Spirit in Action
John Williams - Pax Christi, Peacemaking & Psychotherapy
John Williams was a Catholic priest in his 20's, till he felt another calling. He taught for decades at University of Wisconsin - Stout, in the Human Development and Family Living Department. Now in semi-retirement, he has help found a Pax Christi chapter at St Joseph's Catholic Church in Menomonie.
- Broadcast on:
- 17 Jun 2007
- Audio Format:
- other
I have no hands but yours to tend my sheep. No handkerchief but yours to dry the eyes of those who weep. I have no arms but yours with which to hold. The ones grown weary from this struggle and weak from growing old. I have no voice but yours with which to see. To let my children know that I am out and out is everything. I have no way to feed the hungry souls. No clothes to give or make it and the more. So be my heart, my hand, my tongue through you and will be done. The enders have my none to help and die. Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. 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. Above all, I'll seek out light, love and helping hands, being shared between our many neighbors on this planet, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. I have no way to open people's eyes, except that you will show them how to trust the inner mind. My guest today for Spirit in Action is John Williams. John was a Catholic priest in his twenties until he felt another calling. Subsequently, he taught for decades at the University of Wisconsin's Stout in the Human Development and Family Living Department. Now, in some my retirement, he has helped found a Max Christie chapter at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Menominee. John's path has been deep and dedicated, pursuing healing and peace in their many forms. He's taught pastoral psychology and moral theology, training a generation of marriage and family therapists, and is currently editing a book on the JFK assassination, as well as doing research related to the Vatican Council of the Catholic Church. Thanks so much, John, for joining me for Spirit in Action. John, you're retired from practicing full-time at Stout. What are the things filling your days these days? Well, just to give you an example, right now, I am, of course, working two days a week at the Counseling Center at Stout. I'm finishing that up as of this spring, but that's been a three-year commitment that I made. I'm also currently editing a book that's coming out on the John F. Kennedy assassination. I'm also doing some research in relation to the Vatican Council and the Catholic Church. And what else? Let's see, I'm working with a group, Fox Christie. That's a peace group that we started in the parish. What were you teaching at Stout and How Long? I was teaching in the Department of Human Development and Family Living. I was teaching courses in family relationships and also in adult development and aging, and then also teaching and supervising in the Marriage and Family Therapy Program. The longer I was there, the more my courses were mainly in the Marriage and Family Therapy Masters Program. Was doing this work some kind of a spiritual or religious leading for you, or was it just something that you did to make money? It was very meaningful for me, and I would say yes, it was a spiritual kind of work that I did. In the sense, a lot of it was preparing these undergraduates for becoming practitioners in family work at the Masters level, or doing Marriage and Family Therapy, but more and more, and partly as a result of my own interest, there's been more of an emphasis in therapy and in work on actualizing and utilizing spiritual and religious resources in the process of healing and reconciling and growing as families that has become even in the state university part of our endeavor. I think I've met over the years, people considered themselves to be very religiously based, who were very suspicious of counseling, like psychology was going to replace God. How do you look at that issue? Nowadays, in particular, that has changed because there are more and more people who have come in who are interested in a religiously affiliated kind of counseling. So that has changed somewhat, but then there are still those who feel that there should be a very strong boundary between secular counseling and counseling in a spiritual or religious context. That boundary is gradually lessening. It started out with the emphasis in the 12-step program on the fifth step, which was specifically a step in looking at one's own religious convictions and commitments, taking a look at those in terms of how they were really affecting one's life. That more and more has become a seriously regarded matter in doing work with families, so that family therapists are invited to look at the different kinds of religious resources that people use. That could mean, in the case of some therapists, that they're working particularly with a given tradition as religious counselor, but there are others that are looking at working with whatever spirituality and religion is professed by the person they're working with. In my own minor and clinical psych, I had to take a practicum years ago, and the first woman I worked with had attempted suicide and was quite suicidal when I started working with her, and she was a devout Jew. And so we began to have conversations about how her Jewish faith related to her desire to live. And that turned out to be a very important aspect of her recovery. Eventually, it was her consultation with a rabbi, with her own rabbi, that kept her going. Those resources can come to play a crucial part in people's efforts to heal and to grow and to continue their lives under very stressful circumstances. There are songs that never ask you anything. There are strings that beat against the wood. There are songs that ease 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 about, 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 stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's alright. There is a healing in this night. There are trials that trick you into loneliness. 