Spring 2007 Featured Story A World Without Boundaries : Fellowship interviews Mark C. Johnson By Ethan Vesely-Flad Mark C. Johnson began his tenure as executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) on March 1, 2007. Fellowship editor Ethan Vesely-Flad sat down with him following his first month in office.
Fellowship: You’ve been on staff just a few weeks, and you’ve already represented FOR in several capacities. One highlight was in March for the Christian Peace Witness and the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. We are also now remembering the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s speeches against militarism, racism, and materialism, including his “Beyond Vietnam” speech on April 4, 1967. How significant is it for you to arrive at FOR at this particular moment? Mark Johnson: No one who knows me well would characterize me as a cynic. I’m an eternal optimist. I really believe in some of the tenets of positive psychology, that affirmations and visioning are powerful ways to lead ourselves to where we belong and want to be. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr. was one model of that thinking. He was always telling us where we could and should go and be. I’ve been reading Taylor Branch’s three-volume history of King and the civil rights movement, and I had a chance to hear Branch as the third volume was coming out last year. Branch warns that we begin to rewrite history through the filter of the present moment. The theme of King’s affirming vision was echoed again and again in the speeches at the Washington National Cathedral in mid-March. King was also a pragmatist; he knew the evils of a government not held accountable to its founding vision. It’s more than the cynic inside us that says we cannot believe what we’re told by our government about the way we engage in the world: there is strong evidence we were and are being lied to by our governmental leaders. If you can’t believe the leadership of the “free world,” grounded in the principles the U.S. is grounded in and with the goodness that it does have, this is emotional and frightening to me. I was a conscientious objecter during Vietnam. All of us who took that stance – even today when we stand at a street corner and speak against the war in Iraq – there is a part of the country that labels us as traitors, when in fact, for most of us, we’re expressing the highest form of patriotism. I believe in a world without boundaries. I see myself as a citizen of the world. And yet we all live somewhere. There are so many things to be proud of in America. It’s my home. But I’m deeply concerned that, at this time, what we need to best understand is that our government leadership doesn’t have the moral wherewithal, the integrity, maybe the capacity to lead us through the issues that we’re facing, with integrity and good faith. While there is a risk of becoming or seeming self-righteous in that critique, the prophetic role of organizations that were present at the National Cathedral and are giving leadership to the peace movement are an absolutely essential and authentic part of history and culture of the human species: all traditions have prophets. And all prophets speak truth to power. I’ve been reading a new translation of the Bible called The Message Remix, by Eugene Peterson. It is a fascinating way to revisit the stories. He just puts them into contemporary colloquial language. I’m thinking of his retelling of Moses going to the mountain, coming back, and finding society in disarray. I think our great leaders, like King, have this way of retreating for reflection, and then coming back and having to draw the forces back into the proper orientation to the problems and the needs. FOR’s a small, prophetic voice and we’re one of the lesser prophets, the “minor prophets.” We have a staff, a membership, a history, and a legacy that has been a prophetic voice to power through the ages, and has drawn attention to those cases when we have to be critical to the point of being contemptuous of where we’re being led.
Fellowship: Could you share a bit about your story and what led you to this place? Mark Johnson: I was born in Buffalo and grew up in Rochester, New York. Rochester, through the ‘50s and ‘60s, seemed to be an integrated and intellectual city. We were “clean industry,” and used to call it the Flower Capital of New York. It seemed to be without troubles. But it was also called Smugtown, U.S.A. The smugness bit back in the mid-‘60s, when, as in a number of places in the United States, we saw what we then called “race riots.” Obviously, these were just expressions of response to injustice and inequities in that community, and I suddenly became aware that the Third Ward was the black ward, and that we lived in a white suburb where there were no people of color. The community responded in a variety of ways. The one that most involved me was through the Protestant youth ministers – I grew up in the Presbyterian Church – who brought young people together to try to understand the conditions that had led to the unrest and ways of developing understanding and some kind of a response. The response I remember most clearly was the invitation to Saul Alinsky. He had been busy in Chicago and other places, and he came to Rochester and created an organization called F.I.G.H.T. Frankly, the thing I remember about F.I.G.H.T. was one of their nonviolent civil reactions, which was to hold a “Beanfest” before a concert at the Eastman School of Music. Fellowship: What year was this? Mark Johnson: This was ’64, ’65, so I was about 17 years old. As the concert began, there was a great reaction to the beans. It was an effort to take a stereotype and exploit it, to draw attention to the fact that there was a large African-American audience at that concert, and there were issues in the community. What it reminds me is that there’s a great place for humor in the effort to create a larger awareness to inequities and injustice in the world. And sometimes we lose sight of the fact that what we do should be joyful and fun. Rochester sent a lot of its Presbyterian students off to