Archive for the ‘literature classics’ Category

Beauty and the Tyrant

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Why bother with Arenas? A comment follows this quotation.

Quoting Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1993):

“At the [Cuban] National Library in 1969 Lezama [Lima] gave a reading of perhaps one of the most extraordinary essays of Cuban literature under the title ‘Confluences.’ It reaffirmed the creative force, the love of language, the struggle for an integrated image against all  those who opposed it. A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” p. 87

Arenas is not somebody conservative Christians typically read. He was a promiscuous gay activist in communist Cuba. His writings caught the acclaim of an international audience, and of Castro’s State Security, which hounded Arenas and imprisoned him in El Morro, a notorious lockup for murderers and the like.

Arenas was brutalized. Even after he escaped Cuba by slipping into Key West in the Mariel exodus in 1980, Castro’s agents sought to destroy him.

One night a mysterious blast, like a gunshot, shattered a glass of water in his apartment. Unfortunately, because he was debilitated due to AIDS, poverty, and the struggle to publish as an ostracized Cuban expatriate, he took this shattered glass as an omen, a metaphor of his life. The protective aura he had enjoyed from childhood abandoned him. He died.

He ended a letter published posthumously:  “I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p. 317)

Yet, I find some lessons from his memoir:

  • Faith and a living relationship with God make a difference. As tyranny hammered Arenas, he could have benefited from experiencing the unconditional love of God [not the stereotypical right-wing deity, however].
  • His commitment to Beauty, truth expressed through literature, and his refusal to use his gift to glorify the state, have transcendent value. Quakers speak about “that of God in everyone.” Arenas’s commitment to writing were “that of God” in him.
  • His experience of America as “a country without a soul,” a country tyrannized by “the power of money” is a legitimate warning. I know another America, where people’s love of God and one another is the primary power. But I believe Arenas’ experience is also true. I can’t read the Hebrew prophets, who condemn the rich for caring not at all about the poor, without recognizing parallels in the US today.

Other voices have sounded the warning, too. Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn addressed Harvard; he spoke about how human potential must be balanced by belief in a Supreme Being who gives value to human life and responsibility to human freedom. I also compare Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two figures iconic of America–but which will we ultimately choose to become?

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In Spirit and Truth

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I always get into what I’m reading. I’ve been wanting some biography, and happened on Before Night Falls through a book list. It’s a memoir of Reinaldo Arenas, Cuban poet, freedom fighter and gay activist.

Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.

Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.

Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.

His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.

In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.

Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.

He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.

He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.

In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.

I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.

There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.

C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.

Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.

O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen

 Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.

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Les Mis finished!

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

victor_hugo

Left: Victor Hugo

I just finished Les Miserables, 1260 pages in the Modern Library translation by Charles Wilbour.  If anyone has read the new translation published by the Vintage Classics, please comment.  I’d like to compare translations, because I’ve read that Wilbour’s was hurried.

I confess, after the death of Javert, I felt less motivated to read the remaining 100 pages.  So I speed read them.

You got to give me credit: I read all four chapters on the sewers of Paris.  Hugo, the patriot, wrote that the waste of the French was the best waste in the world.  I’m certainly glad to know that!

My guess is, however, that the sewers of Paris symbolize all the people discarded by society as waste, and other things as well.

The final 100 pages also reveal Hugo’s genius level insight into human nature (like the 1100 pages before them). Jean Valjean could not be free until he reconciled his own self-image as a convict with the reality of his saintly life.  Rejection by his son-in-law Marius paralleled his own self-rejection.

I recall a young Korean woman whom we met in Texas.  She had been rescued from a tormented life by a loving G.I. who married her and brought her to the States.  But she couldn’t accept his love or a happy life, because the scars of her suffering remained unhealed within.

Just as Javert could not accept Valjean’s transformation, Valjean himself could not— until he found acceptance in the hearts and the eyes of those he loved.

The incarnation means, I think, that God does many things through human beings.  When we accept people who feel unacceptable then they begin to feel accepted.  And by the way so do we.

More as I have the chance to reflect.

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The Moth and the Flame, a parable

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

 The following is from Les Miserables (Project Gutenburg) St. Denis, Bk 7, “Slang.” Hugo defends recording slang, which he calls the language of misery. Then, as is typical, after several pages I forced myself to read, I found this:

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another, there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,—that is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading, means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn without ceasing to fly,—therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer. The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in darkness.

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Lent is for “lencten”—lengthen what?

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

As, from outside, I endure the extreme misery of my friends, sometimes it gets too much. This week it did. I turned to Victor Hugo’s mythic novel Les Miserables, which I’ve never read, I don’t know, maybe as a way to transfigure the suffering I’ve gotten so close to it burns like arctic iron.

