Spirit in Action

Ending Torture and Starting Healing

John Calvi was led to found QUIT (Quaker Initiative to end Torture), in part, because of the profound healing work he has done over the decades with victims rape and other sorts of torture, including refugees from Central America. John knows the external facts of torture, including statistics, laws and motivations, but because of his work as a healer, he knows the suffering from the inside as well.

Broadcast on:: 17 Jul 2011
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - We've got a deep spirit here today for a spirit in action, John Calvi. At the forefront of John's work for several years now, has been his opposition to torture by the USA. I've known of his healing work for years, but he was also a plenary speaker at the National Quaker event called Friends General Conference in early July. That talk was, at the same time, deep moving and compelling. And you can purchase a recording of it at the FGC Quaker.org site. Two days after that presentation, John Calvi joined me for a spirit and action interview. And I was joined by my new co-host and sometimes substitute. For the times when I go on vacation, Madeline Shafer. Madeline has recently begun her own radio show called Friends Speaks My Mind. And I'm delighted to share her and her talents on spirit in action. Let's go to the FGC National Gathering in early July on the campus of Grinnell University in Iowa for a spirit in action interview before a live audience with John Calvi, healer and anti-torture activist. John, welcome to Spirit in Action. - It's a pleasure to be with you. - And of course, my co-host here, Madeline Shafer. - Hi Mark. - So John, you gave the plenary a couple nights ago. You did this, I think, being held by the committee that originally formed around the concern about torture, which was the chicken and which was the egg. How did this get started, the concern about torture? And then you're speaking at this gathering. - Well, when we were developing the Quaker Initiative to End Torture or Quit, I understood right away that it is such a difficult topic to learn about, to think about, to work with. That we really needed to keep it within a spiritual context. The stories are too awful for mere humans to be with without some help and protection and encouragement from deepening spiritual life. And so, immediately after calling five friends and asking if they would come together to help put on a Quaker conference on torture, then I began calling mostly old Quaker ladies to hold the work in prayer. There were six Quaker elders who came and sat at each of the conferences. We've had four of them, now we've got a fifth one coming up in November, to hold the gathering in prayer and to maintain a tone of spiritual life and to be clear that we're doing this work not only because we are Americans horrified at the idea of American torture, but that we are also members of the human race and that we are spiritual people who understand that to end torture is a good day's work that we should be doing. - I think we need to call people's attention to regularly act throughout the program that upcoming conference. You said it's in November. I assume they could go to the quit-torture-now.org site and that's where they can get information on when and where and how to register. - Yes, you can go to the website for quit or you can go to johncalvie.com that has a link to quit and that conference will be at Durham Friends Meeting in Durham, North Carolina on November 12th, a Saturday. - And what we do at this kind of conference? - One of the things we'll be doing is to talk about the future of quit and how it is we will proceed. There's a difficulty now for all organizations who are working against torture here in the United States and that difficulty is that there is generally an assumption in the American population that torture was a George Bush problem which has now been cured by Barack Obama. And in fact, torture in the United States is a long and dedicated piece of work with the formation of the CIA in the late 40s after World War II. There was a decision to study mind control and to perfect torture. And so we have really a thriving 60-year history of modern torture. Unfortunately, our new president has not completely ended torture and has not really brought justice to any of the people who have been tortured and who are still imprisoned. - I'm sure there's a lot of non-clarity about what is torture. I mean, there was debate back and forth whether waterboarding was torture. - There really isn't any, actually. The idea that there is a conflict about what is and isn't torture is really some noise that is being generated by people who are afraid of being arrested. - Well, what is torture? How do we know torture? - Well, the simplest definition phrase is cruel and unusual punishment. Now, the wonderful writer Molly Ivan said, "Of course it's torture. If they were doing it to you, you'd know it was torture." (laughs) Which I think is the simplest definition. The Geneva Conventions following World War II, which the United States helped to author and are accepted international treaties and therefore carry the weight of domestic law in the United States, defines a whole range of things but essentially, all the paragraphs boil down to, "You will treat a person civilly and well. You will not cause them to be hungry. You will not cause them to be cold. You will not cause them to be frightened. You will treat them as someone who is