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 hold you when you've done your best. For the love you'll leave within their lives. 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 stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's alright. There is a healing in this night. [Music] 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 stars here that fade against the light. They fall, but it's alright. There is a healing in this night. [Music] From your point of view and in your experience, and you've got a lot of years of experience in this field, does religious faith help or hinder more often people in their growth and in their development and in their continuing fruitful life? I'd say if it's a living faith, yes. Some people really have a faith, but they don't practice it. And oftentimes they would probably feel a little uncomfortable bringing it in as part of their therapeutic work. Then you have people who have a very particular kind of faith, but it somehow can limit their own actualization of resources. I mean religion is a very human thing. And so faith is a very broad term. Sometimes religion itself can be a hindrance to work in healing and recovering. On the other hand, the assumption that I would make is usually that if a person professes a faith and is living that faith, then that faith is a part of their lives and therefore it should be part of their work. Even if they need to change within that faith or to modify it in some way so that it doesn't stand in the way of their growing as a person or as a family or as a couple. When you look at religious faith and spirituality, often you'll find that it's either something that is particular to the individual or it's particular to a community. You have spiritual communities, you have religious communities, you have people who profess to have a very strong faith in a given tradition, or they profess to have a very strong spirituality even though they may not be practicing a particular faith. But the interesting thing is that in the past, there hasn't been such a strong spirituality for particularly couples. The spirituality of couples is a newer kind of thing. I'd say probably not that it didn't exist before, but in terms of something that was integral to life, it's something that has grown a lot in the 20th and now in the 21st century. And so therapists serve an interesting role if they're doing work with couples and if they're doing work with a family or small group, it may be bringing that family to a consciousness of what the real religious traditions and the religious or spirituality that they have is. And that's especially true with families with mixed religion. Sometimes mixed religion is seen as a hindrance to the development of one's faith or spirituality when in fact, there's no reason for that to be the case. There can be people of quite different religious backgrounds who can put together a spirituality that is really important for them as a couple. John, maybe I've jumped the gun a little bit. Could you say a little bit about what you mean by faith, what you mean by spirituality? A lot of people interpret these words differently and I've met people who I think call themselves atheist who are deeply spiritual people. What kind of definition do you, John, work with as opposed to with the profession necessarily as spouses? If I were to make a distinction, I would say that first of all, spirituality is a philosophical term. We're all spiritual. Everyone is a spiritual person. By that I mean our consciousness always is such that it moves beyond whatever horizon is in front of us. We need not have a mind to begin thinking about what goes on in another country. That movie separated by six said that we're only six people away from every human being. There is a kind of consciousness among human beings that transcends our bodies and transcends the limits of our ability to communicate. So I can't talk to somebody in Russia directly right now unless I focus specifically upon that person and know that my spirit is deeply connected to him or her in some way. So supposing I come out of a Catholic tradition and there is a Catholic in Russia and they have a deep faith there. When I include everyone who is of the household of the faith in my prayer, I am including that person. And that's part of my spirituality to have that kind of trans-physical and trans-conscious even awareness. I'm aware that there are people out there who I'm not specifically conscious of that I'm deeply connected to. That spirituality, it's so basic to my human life and to our human life and to our human family as a whole. We are spiritual. Faith is more a matter of it starts out with oftentimes a pathway that was formed by a tribe or a nation or a people who have been in some large community. They have a particular commitment to a particular way of life. Obviously that's deeply involved with one spirituality. But in a sense it particularizes spirituality into a particular community. So the Jewish people have the Jewish faith. The Indian people from India have the Hindu faith. That faith is a reflection of the depth and kind of spirituality they have. Oftentimes people relate this to belief. But it goes beyond that. It goes beyond the way they live their lives. It goes beyond the disciplines they practice, the way they see love and practice love in their community. All of that