Prayer Vigil for a Homicide Victim

I guess I was not the only one who noticed the ‘violence’ in football over the weekend. The National Football League (NFL) announced today there will be suspension for illegal tackles, like using your helmet to tackle. I guess it took a weekend of injuries from violent collisions to wake up the NFL. I heard one high school coach on Public Radio say that in grade school and high school youth are taught the safe and correct way to tackle. However, when kids grow up and play football in college and the pros these lessons seem to be forgotten.

This morning we had a prayer vigil for a young man killed on the North side of Milwaukee. The family was there and the mother spoke and prayed eloquently about her son. She said that when family members got mad and upset with him he would never fight back. He would just take in the words of anger and not get angry himself. The taking in of violence in any form, accepting it and responding, but not giving it back, is an essential element of nonviolence in my mind. This nonviolent young man was killed by violence as the number of homicides grows.

Tonight we, Breaking the Silence met to discuss how to stop teaching war and violence at Marquette University, a local Catholic Jesuit University. How Marquette can host a school of the army, teaching violence and values contrary to Christianity, points out how pervasive violence is in our society.

Violence is so pervasive that we can stop noticing it. It takes a violent weekend of injuries to wake up the NFL. The causes of violence in our central cities, poor education, lack of jobs, broken families are well documented. But a serious war on poverty is too expensive when we have so many other wars to fight around the world. We try to break the silence at Marquette but so far are mostly ignored.

Yet what choice to we have but to continue to meet violence not with violence but with creative nonviolence.

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