Ground Zero is a member of the Pacific Life Community
We are committed to ending nuclear weapons and war-making through nonviolent direct action along the Pacific Rim in collaboration with the global peace movement.
Father Bill Bichsel, Father Steve Kelly, Sister Ann Montgomery, Sister Jackie Hudson, Lynne Greenwald and Sister Susan Crane with VFP Malcolm Chaddock behind
PLC Retreat in Jemez Springs, New Mexico Feb 26-28, 2010
Trinity House Catholic Worker invited Western US groups committed to prayerful non-violence to the 4th annual Pacific Life Community retreat in New Mexico February 26-28, 2010. Forty people representing seven radical discipleship communities from the Western U.S. joined in reflecting and acting for nuclear abolition in 2010.
We gathered in the Jemez Mountains, near Albuquerque, at cozy, spartan Hummingbird Music Camp. Our keynote speakers were Bill Sulzman of Citizens for Peace in Space, from Colorado Springs, and Sr. Joan Brown of the Partnership for Earth Spirituality, from Albuquerque.
This motley crew integrated the venerable gray-haired with the youthfully spike-haired radicals from Los Angeles, Las Vegas (NM), Menlo Park, Medford, Seattle, Albuquerque in prayer, celebration, singing, sharing, planning, discerning, negotiating, and finally vigilling.
The weekend culminated in a direct action at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where a plan to build a new plant for plutonium bomb cores is underway. Our prayerful action aimed to send a clear message to the Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference, held in May 2010, that DISARMAMENT BEGINS AT HOME. A rogue group of seventeen managed to walk with permission past the security blockade set up for the vigil to the site of plutonium pit manufacturing, the Chemical & Metallurgy Research (CRW) building, where we circled on the sidewalk and prayed the Lord's Prayer for world peace and the never-use of the pits manufactured there or anywhere else.
Next year's gathering of the Pacific Life Community will be in San Francisco on March 3-5, 2011 with plans for a non-violent prayer vigil at the Lockheed plant nearby. Mark the date!