is an expansion on their spirituality that goes into the realm of faith. To me, basically spirituality is so into the human condition that it is literally an expression of who we are. Faith may be an expression of who we are, but it depends upon whom we follow and what tradition we're a part of. And that's not just a matter of belief, but for instance within the Catholic or the Anglican or any other religious tradition, whether it be Buddhist or Hindu, there are many spiritual paths. But yet those people consider themselves to be of one faith. You refer to spirituality as a human thing. How does it connect with other animals, plants, things beyond Homo sapiens? That's a good question. I think by analogy we can refer to plants as having some kind of insolvent. They're living, so are animals. Especially a higher form an animal becomes, the more likely it is to have a quasi-spiritual existence, like people refer to dolphins or to elephants whose communication tones exceed our own. And they have in a sense that awareness, that sort of consciousness that lends itself to something of a spiritual-like quality to it. I don't think we've explored that enough. I think that we would see our kindredness with nature much more if we were aware that consciousness was probably in the world from the very beginning of things. This is the way the Jesuit Te'ar Deshardan looks at it. He says consciousness is not something that suddenly occurred as human beings came into existence. It was like it was a part of cellular growth, and that the seeds of consciousness, if I could put it this way, are in the cells. And we know that cells do move with a given kind of vitality to them. Clearly what you've been talking about, John, goes far beyond what some people would define as religion or as spirituality. Some people would say the central core of religion is, you know, Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior, or maybe they'd say if you're just following the Ten Commandments or however they define their spirituality. What relationships are there between what you're talking about spirituality and this kind of religiosity that a number of people espouse? I talk about religion. I think there are people out there that would much more easily agree and understand what I'm talking about. When I talk about a faith tradition, most of the people out there who are in a religion are in some kind of faith tradition, so they would relate to what I say about faith. The main thing I've added there is that faith expresses not just a belief, but also a commitment. It expresses a way of life. And when somebody says I have Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, they are very strongly saying that he is my way of life in some way. I mean, I may agree or not agree with that particular way of life that that person professes even though I believe in Christ. There are many different kinds of Christians, but all of us have some sort of faith in Christ and we practice some way of being disciples. And that discipleship demands a commitment of some kind. So I think a lot of people would agree with and understand that. Part of the difficulty in relating spirituality to religion is that we seem to be at a time now when there's sort of a recovery of the understanding of spirituality. Somehow that was lost to our philosophical tradition. For a long time, it seemed almost as if materialism was sort of the reigning view. And that affected even religion in the sense that we were living in a world where there was a lot of emphasis on the materiality of the world. And now for whatever reason, probably a lot of different causes, there's been this realization more and more of our consciousness and where that puts us. Partly I think even through contributions like from psychology that is looking more and more at those kinds of things that are not easily measurable, we can't put paranormal communication under a microscope. What is it that allows me to be walking into a building with a marriage and family therapy student and she suddenly says to me, I think my sister is trying to get a hold of me. And her sister lives 90 miles away in Wausau and we're in Menominee and all of a sudden I say okay, so you want to make a phone call and she says yes. And she goes and calls her sister and says sure enough, she was trying to get a hold of me and now this was before cell phones. And now we're communicating with one another. I mean scientists haven't been studying that kind of thing. And so the expansion of just the field of psychology itself has lent itself to being more congenial to spirituality. But this has been kind of like a missing link in our understanding of religion and faith as well. I'm firmly convinced that even those people who seem to be rather strict and to adhere to a very specific religious faith are going to be more and more speaking in terms of spirituality because no matter how uniform a religious tradition is, there are going to be people who map the path in a different way. Just because of the way they live. One person is a politician, the other is a poultry scientist or a farmer or whatever. They have to integrate their particular discipleship into their particular way of life. I think there's a lot of people who probably think of themselves and how as fundamentalist Christians or conservative Christians, who are very concerned about the exclusion of their faith from the public arena. Are you saying that you were able to do your spiritual work in the public arena? Or was it that you had to be careful not to use spiritual words, not to refer to higher power or something as your teaching class in UW Stout? When this first started it was new and it seemed a little clumsy. The more this entered into