Nonviolence is a form of spirituality
Spirituality takes many forms in people’s lives. Teny Oded Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, finds spirituality in working with young people who had been members of gangs.
“We are surrounded by spirituality and beauty if we allow ourselves to see it,” he says. “The institute’s work is about love and beauty, these kids don’t see hope. Many don’t think they will live beyond the age of 20. But once they feel that life is worth living, they remove themselves from risky behavior.”
Q: Nonviolence is a challenge in today’s society. What strategies do you use to bring together so many different people under an umbrella of peace?
A: You assume that underneath, we all want the same thing — to grow safely, happily, and be fulfilled, whether you are a cop, a judge, a mother or a gang member. But if you try to build bridges, you find that people are afraid to give up their power. They don’t want to look soft or naive. Here our deputy chief of police sits with our young people. At our table our assistant director of training can be sitting next to someone worth millions and someone who has just come out of jail. Both have something to learn from each other, and that’s the beauty.
Q: How do you perceive nonviolence as spirituality?
Just listen to the words of Pope Francis, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, the Dali Lama, Jesus. Moses said people had to get away from the tribe to get their heads together. There is a way to calm things down and change when you are trying to change the conflict — you need to be contemplative. Or it could be swimming or running or doing photography.… When kids see there is hope, they see that gang life is suicide.
Q: How do you expand hope?
I love the rituals of religion. I have a certain ritual I follow when going to the museum. We go to the RISD Museum with the kids to expand their imagination, where they see the beauty of what we can produce. RISD is a teaching museum and exhibits classic teaching in that it shows how people have lived.
Q: What captivates them at the RISD Museum?
A: One is the mummy room. That is quite mind blowing to them, that is one of the big hits. The young Cambodians find the Buddha even more mind blowing.
Q: Many young people in your program have apparently faced violence. Is there an underlying anger and how do you deal with it?
A: Yes, plenty have anger and trauma mixed. But there is a variety of things that help — a finding of a purpose, something to wake up for. Jobs are important. We need to keep pushing society for employment. Self-esteem goes if we don’t have a check at the end of the week. Purpose and dignity are gone. Having a job is part of spirituality and pay for work is a token of gratitude.
Q: How do you foster the spirit of forgiveness?
A: Forgiveness is part of the journey where nonviolence starts. We look at documentaries about forgiveness. Then they take ownership for what they have done. They confront what was done to others. Also we are engaged and we are tolerant of failure. It takes six tries and failures to get out of gang violence. We tell them you might fail a few times because of willpower, but when we fall back — like with a diet — we start again.
Q: How do you feel that nonviolence can be curbed from the perspective of a national mind set?
A: I trust patience. You can’t push it in a timeframe. Also at some point you have to humanize the enemy. The pain their mother’s might have felt when they lost a child is the same pain a gang mother feels when she loses a child.
Q: What is your dream come true for the young people in your program?
A: I want young people to be open to the beauty of life that comes with skills. It saddens me we incarcerate so many; it is a destroyer of lives. And I wish for society to see their lives as being worth as much as ours. It can be an education. If we see that everyone has the same value, violence would be dismantled.
One example of the institute’s work:
It was noted in their recent February report that at one school to encourage participation among kids who listened but did not give answers, the ISPN AmeriCorps team created their own version of the “I Am” poem.
Gross noted in the report, “Once they had completed it, they all wanted to stand up in front of the class and share their poem.… Some spoke about their cousins getting shot. Others spoke about how bullying had affected them. Twenty-six poems were read and it was like experiencing 26 lifetimes of happiness, fear, loss, everything.”
Their website is www.nonviolenceinstitute.org.
Rita Watson, MPH, writes on spirituality and health for the Journal’s Thrive section.