Velcrow Ripper's Fierce Love trilogy

Photo courtesy consciouslivingradio

Velcrow Ripper (b. Gibsons, BC 1963, raised as a Baha'i) is an award-winning Canadian filmmaker who explores the intersection of the spiritual and political. (see his Wikipedia bio-filmography). 

Scared Sacred (feature doc, NFB 2006) takes viewers to many of the places in the world that have experienced great suffering in recent years including Bhopal, Hiroshima, Israel and Palestine. The film portrays Ripper's own search for meaning, and communicates stories of hope in spite of oppression. 105 m online at http://www.nfb.ca/film/scared_sacred/

Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action (2008) on spiritual activism, tells the stories of people who believe “another world is possible". Interviews with Brad Will (indy video maker shot by rightwing paramilitaries in Oaxaca 2006, the original inspiration for the film), Daryl Hannah, Buddhists Thich Nhat Hanh, Noah Levine, and Joanna Macy; Christians Michael Beckwith, civil rights organizer John Lewis, apartheid opponent Desmond Tutu; gnostic Sera Beak, tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, environment justice organizer Van Jones, black writer Alice Walker, Public Citizen and PIRG founder Ralph Nader. Fierce Light was voted most popular Canadian film and the recipient of a special mention in the nonfiction feature category at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Complete 152m online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmo0DuZ59VY

Occupy Love (2013) is a feature doc about the Occupy movement and the failure of civilization as we know it. What the film shows, triumphantly, is that the dominant system of power is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning, but that love can unite as much as greed can divide. With scenes from the Egyptian Revolution, the Indignado uprising in Spain,  Occupy Wall Street in New York, Indigenous activists at the Alberta Tar Sands, the climate justice movement, and beyond. Interviews Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Roshi Joan Halifax, Drew Dellinger, Charles Eisenstein, Jeremy Rifkin, bell hooks , Anthony Robledo, Pancho Ramos, Colin Beavan, Kimia Ghomeshi, Judy Rebick, Hawaian elder Kumu Raylene Kawaiaee, Reverend Billy. Now on tour and online.

Excerpt from 2007 article on NFB CitizenShift by Velcrow Ripper about the second in his trilogy:

[Interviewing US civil rights veterans, I found] a fierce love, a love of unrelenting compassion, of unwavering nonviolence. A love that faces the bigotry and hatred of the Klu Lux Klan, of the police with their dogs trained on black dummies to attack wildly at the sight of black skin, of the average white citizens of the south who spit and taunted the protestors as they were beaten bloody for simply trying to sit a lunch counter or ride a bus or cross a bridge, and dared to see the divine spark within each and every one of those human beings. That recognizes that behind their hatred, is hurt. Behind their anger, their prejudice, is fear. Behind their violence, behind that testosterone fueled male agression of the hooded Klansman, is a sad little boy, who didn’t get enough love. The people of the movement were fueled by faith, and though I’m not a christian, and like many in this era of fundamentalism, have grown weary and wary of christian rhetoric, I have developed a profound respect for the way Christianity informed the movement. It was sheltered in the churches, the one place they could safely meet free from interference in a segregated land. Although one of the Churches we visited, the 16th St. Baptist Church, was firebombed by the KKK, resulted in the deaths of four young girls. This tragic act became one of the sparks that set off the irrepressible fire of the movement. The power of Faith, and Christ’s original teachings on justice, and peace, gave great strength to the people as they surged forward in the face of out and out assault. 

Birmingham AL 1963: AP photo from Amistad collection

Reverend Calvin Woods, one of the ‘footsoldiers’ of the movement, told me that non-violence was not just a tactic of the movement, it was a lived truth. They worked to not only stop themselves from striking back at the enemy, but learned to remove even the desire to strike back from their hearts. Rev. Mel White, who founded the movement ‘Soul Force’, talks of the love that Martin Luther King calls “Agape” and Gandhi called “Ahimsa.” It is a deep, great love that embraces all beings, sees all as a reflection of the divine, and that is profoundly non-violent. Non-violent not just in deed, but in thought. Speech itself can be violent. Ask yourself before you speak or write a violent phrase - is this love speaking? Are you a force of positivity in the world, or a force of negativity? Are you promoting biophilia, the love of life, or necrophilia, the love of death, the cyncism and hatred that is at the root of the destruction of this planet? Do you think you can create peace in the world through hatred? As Martin Luther King said, hatred does not create love, only love can do that. Darkness cannot create light, only light can do that. ?Although there are a number of severe limitations to the popular book and documentary “The Secret” (in particular the fact that is very ego based and stuff based), there is a fundamental truth to this fact: your thoughts and words draw to you the energy you put out. How do you want to live your life? 