imprisoned with dignity." - You certainly know that I'm on board with this. (laughs) But I can imagine there's listeners out there with question and I think it's important to ask it. Don't other people, other countries, do torture? Why shouldn't we have the tool that they have available to them? Are we the worst transgressors in terms of torture? All of those questions, I'm sure that some people look at it and say, "I don't want our people dying because we didn't use some tool in our toolbox." And that the other people have access to. - Yes. - Well, there has been, of course, a great noise in the media that says, "We have to use torture to keep ourselves safe." In fact, there is no evidence that torture now or in our history has ever protected the United States or any other country. What torture accomplishes is domination. And if you want to dominate someone, if you want to control someone, then torture is a perfectly good tool. In terms of gathering information, it is not a very good tool because someone who is in a great deal of pain or distress or someone who is beginning to lose their mind because they have been treated so badly. These people are not good sources of information. They're perfectly happy to say anything. They think we'll stop the torture. And I think anyone can understand that if they consider the possibilities for themselves. For instance, if they were not allowed to sleep for an entire month or if the room that you were kept in was either too hot or cold for weeks on end or if your clothes were taken away and you were made to be humiliated in front of a group of people. All of these things would not serve to cause you to be a more honest person. They would serve for you to try and figure out what answer is going to get your clothes back and get you some food and get you some safety. The idea that torture is going to help us is actually been an idea that has been fought both within the Pentagon and from the CIA, from people who know better, from people who have experience with interrogation. You remember there was a shell on television call 24 where they were doing torture as part of the plot to save the world every week. And this one fella, he was strong enough and he was bad enough and he would save all of our lives because he would dare to bend the rules and go and do torture. One of the stories that did not make it to all of the newspapers is that a general from Iraq flew to Los Angeles to speak with the producers and beg them to make the show more realistic because the guards and the prisons at Abu Ghraib were taking their cues from the television show rather than from the manual and they were doing torture in ways that were clearly much more Hollywood than were part of what the army had intended. So you can see the tail wagging the dog here. There's a lot of noise in the media saying that torture is necessary and there's a lot of noise in the media that says, well, it isn't really torture. For instance, the idea of waterboarding, this is actually a very old torture. It has been used for centuries. Well, waterboarding is usually described as a simulated drowning. In fact, what it actually is is a great possibility that someone is drowned. Water is poured over someone who has a cloth over their face as they are lying on their back. And we know we have eyewitness accounts of people being waterboarded until they are drowned and then a doctor resuscitates them and then they are waterboarded again and perhaps they are drowned again. And so you see the idea that waterboarding isn't really torture. He's a very new idea that was devised by some people to protect other people from the laws that are well established and on the books. And I'm so sorry to talk about something as ugly as all of this, but of course it's so important for us to know how tax dollars are being used and what sort of half truths are being put forward. - Well, of course, the reason that we do want to talk about it is to bring light forth into the world. - Yes. - How did you get involved in torture? I thought you were a healer. I thought when I first came in contact with you, I think it was that you were doing healing people who had AIDS. I mean, that was what I recall of John Calvi a few decades ago. - Yes, well, you know, when I went to massage school, I was thinking, I'm going to get a job on a cruise ship. (laughing) - I'm going to be spreading oil. - You get on the wrong boat. - I'm going to be spreading oil on rich people in the sun and I'm going to have myself a happy life. What happened was that the first people who came to me were all women who had been raped. And so very soon I was making a study of how is it one creates safety within a massage room so that the grief and the pain of trespass can be made lighter and taken away entirely. And I did lots of work in the rape crisis. The very first person that I did massage work with was a wonderful young woman who had been abducted and tortured and raped. So really my work began with rape and tortured. Rape, of course, is the oldest form of torture that we know. And the most common one. So soon after I had been doing lots of rape work, this other thing came along which was the AIDS epidemic. And as a gay man, I wanted to see if I could be of help in my family. And this was back in 1983 before we had the word AIDS and before we understood the virus and had medicines to work. So there's a great deal of death and dying going on. A lot of the work was hospice work. By and by, my husband got a job