the currency of things, the less uncomfortable it became. There are still people who say, "Look, I don't get into spirituality. That's out of my realm. I'm a scientist. This is what I stick to." And they have a stronger boundary between the two. There are those who realize that all of us are spiritual and therefore they're going to speak about spirituality like they do everything else. And in that sense they're saying that the boundary is artificial. Where fundamentalists come down on that depends. I know some fundamentalists who are very interested in spirituality and are sometimes they tend to identify it more with their religion without making a distinction. But there are some who more and more are realizing, "Okay, I can connect with an atheist because we seem to have the same convictions about things." And in that sense they suspend their exclusiveness when they engage in that kind of dialogue with somebody. How each person as a believer works this out is their own kind of choice. But more and more it seems to me as we become aware of our potentials and our opportunities as spiritual beings it's going to affect our religious traditions. Maybe I'm wrong. It remains to be seen. It's a matter of the future as this awareness becomes stronger and stronger. How do you see yourself as having done your spiritual work when you were both teaching in the area of marriage and family therapy and other related disciplines and when you're doing your counseling, when you're doing your therapy with folks? How is that spiritual work? Can you translate it into words that would be from scripture? I approach it from two points of view. First of all, I don't necessarily quote scripture at people until I find out what tradition they're in because nowadays we're living in a society where there's been a third wave of immigration. And there are a lot of Mid-Easterners out there. There are a lot of people from Asia. And we have of course this whole Hispanic tradition which relies not only upon the traditions of Christianity but Native American religions as well. And so it's a very different scene out there than it was say prior to 1960 when that immigration bill was passed that opened up the third wave of immigrants that have come into this country. So I usually consider myself as operating in a pluralistic environment. I'm very comfortable now asking what tradition people are out of. I just think that's a mark of respect. If somebody believes that Jesus Christ is their personal savior and all the rest of us should be Christians, I want to know that. I want to know what the bent of their faith and their commitments are. And that's in respect to them first of all and in respect to how they see the world and how they see our work together. The other side of it is that I am a social scientist. I'm a psychologist and I also am a professor emeritus of human development. I use those things as well. And that's becoming a more exciting aspect of things. So I'm not satisfied when I ask people what their tradition is. In family therapy I ask the students to map their families. How many different traditions are represented in their family? Was their grandfather a Catholic? Was their grandmother out of the congregationalist religion or out of the Lutheran faith? Or were they a Methodist or were they Pentecostals or were they Christian missionary alliance or were they Jewish? And the Jews show up sometimes in unusual and interesting places and so do some of the other, you know, more minority type groups. I'll track a family back and find somebody there. Well there are intergenerational influences that affect those people. My grandmother was a convert from congregationalism to Catholicism. I'll never forget the first time I walked into a United Church of Christ and I said to myself I belong here. It was like there was something in my blood that resonated to that tradition. Now I'm beginning to realize that asking people what tradition they're out of can be a more complicated question and it does affect their present living. Like for instance you may have a person who considers themselves. They may have come out of a Catholic tradition but their mother was Lutheran and so they decided that they were going to switch from the Catholic Church to the Lutheran Church. And then suddenly they meet up with a Baptist and it so happened that their grandmother was a Baptist. And so now they're married to this Baptist and feeling very comfortable trafficking back and forth between the Lutheran and the Baptist Church. And why is that? Well they have a precedent behind them. It's part of their tradition and I might add that it's also into their spirituality in some way that perhaps I am not yet able to explain. So in a way as a social scientist it's helpful for me to be aware of spirituality because it ends up doing strange things to people. And hopefully some wonderful things. I think a major thrust of the kind of work you do is really finding harmony between people. Yes it is. It's helping people to find peace or harmony in a larger sense of the word that they really develop a stronger intimacy with one another that enables them to allow for more room for growth in one another. And to encourage that growth even though at times they may not understand it. To quote the Bible I think of that particular situation where Joseph and Mary found Jesus in the temple and said we don't understand why you stayed behind. And he said do you not know what I am about? The comment upon the situation is they didn't understand the word that he was telling them. Well how many parents out there have run into a similar kind of situation with their kid? Why were you out doing this? And it may not be as inspiring as what Jesus said. But it's