Janet Chisholm
Janet Chisholm grew up in a small town of 18,000 --- Las Vegas, Nevada. She watched above ground nuclear bomb tests at close range at the nearby nuclear test site. In high school she committed to learn all she could from local atomic scientists and from physics, chemistry and math classes; she entered Pomona College as a chemistry major hoping to design rockets and bombs to help the country compete with the Soviets. She took religion courses, joined civil rights groups, volunteered in the inner city, and lived nine months in Germany studying theology, the confessing church and lay academies. She graduated with a degree in Religion. Today Janet is a nationally-recognized leader in peacemaking. As a community organizer, engaging trainer, speaker, meditation leader, and popular writer on active nonviolence, she is known for her ability to empower others for personal and social change. Her articles have been published in denominational and peace journals, and the exercises she designed have been adopted for other peace curricula. Her greatest passion is peacemaker training where others recognize their own power to create a world of justice and peace. She is committed to a popular education, highly participatory learning approach that is spiritually-grounded and points to a sustaining personal practice of ongoing action and reflection.
Janet worked in poor urban areas for many years, establishing and operating child care programs and subsidies, shelters and transitional housing, job placement, counseling and other services, as well as addressing child abuse, elder abuse, domestic violence, racism, addiction and other violence. She has been employed in a variety of positions: director of religious education, director of anti-poverty child care systems, university lab school master teacher and professor for student teachers, designer of a career ladder for para-professionals and a State of Connecticut manager for social services.
As a volunteer, Janet has provided leadership for many years in the very active Episcopal Peace Fellowship, recently completing a term as its national chairperson. For 40 years she has been active in the leadership of peace groups locally and nationally. She is currently a board member of the Nevada Desert Experience, the 26 year faith witness at the Nevada nuclear test site.
Janet established a spiritually-grounded, intergenerational, community-based program called Creating a Culture of Peace (CCP). In four years, CCP traveled to 36 states and Palestine and prepared over 330 Trainers. Janet began the program at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where she also served two years as the Executive. CCP is now based with Janet at KIRKRIDGE Study and Retreat Center in Bangor, Pennsylvania, and has been adopted by other organizations: the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, Veterans for Peace, the Texas Conference of Churches and the Baltimore Presbytery. As KIRKRIDGE Coordinator for Justice, Peace and Training, Janet also arranges weekend peace programs, training, gatherings of peacemakers, public witness events and pilgrimages. She helped plan the recent ecumenical Christian Peace Witness for Iraq in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 2007.
Janet holds a Master's degree in Human Development and Family Relations. Her daughter is a human rights attorney and the mother of Janet's new grandson, baby Max.
Walking with Jesus Into the Desert
by Janet Chisholm 03/03/2001
The Desert Story is about a search for God. According to the Bible, and the desert fathers and mothers of the early church who intentionally went into the desert to live a simplified life focused on God, the Desert Story is about journeying - about being tested - about encountering God. Today, we know that the Desert Story is also a story about violence and the Bomb.
I want to share reflections about my journey, the desert, the Bomb and the temptations of Jesus in the desert.
My journey in the desert began when my parents moved to Las Vegas many years ago. It was a small town with only 18,000 residents and two modest hotels. My parents were seeking a warm, dry climate where my father's health would improve and they could raise their children. We came from Portland, Oregon, a lush land of greenery and rain where I played on soft lawns, and trees and flowers were everywhere. The change for me was very dramatic! We moved into a small motel room surrounded by dirt, where I was expected to play contentedly. The sun was oppressively hot, and there was one scruffy tree for shade. This certainly was no Promised Land of Milk and Honey, but a Land of Dirt... and Sunny!
Before long the natural beauty of the desert touched my soul. The sky reaching from horizon to horizon and filled with the drama of clouds and wind. The tall, colorful mountains surrounding the valley. The oases with their streams and shady cottonwood trees; and the flat desert, with its thorny mesquite bushes in which I could create a hideaway and block the entrance with a tumbleweed. The bursting flowers at springtime: yucca, belly flowers seen only when we got on our bellies, the red Indian paintbrush and more. When I was older, our family bought a horse. As a teenager, I was allowed to ride alone - all the way to the mountains. It was thrilling and liberating to jump the ravines and gallop for miles across the unfenced desert. This was like the Holy Land, I was told - like the desert where Jesus had walked. No wonder I felt healthy and whole, free and safe to explore and act boldly, and convinced this was a sacred land. And each year our family drove north along the main highway. We joined church friends on a desert hilltop to hold an Easter Service and watch the dramatic sunrise, with its spreading and brilliant colors slowly filling the heavens of God's beautiful creation.