in Washington, D.C. And I was doing lots of AIDS work there going to various hospitals and working with folks going into their homes. And I just got so tired of helping people to die. And I thought, you know, I could work with refugees who've been tortured. I could help people live. That would be such a relief from helping people to die. So I went to Amnesty International. And they sent me to the Latino Mental Health Center. And they sent me to the mayor's office on Latino affairs. And I wasn't getting anywhere. And finally, a good Catholic communist friend of mine said, well, let me make a few phone calls for you. And she connected me with Comadres, the mothers and the wives of the disappeared of El Salvador. And I began doing work in a church basement with the people from El Salvador who had been tortured, usually trained by people from the School of the Americas of the United States Army. So that's really sort of the various beginnings of my work in torture. So whatever happened to those cruise ships, why did you decide to keep doing work? Did something happen within you? Or where did that transformation-- when did that take place? Well, I think the transformation came when my hands began to get so warm as I was touching someone back in the beginning of the work. And I began to experience people's pain within my own body and feel where the pain was in their body and feel their fear and their anger and their sadness. And by and by I could feel their sadness and anger and pain and move out of their body and into my body and out. And my hands got so hot that they began to peel. And people would go into deep relaxation by a very simple beginning touch, even before I had started the massage. And so it took about a year of this happening over and over again for me to understand that this was a spiritual gift and that it was not Swedish massage. And it took about a year for me to actually surrender to it and say, OK, I will go where you need me to go. You'll have to do a lot of the steering because I haven't a clue as to what's taking place here. And so work came to me. And first I was doing lots of work in the rape crisis. And then I began working in the AIDS epidemic. And along with doing massage on people with AIDS, I also was making a study of how it is people could be surrounded by painful circumstances as caregivers and still do beautiful work. How can we avoid burnout? How can we make compassion pragmatic so that we can do our best for a long time? And then I began to work with refugees who'd been tortured. Later on, I did some work in prisons and with ritual abuse and lots of different kinds of hurt. So by this point, almost 30 years later, I've worked with tortured refugees from every continent and worked with lots of different kinds of hurt. And my own gift as a healer is actually quite limited. It seems that my gift is the release of pain, physical or emotional pain, following trauma. I'm not very good at changing tissue, and I'm not very good at changing a disease state. But a lot of pain that people have actually exists within the light and the energy surrounding the body. And that's the place where I can do my best work before there is actually disease within the body or something in the body is actually broken. Then that tends to be the realm that healers say that it is in the body now. And then once it's in the body, then the cheap economy model healer, like me, hands the work over to someone who can do the work on the inside. I have this suspicion, John, that this gift did not begin at the time you were doing the massage, that it probably dates back to your childhood. So thinking back to little Johnny Calvi when he was just a little boy. Were there intimations? Were there things that showed you that this was coming? Well, I was wondering about that. And of course, in everyone's life story, there are numerous beginnings. And in asking about this to an older cousin, she said, oh yes, I remember one day on Grandmother's farm, a bunch of the cousins were playing together up in the pasture and we fell into a pack of nettles and it was stinging our hands. And you took us down to the stream and you made mudpacks on our hands. And then you washed off the mudpacks in the cold water and you took the sap from a jule weed and put it on the places that were still hurting. And the pain went away completely. And you were five years old. How would you know about that at five years old? So I can remember various things along the way that were assigned but really it's only in retrospect that I can sort of see those dots being connected along the way. I wasn't trying to get on the bus. It was a surprise to me too in some ways. And in other ways of course, it feels very much like home because I've always had very large radar for sensing other people's pain and other people's hurt. And it took a while into this work to sort of understand that that radar for me is always on and that I can choose to use it for work and open myself up to work. Or I can say, no, this is a resting time. And I'm not gonna use that radar now. So once upon a time I was sitting in an auditorium and a woman sat down in front of me and I knew that she had torn a ligament in the lower part of her back by her sacrum and that she was in a lot of pain and that I could be of help. And that message comes to me like a message in meeting for worship. I don't have a lot of visuals. I don't see a lot of colors and I don't get a tremendous amount of detail. But I knew that I