At noon on April 14, the Brandywine Peace Community held their annual Good Friday Stations of Justice, Peace and Nonviolent Resistance at Lockheed Martin in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Crosses laid between banners and signs, while a bell of peace tolled. Each station had a reading not of today, but for these times (for all times) ranging from Chief Sitting Bull to Sojourner Truth, Howard Zinn, Dr. King, Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, William Penn, Gandhi, Jesus. The backdrop was war, forever more war: U.S. cruise missiles attacking Syria, a near-nuclear bomb (the mother of all bombs) dropped on Afghanistan, the threat of nuclear war with North Korea. Lockheed Martin, the U.S.#1 war profiteer, the world’s largest arms producer, was the obvious place for us to be on Good Friday. Understood?
13th and 14th Stations: Jesus is taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb
All: We mourn all the victims of war and terror. We know that the profits of Lockheed Martin rest on war, militarism, and the violation of the earth. We have for far too long suffered in silence the social ravages of empire, corporate greed, and a war economy. With each passing day, it worsens with the stamp of Trump. But still we hang on insisting that where war is business, as here at Lockheed Martin, there cannot be business as usual. We resist Lockheed Martin with Jesus’ love and a continuing commitment to justice, to honoring the earth, to peace, to the cross of nonviolent resistance.
The readings came to an end, the bell continued to toll, and a line of people with prayers (pleas, really) for peace stood across the main driveway entrance. All the same people it seems. Maybe a few others the next time?
Those arrested, taken to the Upper Merion police station and released with a disorderly conduct citation: Bernadette Cronin-Geller, Carrol Clay, Father Patrick Sieber, OFM, Beth Centz, all from Philadelphia; Paul Sheldon, of Media; and Theresa Camerota and Tom Mullian, of Wyncote.
Photo by Theresa Camerota
