Monday Meditation: Interrupting the Pattern
I am writing from Galway, Ireland and sending this your way as the ocean breeze hums thru the windows. May we become the healing of the wounds.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” — Audre Lorde
Violence begets violence.
We know this in our bones, in the stories our bodies carry like sediment layered over time. Sometimes it comes as a shiver before we enter a room. Sometimes it comes as a sharp word that tastes like metal in the mouth. Sometimes it is silent, choosing withdrawal instead of connection. Violence is not always a weapon raised; it is also the absence of care, the refusal to listen, the erasure of someone’s existence.
Feminist ethicists like Sara Ahmed remind us that the structures of power are sticky—violence clings to us, shaping our gestures, our gait, our ways of reading the room. María Lugones teaches us that oppression fractures us, splitting us from ourselves and from each other, and that resisting it requires what she calls world-traveling—entering the worlds of others with playfulness and love, creating conditions for something else to emerge.
bell hooks wrote that love is the only antidote to domination, but love is not sentimental. Love, in her vision, is a practice of courage, an ethic of care that interrupts the habits of harm. Feminist theologian Carter Heyward speaks of love as a “mutual relation in which neither is object and both are subject,” which means that our liberation is bound up in refusing to use each other, even in the subtlest ways.
The pattern of violence is old. It has shaped empires, churches, and families. It has shaped our own nervous systems. When we do not tend to this shaping—when we pretend we are untouched by it—we risk becoming its agents, even while speaking of peace. As Judith Butler notes, violence is not simply an act but a condition—a field in which we live and move, and one that requires deliberate, sustained interruption.
This week, I want to invite us into a slow noticing. Where has violence shaped your way of seeing? Your way of speaking? Your way of imagining what is possible? Where do you carry its residue?
The point of this meditation is not to dwell in shame. Shame itself can be a tool of violence when it freezes us in place. Rather, it is to practice recognition. To see the thread before it is pulled. To name the spark before it becomes a fire. To remember that interrupting violence is not only about protest in the streets—it is about how we speak to our children, how we respond to criticism, how we treat those who have wronged us, how we tell the truth without abandoning compassion.
Violence has shaped us, yes. But it need not define us. We can practice unshaping. We can practice tenderness as a form of resistance. We can practice interrupting the cascading violence that would otherwise sweep us away.
May we become people who notice the pattern, and dare to break it.
Paz, —RCE+