could help her and now I had to figure out some way to get permission to put my hands on her. And this was a big girl sitting in front of me. This is a big, tough girl. And I'm just a little fella. And she was talking to the friend next to her saying that she had injured her back pulling the engine out of a truck. (laughs) So I said to her, I said, and the pain is down in the lower left of your back. Isn't that correct? And she said, yes. And I said, well, I think if you put your feet flat on the floor and take a deep breath, I think I can move some of that pain out. And we were able to do that. And she turned to me and she said, that's pretty good. (laughs) So, you know, that's a nice piece of work. That's a nice, finite little engagement. And when I'm at a large, wonderful Quaker Conference, like a friend's general conference here in Grinnell, where it's understood that that's my work, I know that as soon as I get out of bed in the morning and I'm out in the world, that there are people in need who are going to seek me out and ask for help. And I am listening for my guidance, for my angels to see, is this my work to do? Is this something I'm being given to help with? And then proceeding from there. - You know, I'm feeling some tears within me just thinking about the gift of healing that you do have, John. To know that you can move out the physical or the emotional pain, but to know that you can't get rid of the disease. - Yes. - I feel myself crying, just thinking about, why did you give me half the package, you know? - Because they wanted to make sure I could sleep at night. I mean, just imagine if I could actually change disease as some healers can. Or if I could heal the broken bone as some healers can. When would you get any sleep? When could you go rest? You'd have to hide in a cave somewhere. You could never have a known phone number. And healers that I have known who have had that gift of changing tissue, have had to devise ways to hide. - So where does the pain go when you're pulling out? You talk about it going through you, but where does it go? I have in my mind the movie "The Green Mile", right? He's got the bugs that come out of his mouth when he releases the suffering and the pain, the sickness. - Well, I wish I understood more than I do, or maybe I don't. You know, I'm really just a little cardboard tube letting some light come through. You know, that little roll on the toilet paper roll, I'm just that little toilet paper roll and there's some light coming through. - That's a high claim. (laughing) - And my job is to be a good toilet paper roll so that there isn't obstruction. So my job is to keep my disciplines of being rested, to know about the pain in my own life and to be fluent with my own healing. And within that context, then to approach other people's hurt and see where I'm invited to work and whether or not it has been given to me to be of use to someone. Right now, I'm doing some work of helping an old friend to die. And she's someone who I love very much and it's, of course, harder to work with people that you love than with strangers because you really want a particular outcome. She's about my age, she's about 59 and her heart is going to stop sometime soon. And she has seven adopted children. So you can imagine that these beautiful children that she brought to her home 10 years ago are now mostly young teenagers. And now they're slowly learning that they are switching roles and now they're going to take care of mama in her last months. And so part of my healing work has been to go into the household and to help them understand that change. Now, if I could repair her heart, I would give a left leg to do that. But the healing that I'm allowed to do at this point is to make sure that there is sufficient love for everyone to go forward on the path that they're on and to help facilitate that. And there's a great deal of light and healing around that. And it's been absolutely beautiful. - If you just tuned in, you're listening to Spirit in Action. This is a Northern Spirit radio production. Our website is nerdinspirateradio.org. And on our site, you'll find our archives of the past six years. You'll find links to our guests, like today's guest, John Calvie. And you'll find a place where you can leave us comments, give us feedback, give us leads of people we should be talking to, those doing the healing work of the world, whether it's peace or justice or so many other ways that we care for the world and the earth. I have here today as my co-host, Madeline Shafer, she does a show called Friends Speaks My Mind. And Madeline, please say for our listeners a little bit about Friends Speaks My Mind, your work. And then maybe you have a few things to say to John. - I do, I have a few questions. Well, Friends Speaks My Mind is really sort of bringing together two passions in my life, Quakerism and Radio. And I came back to Philadelphia after traveling and going to school, actually in the Midwest in Minnesota. And I came back and I felt like there were a lot of stories that were not being told. Or there were new ways of telling these stories being employed by the younger generation, which I guess I'm part of. And I had a lot of creative energy and so I decided to pursue a Quaker radio show and start this. And it just kind of kept happening. I talked to Quakers in Philadelphia and kept getting support and just talked to Mark about it. And it just has gone from there and been well received. And it just seems to be what I