They always break out of their cage either during lunch or dinner to protest the lack of food I am giving them and run around barking. So, I need to interrupt my meal and catch them. Now the strange thing happens. While sometimes they’ll run away, when I catch them, they always just lie numb on the ground and stretch their feet out towards me. They don’t try to bite me, they’re just lying there. I try to convince them by telling them it is my duty to lock them up and I’m sorry I can’t give them more food, but I can only give them as much food as possible.
No reaction.
Next, I pet them and promise them I’ll try to get extra food though I know there isn’t any.
No reaction.
On a lucky day I will actually have some extra food and they will follow me to the cage thereby getting on of their main demands: food, but giving up the other (freedom).
But most days the escalation goes on: I grab their necks and try to walk with them, but they remain numb and so it’s really hard. In the end I need to carry them to their cage and find out where they escaped and repair it, before they break out again.
All in the dark, of course, since it’s getting dark at half past five.

A little later, sometimes half an hour, sometimes two days, they will break out again, using the same method. Little by little, they wear me down. One evening they actually escaped three times by removing a six pounds heavy stone and pushing themselves through a resulting hole at the bottom of the fence. That night, I left them outside and only re-incarcerated them the next morning.

At some point I realized the dogs are using nonviolent civil disobedience against me. Or canine disobedience.

They refuse to give up their freedom, but know that violence won’t get them anywhere. If they bit me, I’d get really aggressive and had a justification to treat them worse. But now sometimes the other volunteers reproach me for putting them in the cage.

I have identified four different methods of nonviolent resistance in the dogs behaviour:

1. Sit-In (or Lie-in)
2. Noncooperation
3. Crossing fences (escape from the cage, entering the volunteers’ area
4. Boycott (one of the dogs refuses to eat the extra-food I give him to allure him into the cage)

One of the working definitions of nonviolent resistance I have often heard is: Nonviolent resistance is used by or on behalf of the oppressed, serves to end their oppressions and challenges the humanity of the oppressor to stop oppressing.

So in synthesis there’s two parties: Oppressed and Opressors. And nonviolence is the “weapon” of the oppressed.

Logically that means that if the dogs are using nonviolence, they are the oppressed.

But wait a minute! That makes me the oppressor!

But I’m not an oppressor! I’m just doing my job! The dogs have to be in the cage, else the poo everywhere, bring up litter from the enormous pile of junk right in front of our farm, and scare the tourists! You wouldn’t want to have to be scared of dogs when you come and visit me, would you?! And I’m even nice to the dogs! Some of my best friends are dogs! (like the one dog we don’t cage in, because he’s so cute and fluffy).

All these statements are the arguments oppressors worldwide use - especially those in service of the state protecting the status quo. In my current context I think of the Israeli soldiers who are my age and whom I meet whenever I leave the farm. They are the pawns of the occupation. Many of them hate standing at a checkpoint all day making Palestinians wait the whole day. But it’s their job and they are legally obligated to serve in the military. (In Israel there is a universal draft. Men have to serve three years, women two. It’s one of the very few countries in the world that drafts women)
They get these guns and are told to keep those terrorists from getting stupid ideas.
It’s like Yehuda Shaoul from Breaking the Silence said during my CPT delegation: “I’ll give you a gun and you can try to control a thousand people who are waiting at the checkpoint. It only works with fear. So you count them and harass every 10th Palestinian. It’s as simple as that.”

I realize that the dogs have worn me down through their nonviolent canine disobedience. I also realize that I started to escalate the conflict. To keep them from breaking out there are now bigger stones around the fence. Maybe next time they escape I will throw them into the cage, because if I open the door the other dogs already incarcerated will escape. I have less motivation giving them food, or to spray them against lice.

The fence is strong enough now, but they grow stronger every day and it’s time to seperate them in big cages on the corners of the farm so they can be watchdogs and each has more space. More space, but also solitary confinement.

I spoke of the one side of me that is getting more aggressive towards the dogs. The other side one wants to join them, lie around the whole day, howl at the moon at night and eat food scraps.

But I’ve signed a contract and the work on the farm is meaningful and important.

Once again I use the justification of cops who beat up protesters, and soldiers on the whole world.

