The line was clearly drawn. Etched in hate. Etched on the right and on the left. The date was August 12, 2017. The location, Charlottesville, Virginia. The event, “Unite the Right,” a white-supremacist rally that drew hundreds of protesters and hundreds of counter protesters, and which quickly devolved into a pitched battle of sticks, clubs, mace, smoke bombs, projectiles, and even guns.
Into the fray of that sweltering battle stepped a slight, middle-aged woman, barely five feet tall. That woman, Mary Grace, has been my sister in nonviolence since the early 1980s. She and her husband and I have supported each other in activism over the decades. On that hot August morning in Charlottesville, Mary Grace wore her messages of nonviolence on her t-shirt: “Love one another” from the Gospel of John and “Love is the measure” from Dorothy Day.
Mary Grace had painted the Gospel message onto her shirt the previous evening, before going to bed. She knew what the next day was likely to bring. Violent activists on the right and on the left had both announced their intentions. Also planning to attend were interfaith activists – with intentions of bringing words of peace and love. In the middle of the night, Mary Grace awoke with an inspiration and added the Dorothy Day quote to her shirt.
Then hours before the rally’s start, scheduled for noon, hand-to-hand violence ensued. Lines of police stood by and failed to control the mob.
Mary Grace stepped between the factions, into the breach. Her thought was “to stand in the way, to be a witness and a barrier.”
Almost immediately, she saw an alt-right activist staggering toward her, bleeding profusely from a head wound. He fell. She went to him and cradled his battered head against her thigh, while the rioting continued around them. She worked to staunch his bleeding. A photographer caught this moment in an image that has seared itself into my memory. The blood of the alt-right activist is spattered across the words “love one another” on Mary Grace’s t-shirt.
In that moment, Mary Grace took no side. Her response flowed from the deepest place within her, flowed from decades of nonviolent practice and prayer. Radical compassion moves toward suffering, despite the risk, and seeks to transform it. Joanna Macy writes: “At the core of our consciousness is a wellspring of compassion.” This Light of compassion melds concepts of self and other, us and them, enemy and ally. Border walls crumble in its presence.
Mary Grace stepped into the “tragic gap,” a place that Parker Palmer describes as “the gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility.” That’s precisely where Mary Grace placed herself that morning in Charlottesville – between reality and possibility. She moved from concept to practice. She modeled a way to a peaceful world even in the midst of a full-blown riot.
For myself, years later, as political divisiveness continues to roil our lives, I wonder about the place of compassion among our Quaker Testimonies. “Peace is, I think, the manifestation of compassion,” said His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Perhaps today our Quaker peace testimony is calling us to reach out to “the enemy.” The Dalai Lama has also said, “Compassion is the radicalism of our time.” ~~~
john heid is a sojourning member of Pima Monthly Meeting in Tucson, AZ (IMYM).