the College of Wooster in Ohio, and so I went there in 1965 as a freshman. That was a core period of the civil rights movement. One of the things that Wooster arranged was an early form of an “alternative spring break.” Wooster had a relationship with Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama, a historically black college. We would go down in vanloads of students from Wooster, and then Miles College would, on other occasions, send groups of students to Wooster. Wooster also sent students to a number of places around the world for their junior year. I chose the American University of Beirut in Lebanon as the school I wanted to attend. Fellowship: Why? Mark Johnson: Well, frankly, of all of the choices, it was the only school you didn’t need to speak a foreign language to attend! I fell in love with Lebanon and the Middle East. Lebanon was particularly interesting because there was a large, very active and engaged group of Palestinian students at the American University of Beirut. So the focus on the Palestinian-Israeli situation – this was immediately after the June 1967 war – was one that engaged us in a sympathetic response to the Palestinians. But we were not as clear at that time about what the impact a large refugee Palestinian population in Lebanon meant. And so, again, over a series of years I developed a much deeper appreciation for the variety of tensions that still confuse us, I think, in this country, as we look at Shiites, Sunnis, and Maronites, and Hezbollah, Palestine, Israel, and Syria, and so on. I then spent the following summer in Yugoslavia, learning a bit about the Eastern Adriatic. This was just after Rudy the Red, the spring of ‘68 in Europe, and the students at Belgrade, were in a state of protest. Here were some American students who had been a year removed from what was happening on campuses in the United States, experiencing student unrest about the war in Vietnam through the eyes and experiences of European students – where they were dealing with issues of democratization and injustice in Europe. I returned to Wooster, finished my senior year of college, and applied to be a conscientious objector (CO) to the war in Vietnam.
Fellowship: What led to your decision to file for CO status? Mark Johnson: Wooster attracted some fabulous professors. Nels Ferré, for example – who had been a conscientious objector during the First World War – was teaching Christian ethics, and P. T. Raju was introducing us to Christian thought as expressed through India’s history and Asia. Within the student community, there was conversation about conscientious objection. I turned to Nels Ferré for advice and support, and I also involved my family. My father had been a radio gunner operator in the Army Air Force in the Second World War. Frankly, his basic assessment was that war was an enormous waste of young lives, and his new marriage in particular. But largely, it was understanding that even 20 years into the conflict in the Middle East, the constant cycle of war was not leading towards any peaceful conclusion. There just wasn’t any evidence in my life that a violent response to injustice or inequity was a solution that was going to work. I was moving increasingly in the direction of pacifism and nonviolence. I filled out my form and dropped it in a mailbox. Then I left to go back to the Middle East. I didn’t pay enough attention to the mechanics of it, until I realized, after the fact, that I was probably breaking the law, and not supposed to simply leave in the middle of this! It took about two years to negotiate my CO status. But in the end, I found a teaching position at an Armenian college, the Hagazian College. That served to satisfy the draft board. I taught for three more years at the Armenian college as my alternative service. I started graduate school at the same time. And I met my wife Mary, an American from California, who was in a studying abroad program her senior year. We moved into the University Christian Center as resident staff. It’s been interesting coming to FOR to reconnect with people who were a part of that period. Those were the days that Daniel Berrigan would visit, or Harvey Cox, or William Sloane Coffin, and others would come through Beirut as a part of a delegation or a learning experience. The University Christian Center was often a host to their visits. At a fairly young age, I was meeting people who were instrumental in the U.S. peace movement in response to Vietnam. Fellowship: Is there a story from Lebanon that is emblematic of your experience there? Mark Johnson: There would be periods when there would be planes flying over the city of Beirut, and bombs dropping – these were American F-16 fighters flown by Israeli military. You’d see the smoke from a bombing, and everyone standing curiously on balconies – it was a strange way to experience a conflict. I joined an interfaith group called Americans for Justice in the Middle East. We would witness by visiting Palestinian camps. To walk through a bomb crater in the middle of a refugee camp, where people are living in cinderblock houses with tin roofs – when they open their door to you and give you tea and fruit, knowing that you’re an American, and that you’re somehow related to the fact that there’s a bomb crater a few hundred feet away was sometimes more of a disconnect than the mind can really understand. But it was an illustration of the willingness of people, at the people-to-people level, to be open and understanding and caring and supportive of one another. It allowed me not to be overburdened by my citizenship, and to be more engaged, both through faith and just humanity, in thinking about nonviolent solutions. Another thing – which I thought about recently in Washington during the march to the White House – is that we would periodically stage nonviolent marches. This was explicitly in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. We would walk from Beirut to as close to the Lebanese border as we could get. Those were 25 and 30 mile walks. I guess that was my version of what was happening in the United States, with the civil rights marches.
