Elmer Maas died during the Alantic Life Community retreat in Voluntown, Connecticut on May 8, 2005

Come, let us go up to the mountain of God. ,
to the house of Jacob

A Memory of Elmer

by Anne Montgomery

During the night of May 7-8, Elmer Maas, in the 70th year of his life, heard and answered this call after a life living and sharing the Word of nonviolent love. The civil rights marches of the 60's taught him the price that the powerless pay for freedom and justice.  He never turned back from that struggle which led him from the security of college teaching to part-time jobs and fulltime peace work. The short list of involvements included the Peoples' Voice Cafe in New York City , the War Resisters League, the Kairos and Atlantic Life Communities, and, at the heart of everything, the movement to realize Isaiah's command to beat swords into plowshares.

In 1980, with 7 others, Elmer enfleshed this command in the first Plowshares action and for 25 years either participated in or facilitated most of those that followed.  He understood that the threat and actual use of nuclear weapons represented the determination to use any degree of violence to obtain political and economic control of the earth's resources for the powerful.  He also understood nonviolent resistance as the grassroots community building and the simplicity of life at the roots of the Gospel message. 

The "Little Professor" was a remarkable combination of humanist scholar and jailbird with the awesome ability to clarify the historical relationships of religion, philosophy, art, music, and, of course, PLOWSHARES. He could return from deadly court scenes to regale us with his musical compositions like "The Jailhouse Blues" or more classical offerings flowing from his mother's treasured piano.  The legacy Elmer wanted to leave all peacemakers was his "curriculum:" a project growing out of his integrated charts, supplemented by hundreds of books, files, tapes, videos overflowing an apartment also always open to visitors.

He envisioned 7 years of seminars, and we worried about his health as he struggled to transform his charts into workable classes.

Elmer , your curriculum is yourself, your work completed, integrated on the mountain of vision. Your legacy is your great and loving and humble heart. You always worked behind the scenes, tireless even when exhausted, waiting outside a police precinct to be certain everyone was released. All of us will share memories. Mine range from a night struggle through polluted waters to a Trident submarine to the easy task of luring Elmer to the "Met" to relax and explain all the cultural connections of a renaisance painting. We will use your charts with gratitude, but most of all we will try to struggle up  the mountain of nonviolent love, "that God may teach us God's ways and that we may walk in God's paths," beat the swords of violence into plowshares and learn war no more.