More about Ripper and his other films: velcrowripper.com

Everyday miracles 4: transforming trauma in community -- by Lucy Duncan, AFSC

Cross-posted with the author's permission from the American Friends Service Committee website. This is the first of a series of blog posts on a Healing and Rebuilding our Communities workshop in May 2013. It shows what N. Americans can learn from HROC developed by Quakers in Africa. See our previous posts about AGLI.

"Unless pain is transformed, it will be transferred." -- Richard Rohr, quoted by Amy Rakusin
When I was in Burundi after the World Conference of Friends in 2012, I visited a Peace Village outside Bujumbura where Hutu and Tutsi refugees were living. AFSC staff Triphonie Habonimana and Florence Ntakarutimana of Healing and Rebuilding our Communities (HROC) program served as my hosts. They brought together perpetrators and victims of the decades-long conflict that had participated in the trauma healing workshops that HROC conducts in Bujumbura and elsewhere, sometimes in partnership with AFSC. The participants gathered in a small Friends church in the village and told me how the workshops had impacted them.

Each of them told stories of transformation: victims talked of forgiving horrendous acts perpetrated on them, and perpetrators talked about how they had reconnected with those they had harmed and had been healed from the shock of their acts. Listening to these stories of such deep and seemingly lasting change, it sounded like the workshops must work magic for there to be such healing. I wanted to learn more.

In mid-May three of us from AFSC participated in one of these three-day HROC workshops in Baltimore at Stony Run Meeting, led by one of my hosts in Burundi, Florence Ntakarutimana, as well as Americans Amy Rakusin and Bill Jacobsen.

During the workshop a woman who was a trauma nurse talked about how, with physical trauma, the wound often needs to be abraded, opened, exposed in order for there to be healing; if the wound isn't cleaned and opened, it festers and can get worse or cause the loss of a limb, or even death.

This is true with wounds of the spirit, too. People can suffer spiritual death if they hold their wounds too tightly; they can let their hearts turn to stone.
In one activity on the first day, Florence provided a vivid demonstration of how stress and trauma operate in individuals and impact the community. She put a large glass on a tray in the middle of the room, with a pitcher of water next to it. She said, "Things happen that cause stress."
"In Burundi, it's sometimes not so easy to get breakfast for your children. They go to school without tea. One day you might not have bread."
She filled the glass about a quarter full of water--the water was the stress, and the cup was the person without bread for their child.
She said, "You don't have bread, but the next day you get some and feed your children. You feel better."
Florence poured most of the water back out of the glass. She said, "You feel better, but not all of the stress is gone, the stress you've known."

Florence said, "Normal stress comes and goes."
"But let's say, I am here in the United States and I get a phone call that my first born is in the hospital." Florence filled the glass nearly to the top with water.
"And then I get another call, my son has died. Now I have no more space to hold the stress." Florence filled the glass until it overflowed, the water spilled out onto the tray.
"Then I return to Burundi and my husband is hit by a car and dies. This kind of stress is hard, it makes a hard place in my belly." She added a piece of wood to the cup and more water spilled out onto the tray. The wood represented repeated, difficult events in one’s life, but not necessarily ones that people planned.

Florence said, "And some stress is like stones, it breaks me."
"What if some parents raped their own children and killed them… this is like a stone, a stone in one's heart."
Florence put a large stone into the glass. The water overflowed into the tray.
"This kind of stress is beyond what we can hold, beyond our capacity to hold."
"This is traumatic stress. Sometimes we experience or perpetrate such hard things, sometimes our heart is broken, there are scars and they remain. Some wounds are fresh, others aren't fresh, but they are still there."


"Some are caused by natural disasters, but the hardest are those that people planned. This kind of stress causes trauma, because of what we have heard, what we have seen, or what we have done. There is also cumulative stress; all together things are so hard to bear. When you live on the edge of stress, it can be what seems to be a small thing that puts you over the edge."
"What if your parents experienced trauma and haven't healed, then you could be born with a stone in your belly, and that makes it hard to bear stress, to be resilient."

Florence invited us to look at the tray. The tray holding the glass was full of water. "The family and community around the person who has experienced or is experiencing stress and trauma also is affected because the trauma, the pain, the stress overflows into the community."

Sharing, she said, is critical in the healing process. In order for people to heal, it is important for them to expose the trauma they’ve experienced to the light and re-discover the threads of human care and connection. "The more we are able to open our hearts, the more we can let love in," Florence said. As people share in community, the more all can sit together in the mystery and face what is unknown together.

This was the first day of three. In the next two days we explored how the stones of trauma can be softened and melted. We learned how the water in that overflowing glass can be replaced by healing waters from the community through sharing and that as each person heals, they can support the healing of others.

On that first day I was already beginning to see that through this very intentional and powerful, but quite simple, process the healing that occurs isn’t magic, but is miraculous nonetheless.