Fellowship: What led you from the Middle East back to the U.S., and to the work you’ve done since? Mark Johnson: We moved back in the summer of 1974, and I was accepted for graduate studies at Columbia University. I came back intending to focus on the Middle East in a political and sociological fashion. Frankly, I found the program at Columbia to not allow the kind of space for critical inquiry around the Israeli-Palestinian issue that’s actually available in Lebanon, Israel, or Palestine. My interests in the academic field shifted to the area of the right to privacy and the sociology of law. That was what my Ph.D. was in. The expectation, of course, if you’re pursuing that kind of a degree is that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in the academic world. At the same time, Mary and I were developing a relationship with the YMCA. We spent our summers developing a youth leadership program at a YMCA conference center in upstate New York. The short story is that for the next 30 years, I worked in various roles in the YMCA, most of that time with young adults, including five years at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, and many years in the Adirondacks. I think it’s probably safe to say that continuing engagement with young adults at the point in their lives where they’re so urgently seeking direction and meaning both keeps you young and keeps you engaged with the ways culture, politics, and society are changing. The last five years I spent with the YMCA of the U.S.A. at their headquarters in Chicago. A large part of my portfolio had to do with developing a leadership development program at the West Jerusalem International Y, which is operated by the YMCA of the U.S.A. It’s now independent of, but related in many ways to the East Jerusalem Y, which is working in about 19 communities in the West Bank. That work, again, was to try to find ways of bringing Christians, Muslims, and Jews into a reconciling dialogue in the development of skills to be a cadre of peacebuilders and community members. This had more to do with the civic engagement with civil society, and civilian diplomacy, than politics in the more strict sense.
Fellowship: You’re still just getting your feet wet at FOR. What is your early assessment of where FOR is, as an organization and community, and where you hope to focus your energy? Mark Johnson: There are all sorts of paradoxes in an organization like this. With a 93-year history, some 40 chapters and another 60 affiliates across the country – plus a presence in 44 countries around the world – you can think that you’re a high-profile organization. But it doesn’t take long to remind you that you’re still largely a secret. I think that FOR lives in the presence of an explosion of organizations, and a renewal of interest in transforming the world through nonviolent political action and training. One of the things that means is that, ironically, it becomes a competitive environment for resources. So both attracting funding and talent to the work is a challenge. The talk of working collaboratively with organizations has to become more of a walk. I think all of us are recognizing that, but it’s not always easy to shed that parochial or chauvinistic sense of, well, we’ve been here a long time and we know how to do this so why don’t you come join us, rather than finding ways to join others. I think we’re becoming more aware that one of FOR’s value propositions is to be the platform and the convener of an interfaith, multicultural conversation. We have a legitimate argument to make that we’re created for that purpose in ways that other faith groups aren’t. Yet each of those groups have their own history, readiness, and understanding of what that interfaith walk portends. We are learning that sometimes we have to go slowly before we can go fast. What is that wonderful African proverb I heard so often last summer in South Africa? “If you want to go fast, you go alone; if you want to go far, you go together.” In some of my other work, this has been true around the conversations between Christians and Jews, between Christians and Muslims, between Muslims and Jews. When you further make that a complexity of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, or Buddhists and Hindus and others all in one room, those traditions just need the time, compassion, and commitment to grow trust with one another. It looks to me as though FOR has had a bit of start-and-stop success in this area. It certainly has brought even into its building the Muslim Peace Fellowship and the Jewish Peace Fellowship, and hosts a Buddhist group weekly. But at the moment, there’s a sense of a hiatus, and I think part of that is an internal and structural issue of retaining executive leadership and staff over a long enough period of time to make some progress. There are three other things I want to raise. One is just the caveat that everything’s connected to everything – the interconnectedness of the world. A second is the generative concern of an organization that’s been around for 93 years: how do you continue to work into the future? How do you attract subsequent generations into a relationship? Wedded to those issues is the growing awareness of the stewardship of the earth, climate change, and of our responsibility for walking softly on the earth. I really like James Lovelock’s argument that we shouldn’t even be talking about sustainable development. We should be talking about sustainable retreat. We can’t simply live more efficiently the way we’re now living in the world. We actually have to live in the world in a new way, demanding and consuming fewer resources. It’s been a part of FOR’s strategic plan for a long time to focus more attention on climate change. We know that environmental impacts are functions of commercialized society and of militarization of the world, that large numbers of [military] bases and camps and resources spent on the military are investments at the expense of more positive contributions to global concerns. You know, we’ve all grown up in this Think Global, Act Local – or “Glocal” – approach to life. It seems to me that FOR is engaged where are in the world – in Iran, Iraq, Colombia, and other places – because as Americans, we understand that we bear exceptional responsibility for the state in which Iraq, or Iran, or Colombia find themselves in. For instance, Colombia, because of a drug trade that’s driven by addictive drug habits in this country. But at the same time, we need to realize that with huge populations of people of color in prison, especially young males, the disruption to such a significant part of our culture in history and demography; the number of children underserved in inner-city school situations; the impact that global warming is having, all are result of the way we’ve lived and addictive behaviors. The lives that have no meaning or purpose, are lives that we want to engage in because FOR is about purposeful living, grounded in nonviolent principles.