I’m not good at keeping other people’s suffering separate from my own, a flaw which doomed my career as a pastoral counselor, but may in the end save me as a human being.

So, rather than writing a post on the beginning of Lent as part of our CCBlogs community exercise, I’ve engulfed myself in 19th century France and the trials of Jean Valjean.

I’m also preparing my income taxes, and in two Bible study groups leading a close reading of the book of Revelation.

The last is my response to the huge interest in the Left Behind series. (I didn’t want to be left out!) A friend’s faith was awakened when she read the books and began looking up the biblical prophecies.

I’ve taught Revelation four or five times over the past thirty years, usually in response to something like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great, for instance.

My mind is not systematic, but intuitive-poetic, so it’s hard for me to snip verses from here and there and paste up an end times chronology. So many have been wrong! I’m sure I’d be, as well, if I tried.

I prefer to take the whole book—Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation—study its message as a whole, and leave systematics to others.

So what’s all this got to do with Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent?

First, to get my view, you have to know I’ve had to undo a layer of anti-Catholic prejudice that I took in with mother’s milk. Ironic that my dad’s family had been Catholic before converting to Baptist, though Mom told me Dad, a Baptist preacher, was never baptized. I guess he wanted to play it safe, and keep his infant baptism credentials.

I never got any of his affection for the Church, only his objections to it. So I’ve had to unlearn a lot of stuff.

The value of Lent, for example.

Lent, from the Old English “lencten” or as we spell it today “lengthen,” a reference to the lengthening daylight of spring. In Lent the hours of light lengthen!

That’s a symbol I love. A whole lot better than Jeremiah’s sixth century lament,

Woe to us, for the day declines,
     the shadows of evening lengthen! Jer 6:4 (NRSV)

A time of reckoning had come. The enemies of Judah were massing, and soon would descend upon Jerusalem and Judah like a horde of destroying angels.

How about us? For our culture, which are lengthening: hours of darkness or hours of light?

Some Left Behind folks believe the doomsday clock is about to or has already begun to strike midnight. A submerged ice mountain has rent the hull, the ocean liner is going down.

 Abandon ship! Our job as Christians is to get everybody into the lifeboats.

 Lent, however, has a different meaning. It’s the light that is lengthening toward the full force of day. Life on this earth, by the breath of the Creator, is renewing. The voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

 There comes a moment in the second Lord of the Rings films. Sam, Frodo and Gollum stand on the edge of the Great City, which lies in ruins from the juggernaut of the flying Nazgul.

 ”What are we fighting for?” Frodo asks, exhausted from wrestling with his addiction to the ring.

 Gollum looks up. It is the question, the only one that matters.

 Sam says, “There’s some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”

 That’s the question we Christ followers also must answer. Is the message of Lent that all is dust and ashes? Or is the message this: that we need to examine our lives, recommit to our vows, and get on with the struggle to walk in newness of life, not just as individuals, but as a planet, not just for the world to come but for the good earth here and now?

 I believe it’s the second that’s true. Apologies to Tim LaHaye, but I’m not ready to jump ship just yet.

 In the 19th century Victor Hugo wrote:

Society must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

 His words are as true today as when he penned them.

 One of Isaiah’s disciples wrote the people of his time, those who had returned to Palestine from exile, only to wake up to a very hardscrabble morning after. Were their hopes a foamy draft of deception? Would they have been better off to stay in exile?

 Some turned to ritual, the rules of their fathers: just recite the prayers right, offer the right animal on the right altar exactly as God requires.

 No, Isaiah said, ritual has its place. But what God wants now and here is something else:

 Is not this the fast that I choose:
     to loose the bonds of injustice,
     to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
     and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
     and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
     and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
     and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
     the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Isaiah 58.6-8 NRSV

 Whether it’s evening or morning that’s lengthening may be up to us.

 The fastnesses of extremism far from here have demonstrated how deep the roots of hatred and terror grow in the rocky soil of poverty, ignorance, and neglect. It’s not Islam vs. Christianity at issue here, but light vs. darkness in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism and in all other religions.

 But, the arms of love are stronger. The reach of Light is infinite. John wrote, “God is light, God is love,” (1John 1.5; 4.16).

 Lent is God’s calling us, for the sake of this world, come what may, to live in love and in the light.

So let’s get a move on. As John Wayne (or was it Shakespeare) said, “We”re burning daylight.”

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We’ve kiss’d away kingdoms!

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

Part 1

It’s been awhile since I spent serious time with Shakespeare, which I find cleansing, rigorous—aerobic exercise for mind and spirit. So I recently tackled Antony and Cleopatra, reading and re-reading.

Then I hear the newsbyte that John Edwards has had an affair. Damn! He was talking about the poor, like no other presidential candidate.

