Last weekend I was at our Peace Conference at Lake Junaluska pounding with a hammer on a red-hot rifle barrel held on an anvil by Scotty Utz, of RAWTools South. While I am a woodworker, I immediately felt the familiar flow of hand, heart, and mind as I participated in the workshop he and his sidekick Stan Wilson conducted outside the conference hall, right beside the lake with its passing swans and geese. Scotty, who also has a theology degree along with his blacksmithing credentials, and Stan, co-pastor at Circle of Mercy congregation in Asheville, lead one of a network of RAWTools centers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and soon, New York.
RAWTools arose as a creative response to the ravages of gun violence in our country. At its core, they seek to enact the Biblical vision of turning swords in plowshares (Isaiah 2:4, Micah 4:3) and then cultivating just relationships not only in gardens but in human relationships. Their mission is to “Disarm hearts, forge peace, and cultivate justice.” This is not just an exercise in creative blacksmithing. It is an enactment of the spiritual work we all have to do to move from dependence on violence and destruction to interdependence rooted in love and restoration.
Though their work began with turning guns into garden tools, their conversations with people who brought their unwanted guns to them soon led into deeper relationships. A family brought to them the gun their son had used to kill himself in the trauma of his military service. In destroying his gun and using it to create something new and beautiful, they hoped to find a way forward in their grief. Out of that experience Scotty and Stan began to develop a ritual for guns used in suicides, transforming people’s grief into a new relationship with both the living and the dead in their life.
Along with the other participants, I was invited to help pound out a rifle barrel to create a new tool or ornament. As I hammered on the hot metal, I offered this action to the memory of my wife’s brother-in-law, who used a gun to take his own life ten years ago. Even at this great remove, perhaps this action could be a prayer for all those who had suffered the same grief.
As Scotty and Stan entered more deeply into the worlds of people whose lives have been shaped by their relationships to guns, they were able to hear of good times in hunting or marksmanship that are tied to the proper use of guns. And gun owners could also begin to hear of their work of transforming guns from instruments of trauma to tools of growth. They could help people move from being warriors to gardeners, from being victims to creators.
In the process they have become certified safety instructors in the National Rifle Association, thus reflecting its earliest purpose. They are also registered firearms dealers so they can properly receive and destroy guns. This has opened up many new ways of talking with people about the meaning of guns in their lives and in their deaths. In finding this concrete way to transform guns into art and garden tools they can begin to work out pathways to peace from within the world governed in so many ways by guns and instruments of war.
Rooted in this fundamental unity of material and spiritual healing, they are now branching into ways this work can be expressed in cultivating not only gardens but skills of conflict de-escalation and bystander intervention in conflict situations. At the same time, this work might also help heal the estrangement in our own lives between our manual and mental capacities, between our humanity and our participation in the material world. It is a testament to the way we are not merely creatures of words but of the whole “blooming earth.” In cultivating that earth, they offer ways that our whole human culture might be re-oriented toward life rather than death.