Worcester Speaks #8: Claire Schaeffer-Duffy
“When I saw that, I recognized how Cain could kill Abel."
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Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is an activist and freelance journalist. She and her husband Scott offer hospitality to people in need through the Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker in Worcester, which is also their home. Claire is program director at the Center for Nonviolent Solutions and a member of the Worcester Multi-faith Coalition for a Ceasefire Resolution that has been making good trouble at city council meetings.
Liz: I want to start with your petition before the city council. When there's a very contentious situation like Gaza that's been in the news for months, what tactics allow a group like yours to get people's attention or to even expand their thinking?
Claire: Well, I don't think [that] to ask for a ceasefire in the context of a war that is documented [to be] destructive and brutal for civilians is contentious because ceasefire is ceasefire. It is bilateral, it's both sides. It's stopping the armed hostilities. It's not a judgment of who is right or wrong or who gets what. It's basically, let's pause the slaughter so that we can save human life. So I don't really see that as a contentious act or ask. That's one response to the question.
But how do you motivate? I think with our coalition, we wanted to speak from that place of the moral voice, the faith traditions—and all of them do—that see that every life is a universe, which is what one of the coalition members Sarah Lerman-Sinkoff said when they spoke before the city council, they made that quote. During our organizing, our Jewish members, when that quote came up, they said, oh, that's in the Talmud or one of their Hebrew scriptures. And then the Muslims said, yeah, we have the exact same phase. And, you know, the Christian or Catholic framing is all life is sacred. So to kind of start from that moral, expansive place instead of more partisan language that doesn't always reach people, we felt that we had to pull from our faith leaders because this war is a crisis of both bodily harm, obviously, to Palestinians and Israelis. But it's a crisis on the collective conscience because when you have so much destruction, so much killing, everybody is affected, especially when it is not opposed, when there's silence in the face of that destruction, there's kind of a withering of the collective soul or conscience.
I personally was deeply influenced by my own informal study of peaceful nonviolent campaigns at the Center for Nonviolent Solutions [that] we had done back in 2016, a multimedia presentation on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And it was a project to uphold nonviolent social movements. And when you go into their stories, which are fascinating and not upheld enough, you see that people really are very tactical. It's not a vague kumbaya peace that they're speaking about. They're really thinking, who do we need to move? What are we focused on? So that was part of the current within me. I was deeply motivated by a walking tour of Worcester's peace history that the Center for Nonviolent Solutions also does. And in researching that tour—I wasn't the primary researcher, Kathleen Moylan was—but we take people down Main Street and we tell moments in the city's history where people, not necessarily committed pacifists, but they employed nonviolent tactics to speak up for the oppressed.
And again, to see how that worked, how that didn't work, what they were up against, I found it a kind of lineage that I wanted the city to stand on, publicly saying, “ceasefire.” And in our group, we had some extraordinary organizers that were influenced by their own experience. One of the people had worked in labor organizing. Another one of our Jewish members had worked with If Not Now, so they had come out of a well-informed grassroots group in terms of developing a communication strategy: What's gonna be our presence in the corridor before we go into the chamber? So there was a lot of skill at the table for the multi-faith coalition.
Thirteen [Massachusetts] cities and towns have passed ceasefire resolutions. I'm a board member of Mass Peace Action, and it is through that network that you get information statewide. And so that was another important strand of influence. And similar with our Muslim members, I should add that they have quite a network of through their mosques, so each community that came to the table came with their own networks. It’s a great asset when you're trying to organize, to have the person sitting there representing much more than themselves or their personal passion.
There were lots of strands of influence. A lot of the organizers are women and although we never have articulated it, and I can't speak for all in the group, I think some in the group have been haunted by this war's impact on women and children because it's been so heavy. You know, when you hear there are no maternity wards, none functioning in Gaza, that is enough [for] anybody who has given birth to children and knows what that entails to say for the love of God, ceasefire. You can't do this to a community, just make it impossible for them to function the way that our species functions. We're not talking rights here. We're just talking about fundamental existence.