should be doing. And it's been very life giving for me and I hope for other people. And so as I explained earlier there, this American life format, hopefully someday I'll be able to not use this American life in my description of them. But I pick a theme and then I tell, I've interviews and documentaries about that particular theme. So there's one on technology that I've done and one on growing up Quaker and one on aging. I'd love to have one on Quakers and healing. And so my question is, how did you learn about the ways to deal with your own burnout? Like you described that you know, you know now how to, you have to stay well rested and you have to deal with your own spiritual healing. But were there stories around how you learned that and what your personal journey was? - Well, yes, I was a school teacher. I was a Montessori teacher with three to six year old children. And so I was accustomed for the children I was working with and for myself as a teacher that when you make a mistake, you use it for learning. So I had lots of opportunity to learn about what I was doing, not quite right. So in crisis work, when you're helping people to die or you're helping people who've been raped or whatever the trouble has been, there's lots of opportunity to become exhausted. Or there's lots of opportunity to become discouraged. Or there's lots of opportunity to lose your sense of humor or to get stuck in anger. And so I had a chance to watch myself and to watch other people. I had some lovely teachers along the way. The wonderful author Rabbi Tiers of Firestone and some other folks, Jean Schweitzer, also a wonderful healer to help me take a look at how it felt on the inside and what my experience was and to make sure that I was a paying attention not only to what I found in other people's bodies and what their circumstances were but to pay attention to my own body. There's some things in our culture that really cause people to become exhausted. One is this idea that it is better to give than to receive. And while that might be a very kind idea, I think it's probably more true to say that if you're actually gifted and talented in your receiving and you are receiving the correct things, your capacity for giving is going to be greatly enlarged. So what does my best look like and what do I need to stay at my best? Well, it's good for me not to live in the city. It's good for me to live in the country. It's good for me to get as much rest as my body calls for. It's good for me not to have too much in the way of sugar or caffeine. Various little things like this. It's good for me to have a good round circle of friends and loving community. 26 years ago, I fell in love and not long after that got married and my spouse has been one of the most important resources for my staying well and staying healthy and active in the work. And he is a very loving, tender, sweet man. I kept asking the universe for a mechanic or someone who had a lot of money. Never occurred to me to ask for someone who was sweet and tender, which worked out much better, really. You want to also be fluent in your own pain. Everyone has pain. Everyone has some pain in their life. And the better you understand your own pain, the better is going to be your capacity to be with someone else's pain. A lot of people have done work about the pain of their own lives. And if you can spend some time sort of sorting out, these are the pieces that I understand about. And over here, these are the pieces that I don't understand about. And this is going to be an ongoing work. I want to keep track of the pieces that I know about and I definitely want to be wondering at these pieces that I don't yet understand. And the more I do that, the more fluent I am with the pain in my own life, the more different kinds of pain I can hang out with in other people. And this is a very important part of a self-discipline for avoiding burnout. The other thing is the luxury of time. We are very, very busy, especially here in American culture. We are scheduled and over-scheduled. We have no idea how busy we are and we really have no idea how tired we are. And so if you can begin to slowly build into your life that luxury of time that's not filled up with some small thing that sort of begins to crowd and crowd and crowd further. Another very important piece is to have a regard for everything that you give. Every act of compassion is a beautiful and precious work. You want to have some reverence for every act of compassion that you make. Whether it is just smiling and saying hello to a stranger or whether it is doing the hard work of helping someone to die or helping someone to relax deeply after their bodies have been terribly hurt. You want to understand that every piece of work that you do, large or small, is something that is a reverent work and it deserves regard. And you don't just give it away. You dress it up and you present it and you know it's beautiful and you bless it and you let it go and then you withdraw. And that very simple discipline is very, very important and generally something which is not taught. - I'm also wondering about your Quakerism, how you came to Quakerism and how your work is not inspired but I guess supplemented by your Quaker spirituality. - I was even wondering if in some ways it wasn't a disadvantage to be involved with Quakers because I was thinking of certain sex that more likely practice healing that it might not have been regarded as quite so weird or you know we don't want to have