“It is a heavy downpour of rain that drenches the soil to fullness, likewise only a profuse shower of love overcomes hatred.” ~ Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi xiv, p. 402

Beneath this truism lies an important and often overlooked fact of nonviolence: that it is a force, and like all forces, physical or “living” (as Gandhi called it), it has degrees. This is a useful reminder because often when people try “nonviolence” in some kind of tentative, weak form and it doesn’t “work” then, as Theodore Roszac once said, “they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.” We must be prepared to escalate our nonviolence, increasing its depth and purity (which may mean taking on great inconvenience, risk, and suffering) when the hatred it is addressing does not yield.

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About Daily Metta

Stephanie Van Hook, the Metta Center’s executive director, launched Daily Metta in 2015 as a way to share Gandhi’s spiritual wisdom and experiments with nonviolence.

Our 2016 Daily Metta continues with Gandhi on weekdays. On weekends, we share videos that complement Michael Nagler’s award-winning book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World. To help readers engage with the book more deeply, the Metta Center offers a free PDF study guide.

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