I appreciate your reframing about how it's not contentious to call for a ceasefire, and I understand what you're saying. And also, those who oppose a ceasefire resolution or oppose ceasefire have all kinds of rhetoric on their side as to why that proposal is controversial or offensive. I get very overwhelmed in interpersonal conflict around these issues. I know that over the course of your life, you’ve been very brave. You've been arrested a number of times, you've spoken out on other issues that arouse a lot of emotion in people. And I would love to learn what inner or external resources you rely on to weather those disagreements or those conversations.
Well certainly I am quite a fearful person. I'm a middle child. My husband's a middle child, and we both say we were not the kids that were like, “I don't care what you think, family! I'm just doing whatever.” But we've both been to war zones. And when you see the consequence of what violence means for human beings, for their communities, you can speak in very particular ways to people that I think can be heard, so that it is not ideology, it's expressing the conviction that God wants humans to have life, to thrive. We're not made to exert so much time and resources into the destruction of each other.
This conflict has been framed in existential terms. If this side exists, then, it's an existential threat for us. And I look at the war and say, well, what security’s in this? In this context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what security have you laid forth for your community? It's a very fragile one. And it necessitates a huge outpouring of resources for your military, like a constant keeping up of your guard because your neighbors are not at peace with you. In March of 2023, we, the Center for Nonviolent Solutions, hosted a webinar with three Israeli women who had been advocating for peace, for ceasefire, one of whom had a [child who was a] combatant in Gaza, and one of whom works in a Palestinian-majority city in Israel, and she's been a long-time peacemaker. One is an Israeli feminist. But in organizing this webinar, Rachel Ben Dor, a women's group that helped, as she described it, [when] the pressure from these mothers influenced the Lebanon ceasefire in 2006. And in the course of talking with her, you know, she was a very lively woman. I really liked the vibe of her, but it leaked out: She said, you know, my husband has PTSD from a previous war. The poet's son went into the Lebanon war, and he's altered. And so I felt that, you know? You spend so many years trying to raise children well, and they just get broken from the war needs of a state and generation after generation.
So I'm afraid, of course, but the other part of me is also angry ‘cause good lord, anybody that has spent any time raising children, you work your damndest. And then to have it undone seems so unfair to me. I have interviewed so many women for whom that's been their story. And so there's fear, but then there's also, honestly—you get pissed off.
It's my observation that groups on the right, in the United States at least, are quite good at coming together around a particular effort despite differences among their coalition. And I don't always see that, at least on the secular left. There's a tendency to get bogged down around language or a pursuit of ideological purity. And I'm wondering what a multi-faith coalition can teach us about progressive solidarity.
Well, for myself, I'm a faith-based activist, and I come out of the Catholic Worker tradition where the effort is to take one's text and try to inflect them in the world as it is. And I think there is in every tradition that strand, so there's in what's called engaged Buddhism, Thích Nhất Hạnh was a stellar example of engaged Buddhism. And I'm sure one could say there's engaged Judaism, there's engaged Islam, thinkers who see their faith tradition as offering language of concern for the oppressed. You know, it's not a tribal orientation. So I think that with the faith traditions, there's a lot of emphasis on how we work with that good old ego that causes us to bump up against each other and get defensive and get focused on our small selves, when really, God is inviting us to be concerned about the common good.
Of course, religion has been very divisive and very exclusive and fostered tribalism, no doubt about that. But I think in its best sense, all of those traditions offer teachings that help to deal with the ego conflicts that will come up. And [these traditions] take you beyond ideology, because ideology is time-bound. It's very, very, very limited in perspective and very reductionist. And I think any faith tradition is not about reducing people. It's not about categorizing and circumscribing the human being, because this is a kind of violence to do that to anybody. And so I think our faith traditions offer a larger view of how you consider the people that you are working among, and also those who disagree with you. I don't mean to sound trite, but we are all God's children.
So one works within that frame. It's very different than an ideological stance where some are enlightened and some are not, and may God deliver me from those who are not. My husband is always saying this: I have to go on my own truth, as I see it. But I also recognize that I don't have the full truth, by any means. To be true to one's conscience—I think our faith traditions invite us to do that. And, and also to have a much more, much more spacious view of the other, we are suffering from this really reductionist fear bound view of, of each other. It's just deadly.