snake oil salesman here kind of thing. And so I was wondering even if it was a disadvantage to be in the Quaker world. - Well that's a very interesting piece because actually doing healing work was one of the first things that Quakers got thrown in jail for. Around the time that Quakers were coming together and inventing themselves, there were actually a number of groups in England who were sitting around in silence in prayer and because the Church of England at the time was so thoroughly corrupt, people were really experimenting on their at home in small groups. One of the ways that the groups tried to enlarge themselves was to write pamphlets and they would brag about their miracles. And so Quakers were also writing pamphlets and bragging about their miracles which was a dangerous thing to do because if the government found out they would throw the leadership in jails straight away. And Quakers began to brag about the healing that they were doing. And we have documentation of Quakers raising people from the dead and healing broken bones in all manner of other things. In George Fox, one of the Quaker founders was actually a very powerful healer. There's much documentation of the healing work that he did. He also traveled with a small leather case in which he kept herbal medicines that he applied to people. When he came over to the United States at one point and he was visiting in New Jersey, friends were coming together to listen to this famous Quaker hold forth. And someone had fallen off their horse and broken their neck and they laid him under a tree and decided he was dead. And George came over later on and yanked on his head and that fellow got up and had supper that night. So there's actually this large and wonderful history that friends had but it was so dangerous to be a healer. That tradition really went underground among Quakers and we really would not have known about it unless someone had gone to the libraries and done some deep research in all of the journals and the letters and cross-referenced a number of things and was able to reestablish a volume that had been lost called George Fox's Book of Miracles, which has been recently reprinted by Friends General Conference Book Press and is a wonderful little book to look at. For myself, I was raised Catholic informally. I liked church but I knew as a young teenager that as a gay person it was going to be a lot of trouble. And when I was 16, a friend of mine from high school said let's go to Quaker meeting. I have to talk to a fellow there who was a colonel in World War II and interview him for the school newspaper who had since World War II become a pacifist become a Quaker. And so we went to Quaker meeting so that he could talk to Colonel Cruzz. And I walked in and I felt that silence and I thought, ah, thank goodness, this is wonderful, this is what I want. This is where home is, this is where I'm supposed to be. And so I began attending Quaker meeting at 16 years old and never stopped, I would go to the back row and lay down on the floor and just soak this silence in and listen to the messages that were being given. It was a small Quaker meeting at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. And it was just a lovely experience. So I became Quaker straight away, which did not go well at home. Did not go well with Catholic parents. - I've been there and done that. - Yeah. - I was with Catholic too. - Join in this old hippie religion. - What are you doing? - Of course, I was the only one going to church but that was beside the point, I guess. So in terms of being a healer and Quaker faith, one of the things I love about Quakerism is that there is an assumption, especially from older friends, that each Quaker is going to find spiritual adventure and go on it and it is going to change you and you're going to learn things and that's gonna be wonderful. And there's a wonderful expectation of that from older Quakers. And so that's what I was doing and people recognize that. Part of the difficulty was that when I began doing this work, all the people that I worked with had no money to pay me. And so I wrote a letter to 100 people and I said, I'm doing something beautiful who will help me. And half of those 100 people wrote back and said, we'll help you. And so now for all of this time, since 1982, I've been living and working primarily on gifts and teaching almost entirely by invitation. It's a little scary to do that during a worldwide depression. But so far, it's almost been 30 years and things have gone fairly well. - I'd like to bring the topic back to torture. Again, your website, John Calvi is at johncalvi.com. There's the website for the Quaker Initiative to end torture, Quaker Initiative to end torture. The letters you've used is Q-U-I-T. It seemed obvious to put the E in there and make it quiet, but if it was Quaker, but it's quid-torture-now.org. People can follow up. There's a conference in November. It'll be in Durham, North Carolina on November 12th. People find information either via johncalvi.com or quit-torture-now.com. You said so many deep and important things about it the other night, but I think we still need to know a little bit more about it. And there's one of the things I've been wrestling since the other night when I heard you speak. I sometimes worry that if you remove enough visible warts from the face of war, that people might find it more acceptable. You spoke in your talk about the fact that if we directly address torture, that maybe that'll