The Light of Soul-Force: Remembering Veronica Pelicaric

“Friends, we have sad news to share. On Monday, our beloved friend Veronica Pelicaric passed away. Her passing was peaceful, surrounded by love and with friends at her side. She had been navigating cancer for several years. Veronica carried this quietly as she continued to beam out her radiance, wisdom, and teachings every step of the way.

Veronica Pelicaric passed away yesterday. Her passing was peaceful, surrounded by love and with friends at her side. She had been navigating cancer for several years. Veronica carried this quietly as she continued to beam out her radiance, wisdom, and teachings every step of the way.

Our hearts are full of love for her and aching. Veronica has been part of Pace e Bene for 30 years. She has trained thousands of people in nonviolence, in multiple languages, all over the globe. Veronica was the daily companion of thousands of people with her quote choices in This Nonviolent Life. She coauthored Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living, and the revised Engaging Nonviolence Study Guide. In the past two years alone, she created the wisdom-rich Soul of Nonviolence Podcast, initiated the joyously creative For Goodness Sake Music Festival, and shifted our nonviolence trainings into the digital age with online courses. This is just a sliver of Veronica’s magic. Ken Butigan has written this tribute to his friend’s extraordinary life. Veronica was brilliant, honest, joyous and feisty. She had an intuitive streak that has guided all of us through the years.

https://paceebene.org/soul-of-nonviolence-podcast

Veronica was raised in the Catholic tradition in Argentina. While in her thirties, she lived for two years in a monastery in Brazil. She has been a practitioner of Buddhist meditation for over thirty years and lives in a spiritual community in Montreal, Canada. She has a degree in Transpersonal Psychology and has been with Pace e Bene for over twenty years as a nonviolence trainer and educator including co-authoring our books, Engaging Nonviolence and Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living. She considers her work a concrete expression of spiritual practice.”

Ken Butigan, The Light of Soul-Force: Remembering Veronica Pelicaric

The letter came out of the blue.

Musing on the unknown Montreal address, I opened the envelope and found a note full of exuberance for From Violence to Wholeness, a nonviolence workbook I had published in 1996 at Pace e Bene. Now it was 1999, and two people I had never met were explaining that they had come across this text and liked it very much. But this was less a fan letter than a business proposal: would we give them permission to translate this volume into French, so they could get it out across Quebec?

I wrote back quickly, letting them know we would be very happy to have them do this—and then promptly forgot about it. After all, we regularly heard from people with all kinds of great ideas, including translating our books, which often came to nothing.

Exactly one year later, De la violence à la plenitude, Veronica Pelicaric and Martine Sauvageau’s translation, landed on my desk.

This was the beginning of Veronica’s long and powerful pilgrimage with Pace e Bene. Not long after completing that first book project, she was invited to join our small nonprofit, where she brought her deep wisdom, compassion, and longing for a more nonviolent world.

This week, our dear friend, colleague, and spiritual guide died in a Montreal hospital after a second bout with cancer over the past two years.

Though beset by this dreadful illness, Veronica made a conscious decision to live fully, carrying on with purpose and extravagant energy at Pace e Bene.

Despite the rigors of both her ebbing health and COVID-19, for the last two years Veronica poured her spirit and relentless persistence into 40 pandemic-induced online trainings, the daily wisdom of “This Nonviolent Life,” and 45 episodes of her dazzling podcast, “The Soul of Nonviolence.”

Over the past several weeks, the cancer accelerated and a steadily growing number of us, in person and in cyberspace, accompanied her in her final days.

HER JOURNEY

Veronica was born in Rome in 1946 to Croatian parents. She grew up in Argentina, living through its “Dirty War” in the 1970s and 1980s. She became a practicing Buddhist, joining an ashram in Brazil for two years and living for some time in India. She got a degree in psychology. Eventually she found her way to Canada.

After joining Pace e Bene, she traveled often to California to take the nonviolence trainings we offered. Eventually she became a trainer herself and crisscrossed the world building the capacity of many people to live the nonviolent life.

Hers were spiritually-infused programs, but always with an eye to preparing change-agents to build a more just and peaceful world. She led workshops in Venezuela that brought diametrically opposed camps of Chavistas and Anti-Chavistas together to learn how to resolve their differences. She joined Laura Slattery and Leonardo Vilchis in the war zones of Colombia during the civil war, training participants who traveled many hours and crossed numerous military roadblocks to get there. (Veronica reported hardly sleeping one night with the nearby gunfire.) She led trainings in Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and Southern Mexico, including many programs in Oaxaca, where she worked with local movements struggling against multi-national corporations with their egregious labor practices and the destruction of the land. In addition to other trainings in Peru, Britain and the Netherlands, she led many workshops over the years in her homeland, Argentina.

