A Conversion to Nonviolence (Felix Bivens)

Felix Milton (Skip) Bivens III

Personal Statement

coup de grace

Permit me to introduce myself as homogeny gone awry. I am a chagrinned member of that bulging demographic, the WASP. Moreover, my friends quip that I should seek income as an Aryan poster-child with my flaxen hair, blue eyes and snow-white complexion. They feel the glittering blond eyebrows will make me a doubtless shoe-in.

At one time, admittedly, I fit the ambitious, domineering profile: class president, football player, congressional page, political science major, et al. Then mysteriously, over time, my personal paradigm, it did shift: the bodybuilder turned into a vegetarian; the tie/blue blazer/khakis ensemble replaced by carpenter’s bibs; the law degree exchanged for a contractor’s license; and the fledgling Democratic politician became a fledgling Episcopal priest.

Friends and family, my parents most especially, like to ask, with not a little bewilderment, “What happened?” As I alluded, this conversion was not instantaneous, not a Broadway-style Annunciation replete with careering angels and flashing cyclorama. Only several years later, can I now discern the beginning and end of this chrysalis period.

Meeting Coleman McCarthy was the spark. McCarthy, then a columnist for the Washington Post, spoke at the White House during my internship with Vice President Gore. In a breathless tirade of quotations and shibboleths, he decried all violence, war, materialism, indifference and the foreign policy of the US government. To my astonishment, I found my chin nodding in agreement. In fact, I liken the event to a two-hour hand-bell concert, with idea after idea ringing true in my mind. It was as though the interstices between a hundred webs of causality had vanished instantly, allowing my mind to integrate ideas, facts and relationships that had hitherto never valenced the same cerebral plane. As McCarthy concluded, I recognized three things: that I was a pacifist, that I had always been a pacifist and that my world-view and value system were shot.

I struggled to comprehend why McCarthy’s bold apostasies had made more sense to me than anything I had ever heard. My sensibilities offended and my curiosity piqued, I attended a class Coleman taught for the remainder of that summer. For many months afterward, I battled the ideas that Coleman personified, in my soul and on paper. I wrestled with a novel in which our conflicting schools of thought wrestled one another, but to no avail. After a couple hundred pages, I was the one pinned to the mat.

Two years later, I graduated from Sewanee and went to work for the Gore 2000 campaign. Though hard-won and much anticipated, this experience proved to be one of the worst I have known. I despised the job, feeling myself to be nothing but a flaccid, jangling marionette. After nine exhausting months on the road as a campaign nomad, my ongoing internal struggle culminated one Sunday morning.

Residing then in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I received an exquisitely rare half-day off from the phones and the press and the pressure. I strolled to the diminutive Episcopal cathedral that stood several blocks from my hutch over a barber’s shop. It was only my second time at church since joining the campaign. Following communion I knelt at my seat to pray. Only then did the date and its atavistic importance enter my mind-- that Sunday in March when all of Sewanee’s ASB (alternative spring break) teams return from their varied service projects. For the past three years, I had spent this time in New Orleans, tutoring at several inner-city schools, eventually becoming such a proponent of this one trip that I had passed up invitations to the more “glamorous” abroad trips to Central America and the Caribbean, and had even spent a summer bicycling four-thousand miles across America to raise money for one of the organizations where I had volunteered during the trip. The inevitable comparison of my work then to my present occupation brought a flush to my face and, without warning, I was in tears. Launching out a side door, I hurried to an empty little park with a crumpled cigarette package floating in its fountain.

By the time I left that park, I knew this would be my last campaign and that I would return to Sewanee to work for its Outreach office. As I had all along, I wanted to serve, but no longer through the artifices of campaign politics nor the distant, Olympian heights of government. I wanted to serve first-hand-- with my hands. For three years now, I have been privileged to do this very thing. From building houses to mending severed sewer pipes, I have ministered at the most personal and humbling levels.

Without doubt, I could spend many more happy years in my beloved Sewanee, but it truly is the land of milk and homogeny. My appearance fits the perennial mold, but my ideas no longer do. On our peaceful mountaintop, it is easy to ignore and then forget the world’s problems. I find myself increasingly ready to climb from the Lethe of the “Sewanee bubble” and take on the issues that trouble my sleep at night: perpetual war, militarism, environmental degradation and the concomitant political inaction that drives them.

I have previously contemplated stateside peace studies programs and found them lacking. I doubted those programs could teach me more in two years than Coleman McCarthy had once taught me in two hours. However, discovering the School of Ecumenics at Trinity and its synergistic programs exhilarated me. There I found programs built around the backdrop of a real and functioning peace agreement. Classes focused not on heady visions of non-violence, but on actual legislation that decommissioned bristling paramilitary organizations and engendered institutions to defend self-determination and human rights. The only downside has been deciding which of the three programs to undertake; however, because there exists the possibility of my attending divinity school afterward, my choice is the M.Phil. in International Peace Studies. Otherwise, the Eumenides of my intellect would never cease to hound me for passing up the opportunity to study these charged issues so near their source.

--I certify that this essay is my own work.