help us see clearly war as bad as it is. And I'm worried about the opposite, that it's like removing a wart. Oh, well, I mean, war is just war and we've done that. And now we're not doing anything unethical or immoral. We're just fighting to defend our country or our interests or whatever. What do you think about that? I mean, you spoke on the other side of that last night and I welcome you either restating or enlighten me a little bit. - Well, you know, I think for the most part, the United States has always been in the business of war. And war has always been very good at making a lot of money for some people. Wars are expensive and there's a lot of money involved. So it can become a very large part of the economy and it certainly has become a large part of our current economy. It accounts for about half of the money spent in the United States. So if you think about the American war in Vietnam or the American interventions and wars in Latin America, there are all of these places where we said we were going to go into free people and often we were simply propping up a dictatorship. And the result was that a lot of people died but a whole other group of people made a whole bunch of money. And so I really hope that one of the things that the Quaker Initiative to end torture can do is to bring Americans together to say torture is not only illegal, it is immoral. It has to be stopped entirely, not just partially, not just from where we can see but from all places, especially in our domestic prisons. And we have to have investigations and we need to have prosecutions of the people who decided to use torture. If you have ordered torture, if you have done experiments with torture, as a physician, as a psychologist, as a nurse, these stories need to be known and these people need to not be allowed to do their professions in this way in the future. I think that that would be a very good best that America had to offer itself kind of work. And I think in some ways it would be the beginning of the United States to say, completely and deeply, the business of war has nothing to do with spreading democracy and that the business of war has to do with profit for a small group of companies and we must not let these companies take advantage of us any longer. - I was also wondering, John, it's clear that you had this connection with torture in the past of various sorts, including people from El Salvador or rape survivors and so on. Have you dealt with people who suffered torture in this war? I mean, we've seen the horrible pictures from Abu Ghraib and we know some of Guantanamo. Have you had to deal with the people who've been surviving the torture that went on and you also made a lotion to the fact that torture has not ended under Barack Obama's presidency? How do we know that? - Well, in part we know that there is torture continuing in some places because some of the detainees have lawyers and the lawyers are reporting to us. In part, we know that from the American Red Cross and their reports on the various prisons. Sometimes we know it from statements from the detainees themselves. Sometimes they've been released or sometimes they've been able to get word out. For instance, there is still forced feeding going on in Guantanamo. And the last story that I was able to hear, and of course it's not easy to get information. The last story that I heard was that if you were resisting forced feeding because you were a hunger striker, you were being beaten. Well, beating people is against the Geneva Conventions and forced feeding, forcing a tube down through someone's nose and through their esophagus to force feed them is also against the Geneva Conventions. It's very hurtful to a person and can really spoil their sinuses. It's a very painful process. So we know these things are going on. The Red Cross still has not been allowed into the Bagram prison in Afghanistan. There are reports coming in that black sites are still in operation. Now the new president came out on his third day of his presidency and had an executive order saying that torture is against the law. We don't do it and we are closing all the CIA run black sites. Well, there are black sites that are not run by the CIA and they're run by other places. Are those being closed too? Or is that off the list or we're not discussing that what's happening there? It's not easy to find out information about these things. Each night when I'm home, I spend about two hours late at night on the computer reading somewhere between eight and 10 news websites, looking for whatever stories I can. And I often find more information in the international press than I do in the American press. Have you had contact with people tortured in these wars? Actually, there's an interesting dynamic that is common to the American experience, which is after we invade a country and torture some people, it takes a few years for them to migrate to the United States. But often, people do get to the United States no matter where their country is. In the late '80s, I was working with many Salvadorans in Washington, D.C., who had literally walked to the United States from El Salvador. There are many Vietnamese who made their way to the United States who had been tortured during that war. I have not yet had my hands on anyone from Iraq or Afghanistan who has been tortured. I have been doing some work with veterans who have been engaged in those wars and had trauma as a result of that. Of course, anyone who witnesses or is engaged in