Conversations: Mary Lou Ott: Activist and Parishioner
| “Mommy, Daddy, I’ve been thinking what a grand world this would be, if all the people loved each other , holding hands like you and me.”
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On a Sunday morning in May when a group of pre-school children finished singing about love and peace, there were a lot of teary-eyed parishioners applauding. The children were cute, innocent, and their idealism was not lost on a number of St. Joan of Arc parishioners who spend more and more of their time working for various peace movement groups in the Twin Cities. This is the story of one of them.
“Did you know that Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated just before he started working on his dream of a Nonviolent Peace Army? Our world today is very different and the nature of war has changed. The conflicts we hear and read about are internal power struggles that spring from ethnic or religious hatred. They are caused by poverty or the demand for precious resources. In wars of the past, 90% of the casualties were soldiers; now 90% of the casualties are innocent men, women, and children.” Mary Lou Ott wasn’t lecturing me, she was sharing her concern. She is a small woman, five foot two, but passionate about a very big challenge. She works weekly to turn her idealism into a promising alternative to the violence of our time. She is a volunteer staff person in the St. Paul office of the Global Nonviolent Peace Force.
| Mission: To facilitate the creation of a trained, international civilian nonviolent peace force. The Peace Force will be sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to struggle nonviolently, enter into dialogue, and seek peaceful resolution.
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| Tineka Kurth(L) and Mary Lou, a peace force! |
 “An international peace force would represent what many people across the political spectrum feel is our only hope for an alternative to increasingly dangerous large-scale military interventions. Building on the important peace teamwork already happening throughout the world, this project would bring peacemaking activity to a dramatic new level. Effective interventions have sometimes been carried out with fewer than a dozen hastily trained volunteers. What could we not do with, say, two hundred people committed to two years of training and active nonviolent engagement, with thousands of supporters and an effective organization at their backs?”
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Looking around at stacks of envelopes, flip charts, lists, and boxes of materials, I asked Mary Lou what she thought was the inner drive that motivated her. She laughed and shrugged off any notion that she was doing anything unusual, then said:
People who know Mary Lou will say she comes to any encounter on the winds of energy, listens to the issue and then in her true style says; “ I’ll make soup, we will raise money, I will hold a party, we will call some friends, I will call you!” One wonderful trait Mary Lou has is her ability to get you laughing and then wait for what she calls a teachable moment. While laughing at all her causes, she looked at me and said; “ I learned long ago that we are all very different and we can all give in our own unique ways. I know how to organize, how to get things started, and how to motivate. Most of the time I know when I have given my gift and when it is time to move on.”
Mary Lou Ott is 66 years old, a wife, a mother, a grandmother and an attendee or convener of a lot of meetings, but always, always with a goal of making something happen. She has a wonderful Irish way of telling us that life isn’t just about us. There are women out of prison who can tell you of her support. Mary Lou has helped people staying at the Victims of Torture Center and has given a lot of years at the St. Joseph House that became H.O.P.E. Community. She was part of the group that worked to start and support Incarnation House. All of these centers are still thriving and they speak to the need in our community to have safe places for women and children. Mary Lou even went to travel school with her daughter and started a shaky career as a travel agent but she kept running into other people who want to make a difference and needed some help. She discovered people who were working or wanted to work in South American countries but for whom language was a barrier so she started a Spanish immersion camp for adults which she attended several times, but laughingly said she needed more immersion herself. This of course did not stop her from going to Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti to work. She even went to nurses aid training so she might be more helpful to her husband Gene, who is a doctor.
“I am not naive and I know that the issues and causes I choose to work with make some uncomfortable. I know that I live organically, I grow out of what I experience. You ask me who or what really caused directional change in my life. It is many people, many events. In 1983 like others at St. Joan of Arc and elsewhere, I became involved in the Honeywell Project. Like others, I was arrested. Since it was the first of many arrests, I decided to wear high heels to court and when they handcuffed me and took me off to jail, I couldn’t keep up with the guards, I felt like Minnie Mouse in those shoes. Seriously, since the days of anti-war protests I, like others, have become more involved in the Peace Movement. Today, working with others to build the Global Nonviolent Peace Force is a passion for me.”
When the conversation turned to religion and spiritual growth, Mary Lou was not without ideas and conviction. Much of what has been said or written about the spiritual journey has been laid out by the male mind, she said, so “we women have 
had our spiritual work cut out for us.” I am not always comfortable with a top-down church. I believe we must be more circular. There was a time when I didn’t go to church- it was an occasion of sin for me. In the late 80s’ because I was working at H.O.P.E. House, Gene and I went to St. Stephen’s. I loved that community, but that was my community and not Gene’s, so we started to come to St. Joan of Arc. At this point in my life, I needed to be with my friends and I needed a Eucharistic experience that binds me with God and with others. At 66, I understand more and more, that everything reflects God.” She then told me of her fascination with The Beatitudes, what C. S. Lewis once called “mere Christianity”. Mary Lou says the words ‘happy’ or ‘blessed’ don’t translate for me to the true meaning of these beatitudes. “I think that to try to live out a beatitude, any single one of them, or all of them, truly is the only thing that makes us whole. We are completed in our humanity when we truly try to follow them. The beatitudes for me are what bring satisfaction and contentment.” I thought about it and said it to myself, “whole and complete are the peacemakers for they shall be called children of God.” It is reassuring to know that the songs that children sing about love and peace can be carried into the lives of some adults.
| “Dorothy Day was never ‘too polite’ to speak about God. Nothing we achieved was ever our doing, it was only God’s mercy passing though us. Our own love wasn’t our love. If we experienced love for another person, whether wife or child or friend or enemy, it was God’s love. ‘If I have accomplished anything in my life,’ she said late in her life, ‘it is because I wasn’t embarrassed to talk about God.’ ”
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