There were many beautiful and inspiring things happening, but what was most exciting to me were the Psalters and the Volksküche (people’s kitchen). During the day people were cooking in giant pots in the Volksküche so that in the evening people could have supper together. Everyone was invited to eat, but also to cook, cut, salt and wash the dishes. The Volksküche’s tent was also a great place to meet people, and I ended up spending most of my time there.

The Psalters are a band from Philadelphia, Turtle Island, who mix mainly liturgical texts with punk-folk music and consider themselves nomads. I didn’t know them before Freakstock and am still very excited about their music, the musicians and their concerts.

What connected these two groups of people and what caused them to inspire me so much was the fact that both worked solely for donations. At the Volksküche there was a pot where you could put in as much money as you thought the food was worth to you and the same was true for the records of the Psalters. There were no fixed prices and everyone was free to give as much as she could and wanted. You could even give nothing!

These practice got me thinking and in a conversation with a friend I ended up saying: „(God’s) Grace is for donations”

After I said it, we discussed it and found it resolves a lot of tensions between a „sola fide” (only belief (saves)) and an approach which stresses the importance of actually showing your faith through works.

Grace is a word most people would say means to receive something completely unearned. And that’s true. The grace God offers us is something we can never earn. No matter how pious (or radical for this audience) you are, no matter if you resolved every conflict on earth, or converted everyone to a radical discipleship - you can’t earn Grace. Nor could you do all these things without God’s grace, I guess. The concept of undeserved grace redeems us of the coercion of our consciences to do “good”, which so often leads us to justify our means by our ends. Grace redeems us of our feelings of guilt and shows us that we are embraced by God just the way we are.

But. There’s always a but. A concept’s strengths become weaknesses if they lose their subversiveness, become commonly accepted truths and begin to push other truths away.

The same happened with grace. I’m not an expert on church history to point my finger at the exact cause for this swing, but let’s just say that at some point the idea of unconditional grace won over the idea that faith has something to do with works - especially radical works.

Now, people who say that works are also essential for faith and doubt that all Christians should do after their conversion is to sing worship songs and not have premarital sex are heretics to many Christians.

But that’s what they called the prophets, so I’ll take that as a compliment.

I think works are important even essential to my faith, and yet I’d just as strongly say that no one can deserve grace. How to handle this open contradiction?

That’s where I believe “Grace for Donations” is a good concept.

Grace for Donations means everyone takes what they need and gives what they can. Some need more and seem not to give anything, while others are not able to receive a lot, yet think they need to give a lot back. Some give differently than was expected, like those who brought their vegetables to Volksküche, or those who cut vegetables and helped to prepare the food, while others “only” gave 5€ for their supper. By receiving grace you can pass it on and thus also give something back, like those who were so excited by the Psalters that they told all their friends about it who later came to the booth and gave a lot of money for the records.

Those who start the grace and have costs on their side (be it the Volksküche on a very low scale, the Psalters who actually live by the donations they receive, or God who completely delivered himself and the entire cosmos to humanity) need an enormous amount of trust towards the consumers that they will actually return enough so the whole thing works.

But it is exactly this trust that makes the consumers feel recognised and challenged to return the trust and move beyond consumerism to becoming part of the Grace-movement. Sometimes the trust is not returned, like when the Volksküche had a negative balance of a 100€ a day before the festival ended (I hope it got settled), but this disappointment when vocalized serves to remind the recipients of grace of their responsibility which they can then assume.

One last and very exciting similarity between grace and the gift-economy (to which the “for donations” principle belongs) is, that many people find it impossible to accept both. We are so conditioned to see everything as having a fixed price, as being measurable, to see duties as something one can and must fulfill and then be rid of them that it seems impossible and unbearable to us that there is an alternative.

Grace instills fear in the fallen human, because he wants to know good and evil, measure it, and put it into categories. But once accepted, Grace opens up a new reality where measures are not needed anymore and we are free to give as much as we can and receive without fearing the resulting obligations.

These last days, I followed the horrible news from Japan closely: First, the strongest earth quake, in recorded history causing a tsunami that swept away half a city. Together these two disasters already took at least ten thousand lives. Then comes the nuclear melt down, or not melt down, the news and officials contradict each other, but even the most harmless descriptions of what happens in Fukushima sound horrible.

And then there’s also still Gaddaffi, who slaughters his own people and injustices we don’t even see anymore because we’ve become so used to them. Oh, and I have my Abitur (final German high school exams) coming, which doesn’t really scare me, but should actually have all my attention right now.

