Snakes and Weapons
“Living with a gun in your bedroom, is like sleeping with a snake, one day it might just turn around and bite you.” Bishop Denis Sengulane, Anglican Church of Mozambique

“To ‘live without resort to arms’ is a spiritual, a practical and implies also a political position.” Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, General secretary, World Council of Churches

I am slowly learning a vocabulary in Portuguese that I barely have vocabulary for in English. I am more comfortable with the theoretical vocabulary of peace and justice than the practical vocabulary of weapons. I am learning about AK-47s, grenades and triggers. It’s not something I would have thought about learning when I wrote my first research paper in 10th grade about why I believe in non-violence. Non-violence doesn’t have any thing to do with weapons, right? Non-violence eschews the use of weapons so why do I need to know about them?

I am working with the Transforming Arms into Ploughshares (TAE) project of the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM). TAE was one of CCM’s responses to helping build peace after the war ended in 1992. The churches were involved helping people reconcile, welcoming their friends, neighbors and family members back to the community, even when they fought (voluntary or conscripted) on opposite sides of the war. As a way to promote peace, TAE emerged as a means to collect weapons from people. They deactivated the weapons they received, offered material rewards for the weapons (metal roofing, cement, bicycles, etc) and found a number of artists interested in spreading the gospel of peace by creating sculptures with the decommissioned arms. As I work with TAE, I am learning some of the vocabulary of weapons.

The message of peace is powerful, life-giving. Peace takes time. The American Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1900’s accomplished a lot through non-violence but it took time. I think of Bishop Segulane’s quote. Few of us are enamored enough with snakes to want to wake up with one in our bedroom. Here in Mozambique, people do not like snakes and if they happen upon one, they kill it, immediately. Since 1995, when TAE began, over 800,000 weapons have been collected. Some are destroyed on the spot—there is still a bullet in the gun, a live hand grenade—with dynamite and the community watching. Functioning, empty weapons get their triggers broken so they cannot be used again and are transported back to Maputo to be made into sculptures. As powerful as the message of peace is; the irony is how often we believe in the lie of having a weapon is protection: the lie of redemptive violence.

What would our world look like if, following the Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit’s quote was a reality? That like the TAE sculpture in the British Museum called the Tree of Life, if relics of past wars would be fused together to create something profound and holy as a symbol of the victory of peace and reconciliation and a reminder that violence doesn’t solve problems? How would we live differently if we chose “to live without resort to arms”?