Is this getting old, or what? Maybe if we can find a public official who hasn’t had an affair, he or she should get the headline.

Having read John 8, I’m not one to throw stones. But I’d like to understand what’s going on here. That’s why we read classics like Shakespeare, isn’t it, to understand the human condition?

So we begin. Married to Fulvia, later to Octavia, Mark Antony is having the time of his life—with Cleopatra. He says to her:

There’s not a minute of our lives should stretch / Without some pleasure now. 1.1.46-47

Sounds like a guy planning his retirement, doesn’t he?

At the same time, he recognizes that the affair is doing damage:

I must from this enchanting queen break off:
Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know,
My idleness doth hatch. 1.2.127-129

Of course, he doesn’t do it.

During the decisive battle at Actium, Cleopatra flees and, abandoning his forces, Antony follows her. His soldier Scarus says:

We’ve kiss’d away / Kingdoms 3.10.7-8

I never saw an action of such shame;
Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before
Did violate so itself. 3.10.22-24

Antony confesses,

…  I / Have lost my way forever. 3.11.3-4

He dismisses his soldiers, rejecting their arguments that they should stay with him. Realizing he has reduced himself to a thing, he says:

 Let that be left / Which leaves itself. 3.11.19-20 

He confronts Cleopatra with her total control over him:

 O’er my spirit
Thy full supremacy thou knew’st, and that
Thy beck might from the bidding of the gods
Command me. 3.11.59-61 

Just as a cloud “that’s dragonish, / a vapour sometime like a bear or lion,” vanishes before his eyes, he is disappearing:

Even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water. 4.14.11-13

Next, he calls on his servant Eros to kill him. Instead, Eros himself suicides. Antony fumbles, wounding himself but remaining alive for yet one more love scene with Cleopatra. Rather than being taken to Rome as a prisoner, Cleopatra has servants bring in vipers to bite her to death.

Shakespeare paints a fascinating, indepth portrait of persons who are poisonous for each other.

In Part 2, I’ll share my own reflections.

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From the tower looking out on the Sea

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

1008 pages!

I finished my semi-annual reading of Lord of the Rings.

Not the 130 pages of appendices. Not The Silmarillion. That book’s a little dense for me, or I’m too dense for it, maybe. I’ve read that Tolkien believed that names are the oldest element of language, slowest to change over time. So he packs in names, three to five for each person, place or thing.

But LOTR is one of those books that’s become part of me. I read one of Tom Shippey’s books on the background and buried meanings, which helped me untangle and identify many Christian elements. Since this was a time before Christ, they had to be hidden. But they are there.

For example, the dates, which Tolkien tracked meticulously. The Company sets out from Rivendell on December 25. Another famous Christian element is that elvin waybread lembas is parallel to the bread of the Eucharist.

Tolkien, along with Lewis, Joseph Campbell, and George Lucas, lead the way in recovering myth for our culture.

Myth is language about truth which can’t be put into words.

Oh, I know myth means made-up fable or legend; we think especially of Greek and Roman religious myths. Paul warns against them. I’m talking about language that transcends language, that breaks language like a chick breaks its shell.

Tolkien tells a wonderful parable. I’m not sure where: “Of Faerie Stories,” in Tree and Leaf or “the Monster and the Critics,” his ground-breaking essay on Beowulf which every biblical interpreter or critic would benefit from reading. Here’s the gist of the story:

Old Stones

An old farmer had a field. Some people bought it, and found some wonderful old stones on it. They were carved, some with images, others with letters or ancient runes.

The people became fascinated with the stones. They began to publish papers on the origins of the stones, and the meanings of the markings on them. A great debate rose up among archaeologists, geologists, paleontologists, and all the ologists there are about the meaning of the stones.

But they all forgot the most important thing.

The old farmer used the stones to build a tower. And he used to climb its steps and look out at the Sea.

A Look at the Stars

Near the climax of LOTR, as the Captains of the West, hopelessly outnumbered, press the attack on Mordor to distract the enemy’s Eye from Frodo’s approaching the Crack of Doom, Aragorn stands on the hill, surveying the debacle,

his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens

(LOTR, 1994, p. 927).

Here the external truth and beauty is internalized in the person of the king, and by them he reigns even before victory is won.

The book is about Aragorn growing into kingship. He moves from Strider, the ranger, to king, nowhere more regal than this moment.

Another star moment comes when Sam and Frodo are walking through Ithilien, toward the lair of Shelob, the monster spider. Sam looks up.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for awhile. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For, like a shaft clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

 (p. 901)

This passage gives me hope, like almost no other in the book. The Shadows of terrorism, and worse U.S. politics and militarism, are small passing things.