an eye-opener to the growth that this child is going through and in that sense it seems to me that that's really a valuable aspect of things. So yeah I'm trying to kind of keep an eye on how the opening up of some of these understandings of faith and spirituality affects people's ability to accept one another and to work with one another in specific situations. John you mentioned earlier that you are active with a group called PoxChristy, a Catholic Peace Organization and you use the word peace helping people find peace in their relationships. What do you mean when you say the word peace? Well there are two classic understandings of peace that I still adhere to. One is the tranquility of order in human life. That's one way of describing it. That was coined by a theologian in the 4th century, Augustine, who was also a bishop back then. And then there's also a Jewish understanding of peace, shalom. And that was the word that Christ used when he appeared to his disciples. And peace in that sense means in a sense the fullness of life and the fullness of community and the fullness of being together and so on. So in that sense it's a rather holistic way of understanding peace. Peace also is seen as the absence of conflict that is detrimental. And I say detrimental because conflict itself can be helpful to people. Sometimes there are differences they're stepping on that they don't realize and therefore they do conflict and resolving that conflict is actually a step toward growth. Conflict produces creativity as one person has put it. So all three of those definitions of peace mean something to me. And I'm sure there are others that I would relate to as well. But those three particular ones are helpful I think in understanding what peace making is about. What has that kind of peace got to do with war and just war theory and peace as it's viewed by the Catholic Church or the Christian Church? I'll give you a very specific example. The pope objected in person to George Bush's wanting to invade Iraq, made his dissatisfaction with that entry into war very evident. George Bush went back to see him again and the pope said, "Okay, I still disagree with your having gone to war but now that you're there and the war is officially moved to a different level. It seems to me you have some sort of responsibility to decide how long you're going to stay there and how you're going to stay there because this has created a whole new situation." So it strikes me that what the pope was doing, and by the way the pope never used the word just war. Pope John Paul had seen a lot of war and he was not interested in promoting its cause. He probably had an attitude towards the absence of war that was stronger than most people. I think he was hoping that the United Nations would be drafted as the conflict resolving and peacekeeping force of the world and that that burden would be taken off any individual nation. Even if that's not possible today he was looking at that kind of future. All three definitions of peace it seems to me have a relevance to war because in the first case, peace being the absence of detrimental conflict, war is always detrimental in some way. Whether it's considered legitimate or not it's still going to hurt people. It's still going to ruin lives. And so the absence of that kind of conflict is devoutly wished by most people who are even engaged in it. But then when you get to the second understanding of peace, which is more one of harmony and the tranquility of order, there's a lot of rebuilding that needs to go on once the war is over. It seems like the human race is becoming more aware of that. Just take recently the rebuilding after World War II was a tremendous job. And engaged in by many nations, some of which were not even involved in the war. And then you have the effects of that war, which was the release by a lot of nations of their colonies and therefore many nation states emerged after that war. And that meant a whole change in the political situation in the world, which was a matter of establishing some kind of new order of relationships. And then you have a war like the war on Iraq, where we're presently questioning whether or not we still belong there, because can we really rebuild this nation under present conditions? Are we still a force for harmony there? Beyond that, the overall well-being and the common good of humankind, war can interrupt that at a given point and therefore there's not only rebuilding but also a new kind of harmony and a new kind of ordering of harmony. And that's exactly what happened after World War II. It was creation of the United Nations, which is still going today. So all three definitions of peace are really vitally important in terms of looking at the world's situation. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] John, I think you're old enough to actually maybe have a few memories that relate to World War II. How did growing up Catholic at that time? How did that affect how you thought about the world? And did it motivate your eventual entry into the Catholic priesthood? It didn't have so much to do with my entry into the priesthood as such, but it had a lot to do with the work that I do. Growing up in World War II, I grew up in a family that had a lot of responsibility in industry and banking and law and in other ways, even in politics. When that war hit, one of my uncles, who had already traveled abroad, decided he was not going to wait for the United States to go into war, and he went into war with the Canadian Essex Scottish, and he was killed in 1942, just as the American troops were beginning to land in Africa and to start fighting there. He was in a raid on D.E.P. that was very early in the war. So all of a sudden, as