The Rev. John Dear, S.J., has had two major conversions in his life: the first to Christianity as a college student at Duke University, and the second as an aspiring priest at the Sea of Galilee.
The second was nearly as profound as the first.
“Seeing the reality of war, and watching bombs fall where Jesus once walked, I was the only one around for miles and miles. Which was probably dangerous,” said Dear, 49, whose memoir, “A Persistent Peace,” was just released by Loyola Press, and in time for the annual protest at the gates of Fort Benning.
Today and Sunday, Dear joins between 10,000 and 15,000 people in town for the 19th annual vigil. He and the others are pressing for the closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly named the School of the Americas). He’s taken part in the annual protest for nearly a decade.
His second calling, in 1982, was to nonviolence. To practice the discipline in his own life, and to protest in the lineage of Martin Luther King: without weapon or sword or any such force. What he saw in Galilee convinced Dear that Jesus meant what he said in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the peacemakers ...”
Dear’s memoir begins at Duke in 1978. The beginning of his college years started off like that of many college kids: persistent partying (in his case with his fellow Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers). Dear also took a shine to music, had private jazz lessons from music great Mary Lou Williams while at Duke and dreamed of becoming a rock star. That aspiration, however, fell by the wayside as he became more immersed in the Catholic fellowships and services on campus.
An early influence was the Rev. Ralph Monk, Duke’s Catholic chaplain at the time. Additionally, at another professor’s behest, Dear began visiting patients at a North Carolina mental institution, where he came face-to-face with intense suffering. That work had a profound effect on him. At the same time, Dear was reading material by the late Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Elizabeth Anne Seton, a Catholic laywoman who founded a religious order in New York.
After struggling up to that point to get away from the Church, “My heart filled with desire to give my whole life to God,” Dear writes. Then he embarked on a journey with the Jesuits, the Catholic order known for its rigorous scholarship, ministries with the poor and fighting injustice. He professed his vows as a Jesuit in 1984 and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1993.
“My plan was to be a nice priest,” said Dear, who earlier this week was on a book tour in the northeast, “but then I found out you have to love your enemies.” The teachings of Jesus, he added, is not “just nice poetry.” With exemplars including King and Gandhi, and activists Dorothy Day and Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Dear has protested the following: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Pentagon (the site of his first arrest); nuclear weaponry; and the death penalty, among other things. ‘Gentle agitator’
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