torture either as a receiver or a provider, everyone carries a certain sickness after that to witness within themselves or another person the degradation of humanity. And this is a bad penny that gets passed, and it's a very difficult thing to carry. A lot of people would say one of the problems with ending torture is that if we release all of these people that have been tortured, they'll then take revenge on the United States. And so how would you respond to that? Well, it's true. Some of the people who have been tortured by the United States or by the people United States has hired to do torture. When they have been released, they become devoted enemies. If someone kidnapped a member of my family and tortured them and then released them, I feel safe to say that my entire family would become the enemy of whoever had decided to do that torture. I think that's a fairly safe and logical step to take. Now, how are we going to correct making such a gigantic mistake? The first thing that you do is you apologize. You say someone comes forward and says, we really screwed up. This was a really bad idea. I'm so sorry. This never should have happened. And we were wrong. And we are going to stop doing this now. And we're not going to do it anymore. Right then, you begin to stop the enemy making machine. Not everyone is going to believe you, but some people are going to believe you. And then you start to make reparations. And then you make sure that the entire story is told completely from all sides so you can see how it happened. When this happened with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, many, many hearts were turned from hatred to cooperation. Not all of them, goodness knows, but it certainly improved the situation enormously. And this is what we need to do in this country. If we are going to allow people who have ordered torture to continue in public service in offices of great power, we continue a reason for people to distrust and to hate the United States. Well, unfortunately, John, I think we've come to the end of our hour. Of course, appreciate you being here. But I did have one more question. We've referred a couple times now to the Quit Conference, the Quaker Initiative to End Torture Conference. That'll be held November 12th in Durham, North Carolina. Is it only for Quakers? I believe there's other anti-torture and organizations working against torture out there. Would someone who didn't know the secret Quaker handshake and password, would they be welcoming to this? And would they get something good? Do they have something to contribute there? Yes. All of the quit conferences have been open to the public. And we have had the blessing of military personnel and other people to come join with us. Appreciate that. Thanks so much for your healing work of the decades. Thank you for carrying this concern and helping enliven the light response within us to this concern about torture. And thank you, Madeline, for joining me to hear. Thank you, Mark. And thank you, John, for all the work that you've been doing. Thank you so much. Our spirit and action guest today has been John Calvi, healer and anti-torture organizer. Find John at his site, JohnCalvi.com, or follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. And as I said, you can look forward to hearing more from my occasional co-host, Madeline Shafer, including the times when she'll be filling in for me. I'll take you out today with the song by Bob Frankie. He's been my guest on my song with "The Soul Show." And among the many gems he's written is this song, "A Healing in This Night." So resonant with the healing work that John Calvi does. I look forward to spending thoughtful time with you next week for "Spirit and Action." Here's Bob Frankie's song, "A Healing in This Night." [MUSIC PLAYING] There are songs that never ask you anything. There are strings that beat against the wood. There are songs that he is the singer's heart to sing. And that's good. But there are words that change the way you look at things. There are sounds that silence I'll talk on. And there are songs that circle in your mind and seek your heart and find it and seize it like a hawk. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are scars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. There are trials that trick you into lonely deaths. There are tears that burn until they fall. There are needs that tear you when you turn away, when they call. But there are hearts that will hold you when you've done your best for the love that will leave within their life. And there are friends to hear if you should cry, to pray if you should die. And there are songs that sing us all. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are scars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. There have been times that we've been living in. There have been times when working for my sanity. In my mind, I've seen the only one. There have been days when no one seemed to understand what I'd done. But there are ears to hear me in my softest voice. There are hands to hold and point the way. And there are men and women on this path to laugh if I should laugh. To find me if I stray. There's a pain here that slowly slips away. There's a love here that's leading us from darkness in today. There are scars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's all right. There is a healing in this night. There is a healing in this night. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. [MUSIC PLAYING]