An edited version of this essay appeared in Sojourners Magazine, August 2013

THESE DAYS SHE divides her time between Chicago and Afghanistan, but in the spring of 1999, in a small banquet room at Georgetown University, I first heard her speak about the suffering in Iraq.

            The conference was almost over. The economists and the historians had already made their presentations; political analysts and former government officials had already given their speeches. Unlike these experts, she didn’t put herself up on a stage or behind a podium. Standing among the tables in an off-the-rack outfit from the Salvation Army, she spoke without notes or slides.  

            A crowd of perhaps 200 people had gathered to hear about her work. She had been to Iraq dozens of times to break the U.S.-led blockade and to put a human face on the conflict. She spent a little time going over the statistics—the deep poverty caused by the sanctions, the lack of medicines, the half-a-million children who had died due to the blockade—but she quickly moved on. Statistics weren’t her strength.

            Instead she spoke from the heart. She talked about the ordinary Iraqis she had met: the worn women who served her tea and biscuits they could barely afford; the countless kids in threadbare hand-me-downs who ran after her merrily in the street; the tired doctors who broke down crying to remember all the children they had lost; the stone-faced parents who accepted her condolences because they didn’t know what else to do.

            She told the story of Zayna, a seven-month-old baby girl who died of malnutrition shortly after she visited her in the hospital.

            And then she started singing.

            It’s safe to say that her three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize were not for her voice, which is sometimes sweet but often a touch out-of-key. At times she begins a song too low and I imagine she’s feeling a momentary self-consciousness. But the moment passes. The song remains. And I am again reminded of just how deeply this woman can move me.

The fondest memories I have of Kathy Kelly are of her singing.

            That day at Georgetown University she sang ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and told the crowd how her friend Sattar, an Iraqi engineer turned taxi driver, had spent hours sitting with her in Baghdad, patiently translating the lyrics into Arabic and teaching them to her.

Then she started singing in Arabic.

            It was beyond corny. I felt completely ridiculous listening to her singing words she didn’t understand to a song I imagined had no cultural relevance to Iraq. I noticed people in the audience crying and I silently mocked them for being so sentimental.

            Then I realized that I was also crying.

            Then I joined Kathy, and went to Iraq myself.

            Like everyone in the room that day, I was already aware of the crisis. Like many, I was already reasonably outraged. But intellect is not enough. The ultimate failure of reason is that it alone cannot break through a distant heart, and you have to break hearts if you’re going to move people to take action.

            Wars are social disorders between competing groups, each trying to defend themselves from, force their dominance upon, or punish the other. This means that the opposite of war is not actually peace, per se, but community. Violence and peace are contrasting expressions of human relationships, and peace is simply the expression of relationships based on justice and love—what Martin Luther King called ‘beloved community.’

             “At its core,” says Kathy Kelly, “war is impoverishment. War’s genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts. If we can realize that the world’s liberation begins within those troubled hearts, then we may yet find peace.”
 

KATHY FIRST started singing in the choir of her family’s church during the tumultuous years of the 1950s and 60s. The third of six children, she was raised in a working-class, Catholic home in Chicago’s Garfield Ridge neighborhood. Her father was a math teacher, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Those times had a deep effect on her.

            “There were plenty of heroes and heroines to look up to during my teen years,” she says, “when Martin Luther King’s brave efforts in Chicago were denounced by my relatives and neighbors and Daniel Berrigan’s flashy wit and smile lit up our imaginations about creative subversion.

            “I was fairly sure that I’d grow up to join the nuns. Nuns showed no interest in acquiring personal wealth, and they seemed happy about looking after us. I didn’t become one of the nuns, but I’m surely cheering for them now.”

            In the 1970s, Kathy earned an M.A. in Religious Education from Chicago Theological Seminary and started teaching at St. Ignatius Preparatory School, where she sometimes presented articles to her students from a range of 'radical' sources, including essays by Karl Meyer—a pacifist, Catholic Worker, and war tax resister whom she later married in 1982. Although they divorced in 1994, they remain close friends.

            “I think fatalism trumped imaginative creativity during my late teens and early adulthood,” she says. “Meeting Karl made a huge difference in my life. Karl’s radicalism easily made sense to me and caught me at a time when I could rely on both him and an extremely attractive community of friends for ‘backup.’”

            Kathy started volunteering at a local soup kitchen, where she began lifelong friendships with other important Chicago activists, including Roy Bourgeois. A priest and former naval officer, Fr. Bourgeois later founded SOA Watch, which works to expose the massacres and human rights abuses committed by graduates of the U.S. military-run School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

            In 1980, Kathy stopped paying federal income taxes because almost half of those taxes go to fund the military. Protesting trade sanctions against Nicaragua, she and Karl Meyer smuggled Nicaraguan coffee beans into the United States, and used them to serve ‘illegal’ coffee in the Chicago office of the U.S. district attorney.