Felix Milton (Skip) Bivens III

Achievements

Collected poetry, fifitypoems, completed fall 2000

Novel, The Reddition of Gran Nation, completed fall 1999; allegory on the relationship between church

Tonya Corporation Fellowship to the Supreme Court of Arkansas, 1999

Graduated cum laude

Double major: English and political science

Graduated with honors in political science because of superior performance on comprehensive exams and 95 page honors thesis on “Independent Counsels and the Destruction of the Presidency”

Member, Order of the Gownsmen, Sewanee’s highest academic distinction

Dean’s List(s)

Member, Pi Sigma Alpha, National Political Science Honor Society

Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Academic Honor Roll for 7 semesters

Only Sewanee delegate for the 1999 Conference on the Presidency

Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges 1998-1999

European Studies Head Proctor Scholarship, 1997

Tonya Corporation Fellowship to the White House, Office of the Vice President, 1997

Awarded four-year Wilkins Scholarship to Sewanee for academics and leadership

Elizabeth Haislip English Scholarship

Member, Federal Grand Jury, US District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee, 2002-2003

Assistant Coach, Sewanee Women’s Track & Field, Spring 2001

Gore 2000 campaign field coordinator: served in Iowa caucuses; in California, Pennsylvania, West Virginia Primaries; at Democratic National Convention in LA; and in Tennessee for General Election, respectively.

Chapter President, Pi Sigma Alpha, Political Science Honor Society, 1998-1999

Pi Sigma Alpha chapter wins Best Chapter in a Small College Award the year I serve as president

Chairperson, Order of Gownsmen Community Service Committee, 1997-1999

Member, Omicron Delta Kappa, National Leadership Honor Society

Captain, Sewanee Men’s Track & Field 1999

Awarded first-ever Felix Milton Bivens III Award named in my honor for “Heart and Dedication to the Field of Men’s Track and Field”

NCAA Division III Athlete: Four varsity letters Track & Field; three varsity letters Cross Country

Member, Board of Directors, Dionysus & Co., independent student theater company

Spelunking and Vertical Caving Leader, Sewanee Outing Program, 1997-1999

European Studies Program Head Proctor, 1997

Co-Founder and President, Sewanee Original Theater, 1997-1999

Sewanee Assistant Proctor, 1996-1997

Freshman Class Student Assembly Representative, 1995-1996

Chief Floor Page, U.S. House of Representatives, 1994

First-ever Outstanding Page Award, 1994

High school class president 9th, 10th, 11th grades

Community Service

Assistant Coordinator of Outreach Ministries. Fall 2000 to present.

Advisor to 17 student volunteer organizations, facilitating such projects as school tutoring, senior citizen visits, homeless shelter/soup kitchen trips, Big Brother/Big Sisters program, etc. Managing combined budgets of $81,000.

Coordinated and led various mission trips within and beyond the United States, including: service- learning trips with Heifer Project International (2000 & 2002); trips to New York City to work with AIDS patients(2000-2002), trip to work St. Paul’s Church at Ground Zero in New York City (early October 2001); the creation of a new environmental-track trip to Costa Rica to work with leatherback sea turtles and to assist at the Cloud Forest School(2002-2003.) Currently organizing new trips to Ecuador and the Lakota Reservation in South Dakota. Tentatively accompanying Baptist Campus Ministry students on trip to China to teach English during 2002-2003 Christmas break.

Organized fundraisers for spring break outreach trips that grossed more than $18,000 per year.

Served as construction foreman for three Habitat for Humanity houses for families in Sewanee community.

Coordinated logistics and managed construction on summer Habitat building program in Sewanee for church youth groups from across southeast.

Aided in research and writing grants for Sewanee Eco-house, Global Village, and reused construction materials warehouse.

In preparation to take Tennessee contractor’s license exam.

Co-Captain of Sewanee team in 150-mile bike ride to benefit multiple sclerosis research. The team raised over $5400.

Assisting in the creation of an Affinity Chapter of the International Peaceforce, in prepartion for the organization’s December 2002 convening event in New Delhi, India.

Leader of 57 mile Perimeter Trail Walk fundraiser to benefit UNICEF in Afghanistan (Fall 2002).

Coordinating 76 mile Perimeter Trail Walk in conjunction with Cloud Forest School Scholarship Walk in Costa Rica (Spring 2003).

Clarence Day Award. Spring 1999. Awarded Sewanee’s highest honor in the arena of community service at Class of 1999 commencement exercises.

Outreach Across America. Summer 1998. Organized, coordinated and led a cross-country bicycle ride to benefit Desire Street Ministries in New Orleans. Group of six riders biked approximately 4000 miles from Washington state to Delaware. The nine-week trip raised more than $7000 for Desire Street.

University Chapel Outreach Programs. New Orleans Outreach trip: Spring break 1997: Worked as a classroom tutor in an inner city school and visited community-building organizations such as Desire Street Ministries. Spring Break 1998 & 1999: Returned to New Orleans as the trip’s leaders, increased the number and variety of community service projects performed during the trip. Spring break 1996: Navajoland, Arizona: Helped to restore mission buildings on the Navajo reservation.

The Order of the Gownsmen. 1998-1999. Appointed chair of a new council on community service. Projects included reintroducing vegetative cover to a two-acre area of Sewanee’s campus that was formerly the University sandstone quarry. 1997-1998. Core-committee member for the Easter Charity Drive which raised $2000 to benefit Sewanee Headstart and the Appalachian Women’s Guild.

Pi Sigma Alpha Scholarship. 1999. Raised more than $300 to be given as a scholarship to a graduating high school senior from one of the three nearest counties who intended to major in political science in college.

Prometheus Bound. 1997. Organized and directed a small group of students in a performance of the Greek tragedy. The show was performed at Lincoln College in Oxford and raised funds for Helen House, a children’s hospice in Oxford, England.

The Misanthrope. 1997. Initiated a collaborative effort between a local theater group and a local charity to perform Moliere’s play as a benefit for the charity. Produced, directed, performed and toured the show during Christmas break. Benefit raised more than $1000 for the Child Development Center of Lincoln County, Tennessee.