During my elementary school years, there were many other occasions when our family drove north along that same highway. We rose early - as we always did for the Easter sunrise service. We drove out early, before dawn, while it was still dark, to get a good parking spot on the shoulder of the highway. We and hundreds of other families - cars full of children - our grandmother, too. It was the chance of a lifetime to watch the bombs go off. The newspapers and radio described the exact route to follow to get as close as possible. And they told us it was safe! Everyone got out, put on dark glasses and waited. There was a great hush - we were afraid to blink and miss the spectacle. It was the hint of morning - a creeping glow was visible above the horizon - when finally a light exploded into the dark, there was a powerful sound forced into the air, the ground shook, and slowly dark billows tumbled out and rose, the mushroom cloud. And they told us it was safe!
As a Las Vegas High School freshman, I researched the effects of radiation on the human body. Recently, my mother was cleaning her garage and found my paper on the project. I had analytically reviewed photos of Japanese who were said to have survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings - of U.S. doctors treating them and gathering data about exposures. I spent time in the local Atomic Energy Commission office and interviewed Edward Teller - not realizing his renown, I asked my simple questions about his research. It was the Sputnik era and we were being encouraged to enter Chemistry and Physics if we had talent, because the U.S. wanted to catch up with the Soviet Union. I was doing my loyal best: studying rocket fuels and design, taking all the science and math courses I could get. It was expected of the brightest students - take the hardest courses, prove yourselves! And during my early school years, the nuclear testing industry employed the most people in town. It was the best place to get a good job. Despite the overwhelming evidence of sickness and dying that I summarized in the paper, I patriotically concluded with a quote from Dwight Eisenhower about the necessity of nuclear weapons to protect democracy. This certainly was no Land of Milk and Honey, but a Land of Bombs and Money!
In Honolulu, the Bomb exploded into my personal awareness again. I remembered the "survivors" in those black and white photos of doctors examining living victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - shriveled skin, scarred faces and bodies, babies born with deformed limbs - a white American military doctor with a stethoscope against the passive chest of a frail Japanese woman, the dazed children and the cold projections of reduced life expectancy. They were so similar to the films I began to see of Vietnamese survivors, the wounded, dazed, crippled and scarred victims of a deadly rain of napalm and bombs. "Stop this horror!" my heart cried out. The children of the deadly rain were being brought to the island, to Tripler Army Hospital, for skin-grafting and prosthetics. But the deadly rain continued. Some of us purchased films showing the victims and toured the Islands - and protested in many other ways - calling for a cease fire, for an end to all the killing and violence, an end to the victims who never made the nightly body count reserved for soldiers on both sides.
As a Navy wife, the Bomb touched my personal life again. I went to watch the first firing of a Poseidon nuclear submarine off Key West. With other family members of the submariners who were involved in the test firing, I watched the extraordinary event from a nearby surface vessel. The thunderous explosion and horrible power immediately recalled for me the explosions I had witnessed as a child. Others cheered and clapped. I was shaken to the core and wept.
A few years ago, the Bomb became personal again. There was a lump in my breast. (It turned out to be benign.) When I was scheduled for surgery, I called to inform my mother. With great distress, she talked about recent studies that indicated Las Vegas residents had been exposed to high levels of radioactivity during the bomb testing in the fifties - from the winds that had swirled in our hometown.
But they told us it was safe!
The silence was suddenly broken. No one in Las Vegas, during the years I lived there or since, had ever spoken to me before about the dangers of the nuclear weapons testing. Mother admitted she had had no concern then, no one seemed to - it was a time to show loyalty and patriotism. (I remember that the first TV pictures we watched were the McCarthy hearings.) Everyone was so trusting. With increasing alarm she disclosed some of the horrible clues to the dangers: the blasts broke windows and cracked the walls of buildings, tumbled dishware and other breakables onto the floor. There were thousands of insurance claims.
But they told us it was safe!
It felt like an earthquake, but it was not an act of God.
But they told us it was safe!
A man who worked for my father suffered from terrible skin cancer and finally had to stop working. He had been the only insurance investigator allowed on ground zero after a blast. He would go around and assess the damage with government experts. He was never warned of the dangers. The soles of his boots would be eaten off after one walk-through; he was always purchasing new shoes!
But they told us it was safe!
The sheep in Utah began to sicken and die in great numbers - and then the families became sick. And so much of our food came from there.
But they told us it was safe!
Protesting nuclear weapons is personal! I have spoken often against nuclear weapons and joined others in protest at the Groton Submarine Base, Electric Boat, the Nevada Test Site and the Pentagon. And I shall continue - until it IS safe for all of us. My desert is Holy Ground; not a wasteland or a land to waste, not a place to perfect weapons that will destroy, murder, and dominate. It is a place of testing and transformation!
Related Links:
Learn more about the Fellowship of Reconciliation at:
http://www.forusa.org
Learn more about the Episcopal Peace Fellowship at:
http://www.episcopalpeacefellowship.org/
Learn more about the Nevada Desert Experience at:
http://nevadadesertexperience.org/