Fellowship: Throughout your career you’ve looked for collaborative opportunities. FOR has a certain organizational capacity. Some of the issues you’ve named – prisons, education, economic justice, immigration, the environment – are critical for FOR to address, yet we may not be able to provide staffing. What are ways that you hope that FOR will be able to engage these issues? Mark Johnson: The first and most obvious is our local chapters and affiliate organizations: understanding more deeply what it is that they’re engaged in. When they’re designing responses that are very effective, we might serve best by being a disseminator. Those chapters may have found partners that might represent models of relationships that can be replicated in other places. Secondly, United for Peace and Justice is gathering in Chicago this June. Something around 800 organizations are eligible to gather there. When you think of national collaboration, we begin to see the environment in which to think about relationships and partnerships. Thirdly, I think that each of us bring our own histories and biographies of relationships. We have people in leadership in FOR, like Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, who has a programmatic presence in the world around the Jewish-Muslim PeaceWalk, and partners in that work. We’re now engaging her more explicitly and programmatically in our “Spirit-Ally” training within our larger sense of Civilian Diplomacy. I also have a series of relationships with the arts world, with music, and puppetry. We’ll keep our eyes open for new partners who are doing exciting things that allow us to collaborate. A fourth opportunity is peace fellowships. My sense is that some of the peace fellowships became part of FOR at a very nascent part of their life cycle, and they have grown to be well-identified, well-integrated, substantial parts of their faith communities. Participating in the Christian Peace Witness in Washington helped me to see and understand how effective that leadership is and how well-connected it is. I think we have to assess: when do we become a collaborative equal, when do we become a contributing partner, how do we continue to engage with a community without necessarily seeing it as defining who we are as an organization. I think it was Bill Moyers’ talk at Occidental College where he reminded me that Winston Churchill said, “Never give up, never give up.” Bill Moyer seems to be saying, “Organize, organize, organize!” In my lifetime, we’ve gone from two billion to six billion people in the world, and we’ll probably get close to nine or ten while I’m still around. Organizing means something different when you talk about scales changing in that way. The incidental impacts of that change in our lives of simply getting from here to there, highways, and traffic – that means pollution, consumption, a whole set of things. I think probably another part of what this means is that, in a digital age where information is shared increasingly in a digital form by Web sites and blogs, we need to be working hard to develop skills of truth-telling and discernment, not to provide content so much as to provide paths and values constructs, to judge what it is that’s being dumped in our laps by way of information. Another issue is that the notion of reconciliation, which was the foundation upon which FOR was built in the First World War, means something different today. It has to do with forgiveness, and the search for truth and reconciliation. We want to be introducing ourselves to the community involved in reconciliation of the world. I’m not sure that we are there yet. Sometimes you can take advantage of the fortuity of one’s history by letting it keep you on a path. Even as the path might change directions, it may still be the right path. I’m struck, for example, in reviewing FOR’s charter that it speaks to love and forgiveness. A love and forgiveness conversation is one, for example, that is very integral to the Fetzer Institute. It’s come to it from the same place that we’ve come to it, from a concern for wholeness, for reconciliation, for oneness. I’m interested in how we use that as one of the benchmarks or criterion, as we develop relationships and engagements as individuals and communities, practitioners in the area of reconciliation, where reconciliation means love and forgiveness. I suspect there’s a real opportunity for FOR to be an incubator. We have spun off many initiatives – even as recently as last year, with the Interfaith Peace-Builders program. Look back at the Creative Response to Conflict program, and even the ACLU originally. We have been an environment in which people have created services that have become strong and independent and stand on their own. We might want to be even more intentional about being an incubator for peace and social justice work. Maybe our internship process focuses on high potential, challenging, entrepreneurial voices and spirits who are invited into a short-term relationship, to get started serving some need in a new way. But you’re right, we can’t do everything!
See also in this issue (p. 41 of the print magazine) Mark Johnson's review of The Revenge of Gaia. ©2007 Fellowship of Reconciliation
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