Nonviolent direct action and community are both at the center of Kathy’s faith. She likes to say that we can all ‘catch courage’ from one another: the courage to do peace work, to make ourselves vulnerable not only to violence, but to ridicule and sometimes loneliness as well; and the courage to keep on working even when we can’t know what the end results of our work will be. For Kathy, the most hopeful lessons of Jesus’ life are his radical love and his call for courage. Although the injunction in Romans 13 to submit to worldly authorities has often been used to discourage civil disobedience, she points out that Romans 13:8 teaches us to “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”

“The love command trumps other commands whenever lawmakers usurp their own authority by prescribing or upholding the devaluation and destruction of life,” says Kathy, “and Jesus consistently tells his friends and followers not to be afraid. When the disciples are petrified that a storm will overturn their boat, and quite likely fearing the cost of being associated with Jesus and the radical love he practiced and preached, Jesus walks on the sea and says, “Don’t be afraid” [Matthew 14:22-33]. I can relate to the overwhelming fear of the disciples. And I also cherish the encouragement to overcome our fears, catching courage from one another.”

            In 1988, inspired in part by Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s work, Kathy joined the Missouri Peace Planting. Eight years earlier, Berrigan and seven other peace workers had broken onto a nuclear missile plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, hammered on two warhead nose cones, poured blood on some of the documents they found, and offered prayers for peace. Their actions started the Plowshares Movement, which aims to literally enact the Prophet Isaiah’s words: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore."

            In August 1988 Kathy broke onto a U.S.-military base housing nuclear missiles and unlawfully planted corn in the ground. The peace planting resulted in her first long-term prison witness—nine months in a maximum-security federal prison in Kentucky. It would not be her last.

            After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Kathy joined the Gulf Peace Team, a group of dozens of peace workers from all over the world who established a camp on the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia in order to provide a direct, nonviolent presence opposing the world’s rush to war. Building on this experience, Kathy cofounded Voices in the Wilderness 1995 to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the 1991 Gulf War and the continuing sanctions against Iraq. From 1996 to 2003, Voices organized more than 70 delegations to Iraq, openly defying the U.S. blockade. In 2003 she helped lead the Iraq Peace Team—an international, nonviolent presence in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion.

            In 2000, the American Friends Service Committee nominated Kathy for the Nobel Peace Prize as "an expression of the importance of the individuals who transform a personal commitment to peace into visible and effective action." She was nominated for the award in 2002 by Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire and, again, anonymously in 2003.

            The U.S. government eventually prosecuted Voices in the Wilderness for illegally delivering banned medicines and children’s toys to Iraqi hospitals, and imposed a $20,000 fine. The group shut down rather than pay the fine, and its successor organization, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, was founded in 2005. Since then, they have organized several campaigns of active resistance in the U.S., and sent dozens of delegations of ordinary Americans to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.

TODAY, VOICES is coordinating with Afghan Peace Volunteers in Kabul on a ‘Why not warmth?’ project. Last winter, 26 young children froze to death in refugee camps around Kabul. More than 100 children froze to death across the whole country. After raising money in the United States, Voices for Creative Nonviolence will partner with Afghan Peace Volunteers and local seamstresses all across Afghanistan to help them produce duvet comforters and then store and distribute the duvets free of charge. This project is important because it helps support Afghan artisans and peace workers to provide a needed service in their community, and because it helps strengthen ties between them and their sisters and brothers in the United States.

            There is a fundamental truth obscured by years of violence and suffering, and that is that places like Iraq and Afghanistan are not, in fact, ‘war zones.’ Afghanistan lies at the heart of the ancient ‘Silk Road,’ tying Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia, India, and the Far East. Whereas to list Iraq's cities is to sketch an actual history of civilization: Nineveh, Babylon, Samarra, Mosul, Kirkuk, Ctesiphon, Basra, Baghdad.

            These are nations of deep history. They are places of marriage and of love, of children and artistry, of entrepreneurship and creativity, of grief and joy and suffering and perseverance. Afghanistan and Iraq are not war zones: they are lands of human devotions to which war has been brought in an ongoing tragedy nurtured by militants of many nations and ideologies—and prolonged by our collective inability to effectively oppose them.

            Peace work is as much about making connections as anything else: making the intellectual connections between institutionalized violence and poverty, the emotional connections between our choices and their consequences, and building actual physical connections between our diverse human communities.

            I recently asked Kathy what advice she had for young people thinking about doing peace work themselves.

            “Young people could, understandably, feel sullen and resentful about the world they’re inheriting,” she said, “but I’m hoping they’ll find resilience more attractive. 

            “My advice to them would be to find kindred spirits. Learn about courage, the ability to control your fears, in all kinds of exciting, interesting ways, ranging from your current crush to jumping off the high-dive.

            “Give yourself a pat on the back for the good you’ve done. And always remember that if you spread the peanut butter too thin, the bread rips.”

            At 59 her hair is starting to show more grey than brown, but her passion and good humor haven’t changed. Although she stands only 5’ 3”, Kathy Kelly still towers over most everyone I’ve ever known.

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