She and I were part of the launch of the Nonviolent Peaceforce in Faridabad, India, near Delhi, in 2002, and in 2005, Veronica, Laura, Ken Preston and I were invited by Brendan McKeague and his colleagues to help initiate Pace e Bene Australia, which continues today. We spent an exhilarating week with our new friends, including Carole Powell and Gill Burrows, at a retreat center outside Melbourne, going deeply into the dynamics of nonviolent change, then we headed out to different parts of the country to lead trainings. For five years she and I joined Ken Preston in leading Pace e Bene’s year-long training program. She was part of the 2019 Pace e Bene Assisi Pilgrimage team, joining thirty participants walking in the footsteps of St. Francis and St. Clare as we celebrated Pace e Bene’s thirtieth anniversary.

Over the years Veronica trained with many co-facilitators in many contexts, including Dr. Kit Evans-Ford, Janet Chisolm, L.R. Berger, Suellen Semekoski, Lisa Haufschild, Jonathan Relucio, Joi Morton-Wiley, Robert Ferrrell, Julia Occhiogrosso, Adam Vogel, and Nina Koevoets. Her recent online training duties were shared with several facilitators, though most especially with Rivera Sun, who has been Veronica’s persistent partner in the sacred process of inviting people from many walks of life to unleash the power of change.

HER MAGIC

Veronica brought a shaman’s touch to her work, helping us to look deeply into the realities we confront, while also tapping the power we all possess for metamorphosis. For her, change required tactics, but in the end, it needed more than this, including intangible poetics, emotional intelligence, and a spiritual heft.

We can glimpse these elements in the pithy, mostly two or three word titles of the podcast episodes she produced weekly since last March. Here are a few of them:

Silence changes us.

Pain for the world.

Anguish of the soul. 

Open breathing space. Embrace conflict.

Listen. Know their story. Each other’s magnitude.

A path with heart. North star of healing. Repairing the human spirit.

Finding your task. Courage is the key.  Keep creating.

The root of the matter. Truth and transformation.

Guard your light.  Grounded in practicality.

Changing the structures. Noncooperation.

You are what you give.

Never give up. 

Wake up! 

Each of these episodes is a sparkling jewel, as you may see for yourself here. Veronica chooses a quotation—from Thich Nhat Hanh to Medea Benjamin, from Ursala Le Guin to Ranier Maria Rilke, from Gandhi to Joanna Macy—and then, very delicately, reveals it, honors it, revels in it, savors it. Most of all, she knits together with metaphysical gossamer thread the deep and abiding connection between the interior life of nonviolence and the gritty, seismic change that our suffering world requires.

It was this inextricable web of the personal, interpersonal and social-structural that was front-and-center for her, whether in shaping the 2020 online nonviolence conference (it was Veronica who insisted that we shift it to Zoom as the pandemic was beginning—she was spot on!) or in proposing the 2021 online music festival. This was also at the heart of her 2019 book written with Nina Koevoets, Engaging Nonviolence: Activating Nonviolent Change in Our Lives and Our World. In these and many programs and formats, it was always about envisioning the indissoluble interconnectedness of “soul” and “strategy.”

HER LIGHT: SOUL-FORCE

St. Lucy’s Day—December 13—was Veronica’s birthday. She delighted in the fact that she was linked with this 4th century saint, who has been celebrated down through the centuries with a “festival of light,” dispelling the darkness of winter. Veronica was an inexorable light-bearer, forever bent on the trail of enlightenment and the radiance of soul-force.

In the midst of our teeming culture of global violence and injustice, it makes sense that there is a growing nonviolence lineage. Veronica stands firmly in that tradition. She was ceaselessly looking for ways to shine the light of nonviolent transformation onto the often-murky path ahead, and inviting so many others to do the same.

We are grateful for the plenitude of her life—and her light.

Pace e Bene is planning a virtual gathering to celebrate and remember Veronica. We will share more about that and other arrangements as we know more. Please light a candle for our beloved friend and send prayers (in all of your many faith traditions, all of which Veronica affirmed and delighted in) to her spirit and to her family and friends.

Thank you for your compassion and patience with all of us at Pace e Bene this week. As you can imagine, we feel like we are walking around with a hole in our hearts.

With grief, and gratitude for the gifts Veronica showered us all with,
Rivera, Ken, Ryan, Erin, and all of us at Pace e Bene

Despite the rigors of both her ebbing health and COVID-19, for the last two years Veronica poured her spirit and relentless persistence into 40 pandemic-induced online trainings, the daily wisdom of “This Nonviolent Life,” and 45 episodes of her dazzling podcast, “The Soul of Nonviolence.”