a boy of, I think I was seven years old at the time, that had a profound effect on our family. So did the departure of the rest of my uncles, who all went off to war. World War II was a very big sort of thing, and all my uncles were of age at that time, and they all went off to war. And so when the broadcast began coming from overseas, I had my ear glued to the radio. It was just like, what's going on over there that causes all this disruption in a family. So it's had a profound effect on how I view things and what kind of costs people pay to get involved in national and international conflicts and how that's become so important today because the world has grown so much smaller. I believe that one of the things that you are concerned that you do through Parks Christi is to help people learn about citizenship. How does citizenship compare with something like patriotism? I think that citizenship has become far more important today, that rather than having a select group of people involved in politics, it's really important that all of us take our responsibilities as citizens more seriously. And I arrived at that conclusion as I began to look at the profound effects that have occurred with this country since the Second World War. I mean, we took a position of leadership in the world that has very much changed us. Throughout the years, I've watched different ways in which citizens have become involved in this leadership process. One is the Peace Corps. There have been a lot of people who have gone over to other nations as members of the Peace Corps who have come back and it has had a profound effect upon their lives. You've been one. That, I think, awakens people to a kind of citizenship that they were not aware of before. They become more aware of the effects that this country has upon other countries, to put it simply. And those effects are increasing as countries come more and more to trade and to employ one another's workforce. I mean, there's just a million ways we could go off and talk about this. Well, then that says to me that inasmuch as my allegiance, first of all, is to the United States of America, that I want to be a citizen of this country in such a way that it will not only be for the common good of the citizens of the United States of America, but for the human family to which we all belong. And so it seems to me that my citizenship is important and all of our citizenship is important inasmuch as we participate in a much larger arena, whether we wish it or not, often one that we are not aware of the impact we have. Patriotism, to me, is the virtue of being a faithful citizen. And I say faithful rather than loyal because sometimes our loyalty to our country can get in a way of promoting the common good. We see our loyalty in a certain way, but our loyalty is not always necessarily helpful. And that's why I think there's such a conflict today over patriotism, and some people are reluctant to use the word because it's moved from being a virtue to being a particular viewpoint that people have. Well, in fact, a virtue is more than a viewpoint. A virtue involves viewpoints, but a virtue has to do with one's faithfulness, not only to the common good, to the benefit of other citizens, but also the impact that those citizens are making outside this country. And why is this part of your POC's Christie discussion? Why is it part of what you're dealing with as your POC's Christie group and the Lutherans that are involved and the UCC people that are involved? Why is citizenship important there, and how does that bring about peace? It's important, first of all, because it seems to me that if our citizenship has become more important, we're going to have to take account of that in the process of making peace. If we're going to be people who strive to bring an end to war, or strive to bring greater harmony into human relationships throughout the world, then it seems to me that we need to come together as citizens to talk about this. Faith can help that process, or it can hinder that process, depending upon whether or not we see that faith is a way of being inclusive of community. If we're promoting the common good of those who belong to the household of our faith, we should be able to extend that outside. Therefore, a POC's Christie is mainly a Catholic organization, but it's also an organization that has strong ecumenical implications to it. Our citizenship involves everybody. It's inclusive of all the people who live in the United States of America, regardless of race, creed, color, anything else. And for that reason, I also belong to another group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Fellowship of Reconciliation was originally an organization of the American friends, but they separated out from the American Friends Service Committee because they realized that their peacemaking efforts were already awakening people in other traditions who wanted to work with them. The Ad Organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has included all kinds of religious traditions. I mean, there are Muslims for beasts that are part of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. I have a negative reaction. When all the flags were flying and the buzzword of the day was "God Bless America," I recognize that in a deep way that offended my sense of connection in the world. How does that relate to your ideas about citizenship and patriotism? It has a very strong influence on it. I'm going to make a principal statement first of all, and that is that citizenship and faith overlap in very interesting ways. I'm an American citizen. That's the nation in which I live. That's the citizenship I hold. However, when we get into foreign issues, it so happens that the