Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Weaving the Web

April 21, 2006
Rev. Amy Zucker Morgenstern

I underwent a rite of passage last Friday at Lawrence Livermore Labs. I was arrested for an act of civil disobedience. A deputy sheriff informed me that I would be breaking the law unless I left the entrance driveway where I was quietly standing along with 50 other protesters. When he then asked me if I was going to leave , I said, “Sorry, no,” and that was that; I was under arrest.

I’m very well-behaved, normally. I abide by the laws, and when I slip up and get a traffic ticket, I feel awful. I smile at cops, who have a hard job and little appreciation, and even in the middle of courting arrest, I apparently feel the need to say “Sorry.” Let’s be honest; most of the people I went to junior high with would laugh knowingly to discover that goody two-shoes Amy became a minister.

But this week, being a minister required that I stop being such a good girl and break the law. It does that sometimes. Long before I decided to go to divinity school, my heroes included Dorothy Day, Gandhi, the Berrigan brothers, Martin Luther King — people whose religious convictions brought them into conflict with laws and institutions. Another was William Sloane Coffin, who died two days before this protest. I admired the way their convictions were so rock solid that everything else had to bend around them. Sometimes an entire country changed course.

I don’t have any illusions that US weapons policy will be swayed by my small, symbolic act of witness, or by the 50 of us, or the 150 who prayed and sang there. But over years of struggle, through many such assertions of conscience, hearts are changed, andso is the world.

Who was going to change their minds because of our Good Friday witness? As far as I could tell at the time, the press wasn’t even there. The only people present who weren’t already against the development of “bunker busters” and “tactical nuclear weapons” were the police who were guarding the gate. And, mindful of the many subtle ways to do violence to others, I realized I didn’t even want to pray that they would change their minds. So I looked at the very young faces under the riot helmets and practiced the breathing in of pain, the breathing out of love that the Tibetan Buddhists call tonglen. And they spoke politely — I haven’t been called “ma’am” as many times in the past six months as I was in that one morning — and we spoke politely, too. Maybe this gentle confrontation will plant seeds that blossom into a better world. That’s what protests, and ministry, are for.

— Blessings,
Amy