ‘us vs. them’ mentality.

Rory (“Ro” to his many friends) was involved in youth probation and related law-enforcement work. He was recruited by Duekmejian and his staff to head up a school safety program that focused on partnerships among schools, police, and communities towards the reduction of school violence as well as gang and other criminal youth activities.

“We were both pretty typical products of the 60s,” Rory says. “The assassinations of Gandhi and King were huge events in our lives. They put a stamp on what we were trying to do long before we worked together for the State.”

The Elders had, in fact, spent their entire careers working in government, the school systems, cities, and neighborhoods promoting non-violence and developing programs aimed at reducing conflict and violence.

“In our minds,” she says, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea that violence is anything that leads to helplessness, hopelessness, or a loss of integrity was wholely valid. It’s much broader than physical violence, though it encompasses all manner of that as well.”

Being “children of the 60s,” they both gravitated to government-service jobs in an effort to have as large as possible an impact on society.

“But,” Vicky says somewhat wistfully, “We eventually realized that government follows rather than leads.”

Wake-up Call from Cancer
The two were working together in Sacramento in 1981 when Rory was diagnosed with cancer (thyroma). They had become friends and often commuted to work together, so Rory began to open up to Vicky about his fears and concerns about his health and what would happen to him.

“I had started my life on Choctaw Land, which is similar to but not quite a reservation,” he recalls. “But when I was eight years old, my mother’s parents removed me from my native culture and took me to a Catholic school in the Los Angeles area. That resulted in a huge amount of confusion and loss of identity. So it wasn’t easy for me to open up to people about myself.”

Rory’s cancer and the mortality with which he was immediately faced brought Rory up short. He began to search for a deeper meaning in what he has now come to refer to as his “life-transforming” rather than “life-threatening” diagnosis. He found time to earn his license as a marriage and family therapist, and to write a book about overcoming illness. Life on the Line: Challenge, Choices and Changes touched the lives of many others who were struggling with serious disease.

“We started on separate spiritual paths but we both struggled with how we should react to Rory’s cancer,” Vicky recalls. Through this time of reflection, which for Vicky involved several of her female friends in the office, the two of them separately discovered a spiritual tradition called A Course in Miracles, which was gaining great popularity at the time, particularly among psychologists and psychiatrists. They became active in a Sacramento-based Unity church led by two of the oldest and best-known Unity ministers, Phil and Dorothy Pierson.

Another result of Rory’s encounter with cancer was to reunite him with his long-estranged father who lived (and still lives) on Indian land in Oklahoma. Today, the two of them are close and Rory has made several trips to visit his ailing father during the past two years.

As Rory battled and eventually overcame cancer, he and Vicky drew closer and their interests converged. They were married in 1987 and soon had two sons, Travis and Kyle to add to their family of three that included Vicky’s daughter, Brianna.

“The longer we worked in government, and the more time we spent on spiritual exploration, the clearer it became that we just didn’t belong where we were,” Rory recalls.

At the urging of the Piersons, the couple opened a counseling practice under the auspices of the Unity church in Sacramento. Within a year or two, they began to consider making a major career change.

“We went to Unity Village in Kansas City,” Vicky recalls, “for two weeks of in-depth spiritual study. While we were walking around the campus, we both concluded that we should probably consider eventually going into the ministry.”

Ten years later they applied for Unity School of Ministry in Kansas City, a two-year ordination and two years later, they graduated from their program and were ordained. They soon found themselves in Monterey. Last year marked their eighth as co-ministers of the local church.

“In our ministry,” Vicky says, “we have a peace-centered and peace-focused approach in all things.”

’Tis the Season
Nationally, the Season for Non-Violence effort has grown over the years to a point where more than 400 communities in 38 of the states in the United States hold official commemorations each year. In addition, recent global expansion has resulted in programs being sponsored in 18 foreign nations, including Canada, the Congo, Nepal, Nigeria and South Africa.

One of the most successful outreach efforts of the Season for Non-Violence has been the publication in various forms of “64 Ways in 64 Days,” offering concrete ideas individuals can use to make non-violence a part of their awareness and conduct during the time of commemoration.

The Monterey Season team offers a free 16-page booklet with a suggestion for each day of the period, which you can obtain by calling Unity of Monterey Bay at 372-0457.

Also available at no cost is a poster containing peace prayers of all the major faith traditions. That poster, published shortly after the first celebration of a Season for Non-Violence in Monterey, has now made its way all over the country. °