Catholic Church has members all over the place. In the First Iraq War, because there was an increase in tension among the Muslim groups there, as a result of the United States intervening, what happened was that the Christians in that country, probably a majority of whom were Catholic, found that things were becoming so bad and the tension between religious groups was becoming so strong that they were leaving the country. So all of a sudden, the Christian presence in Iraq began to shrink as a result of the action of the United States and the impact it had upon religious groups in Iraq. That became even stronger in the Second War on Iraq, because there we were directly intervening to establish what we believe was important, namely a democracy. While this democracy heightened the religious tensions between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims, and as a result of the heightening of those tensions, things have become even worse for Christians. And so here I am, belonging to a church that has a minority faith that is literally vanishing from the land of Iraq where they might be, hopefully, a peacemaking effort between the very religious groups that belong to the same religious tradition, but are now very much at loggerheads with one another because they see politics differently from one another. So a very interesting thing for me as a Catholic is to sit here and ask, "What is my position toward this war in which the Christian presence in Iraq is shrinking?" That is not very well known, but it just so happens that I know a bishop, he is a peacemaking person, and he's been over to Iraq, and he's very close to the Archbishop of Baghdad and also the Bishop of Basra. This is common stuff between those people, and so it's heightened my sensitivity to the dilemma that is posed to Christians in this war. And I would feel the same way if there were Baptists instead of Catholics over there, and they were shrinking. I'm not a Baptist, but I have a deep respect for people who are of the Baptist faith, and I would be concerned that that minority is suffering as a result of what is going on. How do I square that with what my country is doing? I want to take a trip back into your bibliography. You became a priest. You were ordained as a priest in 1961. In the course of the 60s, by the end of the 60s, you had ceased to practice as a priest. Why was that? What was the change, and what has this got to do with your mission in life, what God calls you to? I think I see you as intentionally living out God's will for you. Why did you go in? Why did you leave that practice? I went in because I thought at that time, and I'm not going to be able to explain this exactly, but I still believe that it is a part of my call. In the Catholic Church, we believe that once a priest, always a priest. At a given point in my priestly life, I realized that I really needed to attend more to the issue of celibacy than I had been aware of at the time I was ordained. And so I went to my Archbishop and told him that I really felt that my call needed to change. And he said, "Well, that means you're going to have to leave the actual practice of the ministry. And if you're going to do that, I would like you to take some time to think it over. Even though I didn't tell him this, I had been thinking this over for three years already, and it seemed to me I had given it a lot of thought. I wanted to cooperate then, especially since he was the Archbishop, and he carried a certain responsibility for my actions. And so I said, "Sure." That led to my coming to the conclusion that, yes, I wanted to proceed with this, and he was very cooperative in placing my permission request to Rome. Because this means working out an arrangement with the church whereby I leave, and this was very new to the church itself. I did this shortly after a commission had been set up to process these cases by Pope Paul VI, and I was aware that this was quite a controversial move. And so I wanted to be sure to do it in such a way that it would still be a part of the integrity of my own profession of faith. I was going to go on as a Catholic, but I was going to now buy agreement with the church no longer function as a priest. I feel that I want to support the church in whatever way I can, even though I have made this decision. As long as the church keeps the law of celibacy enforced, then I feel it's my part to honor the agreement we have made, and to stand by my willingness not to practice as a priest as long as the church wanted to make sure that it was celibate priests who were practicing. So let's step forward in time. It's maybe 2004. You're active with Pax Christi. I think you originated a Pax Christi group within your parish, St. Joseph's in Menominee. What was the motivation, what was going on, and what are you trying to do as part of that group? The first thing I have to say is that I belonged to Pax Christi a number of years before I actually started a group. I was, as a faculty member, very tied up with a lot of different things. I would have welcomed an initiative for someone to start a group and would have readily joined, but when it came to starting one myself, I knew this was going to take some work. And so it was after my retirement and also with the presence of a pastor whom I knew was very sympathetic to this kind of group and this kind of work that I approached him and said that I would be willing to take the initiative to start the group. Now actually, I mean when people get into peacemaking, this is a rather large order and as a result, we don't have that many members of the group. Right now there are four couples and one minister. It's the nature of the group that usually a group like this grows very slowly. So in