And I think it's exacerbated by the ecosystems of rapid communication. We're in a world where reaction is the first articulation, and really we all have reactions, but can we sit with them for a little while before we blast them out there? I think our faith calls for more patience, more humility, and always, always a sense of—I would just speak for myself—who are the ones that are being denigrated right now? And it changes. This is what I was interpreting from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book The Message, that people in the rapid-fire world of talking heads kind of got baffled. He was saying, don't assume that a people who, in a historical phase are oppressed and endure terrible suffering, that they will not also perpetrate it at a different point. That we have to sort of see ourselves with more humility. With our faith traditions, at least in mind, you recognize that the capacity to do harm, to do terrible harm, is there in you. You're not exempt from that. And for me, that was not an abstract claim after I went to Bosnia. Because when I interviewed people in Bosnia, you could see how social conditions reduce people to do things they never believed they would do, like turn on their neighbor, not help their neighbor, because it would cost them so much if they did that, or because they were so afraid. They just did. And you could feel how displaced and disoriented everybody felt with themselves as well as with each other because of what the violence had had reduced everybody to. And when you see that, or at least I—I won't say you—when I saw that, I recognized how Cain could kill Abel. It's possible. And that doesn't lead me to acquiescence or despair. It leads me to mercy and to realize, don't do this to people. Don't impose conditions that reduce them to this state. This is not what God wants.
That is a really good transition to a quote that I found in your writing, a Peter Morin quote: “We're working to create a society where it is easier for people to be good.” I love that. What it brought to mind for me was Bill's writing about the unhoused population in Worcester and also about prison abolition. Could you talk more about what that quote means to you and how it's informed your activism?
Well, I've been a Catholic Worker since I graduated from the University of Virginia. I actually did my thesis on the movement and so I entered it intellectually and then moved to a community in DC. I think it means many things. It means what I said before, trying to ease the burden that violence puts on all of us perpetrators, victims, and that violent systems put on all of us. It means responding to the excluded ones or to anyone personally, you know, not categorically. This can be you know, with our guests who stay here at the Catholic Worker, 'cause we have the people in need who come and stay. Not a romanticization of [them]. It doesn't mean you can't be real with people, to believe that God exists in everybody.
With one of our guests who stayed years ago, a young person, this person is accused of terrible murder. We correspond and there's beauty in that person also. To realize that that is always there, redemption is always possible. God wants redemption. This is what it means to create a society where it's easier for people to be good. You have to have as a first premise a belief that this is what God wants. That the capacity for good is in everybody. Just as the capacity for cruelty is in everybody, including ourselves. And we live simply. We try to live in community [which] is the sharing of resources. Not you know, trying not to be greedy. But I certainly am. And what is it Kurt Vonnegut said? Refuse to participate in mass slaughter. Get that down and you're doing pretty well.
I don't know that it's possible for anyone in the United States, at least in capitalism, to not be complicit, but we all have to do our best.
Yes, that's right. And the more we see the price of that system on human beings, if we can find alternatives and, and you know, I was saying to my oldest son yesterday, you gotta find your yeses too. Because he really struggles with this. There has to be a lot in life that you're saying yes to. It can't just be, this system is terrible and this system is terrible. I certainly can go that way and think about that a lot, a lot, a lot. But I think God wants us to be happy. Not in a facile way, but to know the joy of creativity, the joy of community, the joy of music, the arts, literature. So there is this resistance to systems that dehumanize, but also take time to celebrate all that is so marvelous about the human experience. And I, you know, I'm, I'm grateful for the work of Robin Kimmerer. She's writing Braiding Sweetgrass, but she—
I love that book!
She talks about how you have to love what you love, and that makes you wanna preserve. Right? People love their kids. And so they do a lot of things because they love their kids. And I think this is a little bit of a challenge sometimes with the left. You have to love your community. You're not speaking out of just a bunch of denunciations. You really wanna see them come together, work together, work for the common good.
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