Responding to Violence Consciously in a Time of Flailing Empire

In recent weeks, as reports continue to emerge about the violent and violating actions carried out by ICE ~ and as images of war, displacement, and state-sanctioned brutality circulate relentlessly ~ many people of conscience are asking a familiar, aching question:

How do we respond without becoming numb, hateful, or overwhelmed?

For me, this question is inseparable from the consciousness of the Marys ~ and, unexpectedly, from the life and work of journalist Marie Colvin, whose story I revisited recently while watching A Private War, portrayed with extraordinary depth and vulnerability by Rosamund Pike.

Colvin was not a spiritual teacher. She did not speak in the language of mysticism or prayer. And yet, what she embodied on the front lines of some of the world’s most brutal conflicts was a quality the Marys know intimately: the courage to bear witness without looking away… and without surrendering one’s humanity.

Marie Colvin placed herself again and again in spaces of extreme violence, not to sensationalize suffering, but to make it visible. She reported from East Timor, Chechnya, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Syria. She sat with civilians whose lives had been shattered by military power, listening to their stories, amplifying their voices, refusing to allow them to disappear into abstraction.

She paid a terrible personal cost. Trauma marked her body and psyche. She lost an eye to a grenade blast in Sri Lanka. And ultimately, she was killed in Homs, Syria, targeted for her refusal to leave when civilians were being bombed.

Watching A Private War, I was struck not only by Colvin’s bravery, but by the quiet moral line she refused to cross. She did not romanticize war. She did not dehumanize soldiers. And she did not reduce suffering to spectacle. She insisted, again and again, on the dignity of those caught in the machinery of violence.

In this, she stands unexpectedly close to the Marian lineage. I see her very name, Marie, the French form of Mary, as a synchronistic marker of this.

Mary knows what it is to live under empire. She knows surveillance, displacement, and the terror of raising a child in a world where power has marked your family as expendable. The flight into Egypt is not a metaphor, it is a refugee story, a border story, a story of state violence justified by “order.”

When we ask what the Marian response to ICE might be, or to the atrocities unfolding in places like Palestine, African-American neighborhoods in the US, and elsewhere, we are not asking for a political slogan. We are asking how consciousness rooted in love, moral clarity, and embodiment can best respond in a world in which violence is legalized, bureaucratized, and carried out by traumatized human beings in uniform.

Here, I am reminded of Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewish writer who chronicled her inner life during the Holocaust. Reflecting on an encounter with a young Gestapo officer who had shouted at her, she wrote:

“I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion… I know that pitiful young men like that are dangerous as soon as they are let loose on mankind.”

Hillesum’s words are often mistaken for passivity. They are not. They are a piercing diagnosis of what happens when unresolved trauma is married to authority and given permission to act.

This is where the Marys stand.

The Marian path does not ask us to hate those who enact violence, but it does ask us to refuse to normalize it. It teaches compassion with boundaries and understanding without excusing.

We can rest assured that Mary grieves along with families torn apart by ICE raids, neighborhood police brutality, and military strikes. She stands beside children whose nervous systems are shattered by armed strangers. And she also weeps for the young men ~ and, increasingly, women ~ whose hearts have been hardened in order to make such acts possible.

Because Mary knows this truth intimately: when tenderness is exiled from the human heart, cruelty rushes in to fill the vacuum.

Like Marie Colvin, the Marys do not look away. But neither do they become consumed by the violence they witness. Their presence is steady, embodied, and morally clear. They place themselves between the innocent and the machinery of harm.

This is not a call for everyone to go to the front lines. Most of us are not meant to do what Marie Colvin did. And most of us are not meant to absorb the suffering of the world into our own bodies.

But we are asked something nonetheless.

We are asked to remain human. To refuse dehumanization ~ of victims or perpetrators. To hold moral clarity without hatred. And to allow our care to circulate into forms of action that are sustainable, embodied, and true.

In this spirit, I’ll be offering a live Oracle Transmission & Divine Teaching on February 10 through the Inner Sanctum Temple ~ How to Respond to ICE-Level Violence: Spiritual Guidance from the Marys & the Pleiades ~ for those seeking grounded, empowering ways to meet violence with embodied presence, moral clarity, and nonviolent action; if you’re not already a member, you’re warmly invited to join HERE so that you may participate.

The most transformative thing for an empire in crisis is not anger. It is a heart that remains tender, awake, and unwilling to look away.