spite of the fact that we're part of a large parish, very few people have approached us to join. So after a period of about three years, we have nine members in our group. Once we get a program underway, a lot more people join us. After the election of 2004, we felt it was important for people who were Christians to sit down and ask themselves what it meant to be people of faith who were also citizens and how their faith influenced their own citizenship and vice versa. So we started a summer program on faithful citizenship. That program utilized Jim Wallace's books, God's Politics. We thought that would be a good discussion tool. But it also brought together a number of people who, after the election of 2004, were searching around these same questions. And so our group started off with a membership of about 34. Now with the election of 2006, we're looking at another summer program and hopes that we'll get people more involved as people of faith in taking the election seriously. And to kind of tie things up, John, I'm wondering if you could share what would be your vision of, well, in Quaker speak, we speak of the Peaceable Kingdom. What would things be like if your witness with respect to your counseling, your spiritual direction, your work with Fox Christie? What would the world be like? One of the things that I would like to see come out of this is that the awareness of ourselves as American citizens and the impact we have on the world would become fuller and stronger. I think we have a long way to go to realize that we are citizens of the human family. I mean, I listen to people in my own church praying to support the troops. I never hear anybody say, and the allied Iraqi troops that were trying to help to police this country so that it won't go into civil war. I mean, it would seem to me that would be a logical prayer request. But why don't they have this because they're still thinking in terms of our military effort and they're not thinking in terms of what we're doing to try to engage Iraqis in rebuilding their country? And also, when we pray for our dead, why wouldn't we also pray for the Iraqis who died and who firmly believed in whatever way they're believing they're promoting some kind of action that is for the betterment of their people? I mean, somehow we have to be able to cross boundaries in these situations. And I think, in a way, the whole issue of boundaries is a very important one in our world of today. I mean, look at the Carter Center. Look at what Jimmy Carter has done as a citizen of this country and going abroad and actually being invited by different nations to engage in high-level peacemaking efforts. I mean, it seems to me that that's not just the province of a former president but that more people as they travel would use that as an opportunity to become aware of what our impact upon various countries is. And so that's just one facet, but the whole thing about acting locally, it seems to me that if I can't sit down and talk with my neighbor about these issues and he's an ardent Republican and I'm a devoted Democrat that we can't have a meeting of minds that allows us to sit down and agree over some core values that we share that are trans party. What are the values that unite both Democrats and Republicans in a single political effort? So as I see it, we have to unite and we have to be able to cross boundaries in our own country, especially given this third wave of immigrants. I mean, the fact that there is something like 300,000 Mid-Easterners in the city of Detroit alone and that Chicago, from what I understanding, has as large or larger a population yet, tells me that there's a whole new world out there in the United States of America and that as a elder citizen, I'd better get used to the idea that I need to stretch my own boundaries if I'm to relate to these citizens in a way that's going to be helpful to the common good of our country. John, if people wanted to connect up with your POC's Christie group or if they wanted to get involved in that ecumenical discussion group that you're doing over in Menominee, how could they do that? They could get in touch with us directly at 235-4764. That's a 715 number. I'll repeat it again. It's 235-4764. They could also get in touch with POC's Christie, their website. POC's Christie, they just type in POC's Christie USA and .org, I believe it is. The people there would be more than happy to hear from them. Thanks, John, for your many years of service in helping people work on reconciliation, personally in families and extending it to our larger communities. You're welcome, Mark. I'm glad you invited me and I was glad to be a part of this program. My guest today on Spirit in Action has been John Williams. You can hear this program again via my website, northernspiritradio.org, as well as access the site for other programs and information about these programs. Music featured on this program has included A Healing in This Night by Bob Frankie and Lake Isle of Innisfree by Bill Douglas. The theme music for Spirit in Action is "I Have No Hands but Yours" by Carol Johnson. Thank you for listening. I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. You can email me at helpsmeet@usa.net. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. I have no higher call for you than this. To love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness. To love and serve your neighbor, enjoy in selflessness. Music You
John Williams was a Catholic priest in his 20's, till he felt another calling. He taught for decades at University of Wisconsin - Stout, in the Human Development and Family Living Department. Now in semi-retirement, he has help found a Pax Christi chapter at St Joseph's Catholic Church in Menomonie.