So this Sunday morning I’m watching the news and again I’m praying for Japan, praying for the nuclear plant not to melt down but I’m also just f*&%ing afraid of what the speaker is saying next, because all he’s saying conjures a worse and worse picture in my mind. The speaker of the German government talks about how we can’t have a tsunami in Germany and that nuclear power is only a „bridge technology“ meant to be replaced by alternative energies in a few years, but does not say how we ever get passed nuclear energy if we allow the owners of these plants to take all the profits while the state pays for the damages and for the development of alternative energies. The opposition is being critized as „lacking sympathy for the dead and politicising this catastrophe because of the near election“ for demanding we finally shut down our own nuclear plants.

Devastated and looking for solace I went to church – where we sang praise. Songs glorifying God for his awesomeness. One after another. We sang these songs without ever specifying what we praised God for, or explaining how we could praise and not mourn in these moments. The sister leading the service prayed to open the service and in that prayer she expressed her worry and desperation over the state of Japan, but in the liturgy there was not a mention of mourning.

We read out Psalm 91, 7-8 and it sounded like mockery to the dead and homeless in Japan:

A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.

Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked

(in the translation she had „wicked“ was translated „pagans“!)

So that’s our answer to suffering in the world??: Luckily it didn’t hit us.

Of course I’m happy this didn’t happen in Germany, and probably I should thank Gott for it. But I can’t and won’t. I’m not the psalmist who is in the middle of danger and is happy to have gotten out of there. I just see the ten thousand und I refuse to give thanks.

The sister who was leading the service had planned the liturgy before the disaster, of course, and didn’t even realize how her songs and texts sounded under these new circumstances. She just wanted to thank God from the bottom of her heart.

But I couldn’t and wouldn’t.

After three songs, I just stood up and went out, my mum ran after me, but she understood how I was feeling and that I couldn’t go back inside. She went back and I took a walk. In the forest I wrestled with God and mourned for the Japanese.

God can bear my charges and consoles me. But right now, I don’t want to be consoled. Consoled sounds a lot like fleeing from the grim reality. Just hoping for other times, for the kingdom of heavens, for apocalypse to happen. Apocalypse, which some evangelicals imagine a lot like what’s happening in Japan.

I don’t want to be consoled. I want God to justify himself. To wrestle with me, to tell me the answer to theodizee, the answer to Jesus cry: „Eli, eli, lama sabachtani?“

This catastrophe happened in the beginning of lent, in which we remember and prepare ourselves for the suffering and death of our redeemer. I like this time, because it is the time of the liturgical calender we become more conscious of the suffering around us and are challenged to become followers of Christ who suffered because of injust humans.

But even following Jesus won’t prevent natural catastrophes (though it might stop nuclear disasters).

Were there earth quakes in Paradise?

Post Scriptum:

When I had left the service someone said she also couldn’t thank and once she said this many people agreed with her. They spontaneously changed the liturgy and were silently and outspokenly mourning to God.

I love my congregation for being so open and the sister who was leading the service was willing to change everything once she realized what was going on. I also wrote her a mail explaining my behaviour. She hasn’t yet responded, but I think, we are reconciled.

In my head, I heard my eight year old self singing the chorus over and over again, the rough translation would be:”Do you have your toothbrush with you? You will need still need it. Still today people are put in jail who are against oppression.”

I was really amazed by this, on the one hand because I rarely remember anything from my childhood, but on the other hand because of the radical message this song was giving.

It‘s paraphrasing Jesus, “Take your cross upon you and follow me” into words children can understand and that I still remember ten years after I last sang the song…

To me, taking up my cross or carrying my toothbrush around is a daily struggle because although it feels good to be really critical of the state and school and be the radical guy in school who challenges basically every opinion, my radical activity is usually done there (sometimes I also translate stuff for the German CPT branch…). How can I live a life where it makes sense to carry my toothbrush with me all the time, because I challenge the world so much, that it can’t stand me, it wants to put me in prison?

I sometimes lead Sunday school classes in my congregation at home, and I’d love to sing that song with the kids, but I feel like I have to carry my toothbrush with me for some time, till I can do that.

The last line is:”I have my tooth brush with me and I will still need it. Still today people are put in jail who are against oppression.” - this I will try to do…