Vertical Meets Horizontal

If horizontal is the human plane, and vertical the God plane, then myth is the moment, like an in-breaking beam of light forming a cross, where God-human transcendent-immanent intersect.

Favorite Character

Faramir, Boromir’s brother, is my favorite character. I like his association with Ithilien, one of the most beautiful landscapes Tolkien creates. I love his courage, his willingness to butt heads with his tyrannical father. He fights but is not a soldier.

The extended version of the film attributes to Faramir a passage the book gives to Sam, when he comes near a dead enemy.

He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from home; and if he would not really rather stayed there in peace.

 (p. 646)

Of course, Sam with his loyalty, simplicity and goodness is a role model for us all.

 I wish Tolkien’s faith had been more explicit, I guess. I have mixed feelings. Think of his influence on world culture. How many Christians have had the same?

 

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When the heart is hard and parched

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

When the heart is hard and parched, come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides, shutting me out from beyond, come to me, God of silence, with Your peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner, break open the door, my God.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O Holy One, come with Your light and Your thunder.

The Heart of God: Prayers of Rabindranath Tagore, ed. Herbert Vetter (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 1997).

First Asian to win Nobel Prize for literature (1913), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is a national poet of India, an educator, lyricist, advocate of Indian liberation from British rule.

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Of the Ring in the road, chocolate and reading

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

I’m making good progress in LOTR. The orcs have Frodo in custody, Aragorn and the Dunedain have taken the paths of the dead, and the Rohirrim are about to ride. Sam reveals that Frodo bears the Ring to Faramir, Boromir’s younger brother and son of the Steward of Gondor, and (in the book) Faramir has no desire to take it for himself or his father, not if he found it lying on the road.

Inconsistent, as Tolkien’s critics charged? Not to me. Faramir is a pure soul; nothing in him is snared by false promises of power and domination. Temptation arises because something within answers the external call. “One is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it” James 1:14 (NRSV).

Scapegoating

We keep tripping over the dynamic of projection, blaming others for our sins. It’s a strategy as old as Adam and as contemporary as 2008 presidential politics. It’s Eve’s fault Adam ate the apple. It’s illegal aliens who are wrecking the U.S. economy. I’ve never met a little green Martian; as far as I know there are no laws against them.

Hooray for California

Oh, speaking of projection. Imagine:

Two young MTV-watching kids go to their preacher. “We want to get married, be true to each other, forsaking all others, till death do us part,” they say.

“No way,” says the preacher.

“How come?” they ask.

“Everybody knows, gays aren’t monogamous,” the preacher replies, “and this isn’t California.”

I promise on a stack of Bibles to read

Speaking of temptation. My reading queue is getting quite long. I’m including it also as a text widget as a kind of self-discipline. Currently it includes:

  • Anglo-Saxon Spirituality
  • Julian of Norwich (in the Classics of Western Spirituality series)
  • Selected Poems of Tagore
  • Prayers of Tagore, ed. Vetter
  • WordPress for Dummies
  • Not yet delivered: Ordeal of Love: C. F. Andrews and India, Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods

Reading is what I do, mostly. Without it, this chair I spend my days in would be a prison. And I have few temptations stronger than amazon.com in my repertoire.

What are they?

Never mind.

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Seeking a Myth of Peace

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

I’m doing my annual read of Lord of the Rings, a myth of war.

Soldiers of Peace?

As much as I love Tolkien, I realize

(1) he wrote when his city was being bombed by the Germans and his son was in the military.
(2) He was a veteran of World War I.
(3) He wrote from the Germanic tradition that glorifies the war hero, depicting Jesus as a hero who leaped onto the cross as to a battle.

For example, take these lines from Dream of the Rood, one of the oldest poems in English:

The young hero stripped himself–he, God Almighty–
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.

(ll. 39-41)

A Tradition Explolited

More than to Boromir, the elder brother, I’m drawn to Faramir, the younger brother, who longed for peace. He said:

War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.

LOTR, 1994, p. 656

In the past the desperate straits of war often called forth human response at its best. Civilians worked long hours, sacrificed for the common good. Soldiers gave their lives to defend home and loved ones, and ideals such as freedom. Today it’s still true some individuals offer their very best in time of war.

Politicians and corporations exploit this tradition of honor and valor.

Mass Destruction in a Bottle

Today is different. The capacity to destroy the earth lies within reach of small groups as well as nations. All the progress of science will be weighed against the development of weapons of mass destruction including weaponized gases and viruses, which can be transported in small bottles. The good accomplished by warfare will be obliterated along with everything else by its indiscriminate violence.

History will judge as a grave error the decision to treat the attack on the World Trade Center as an act of war rather than as a crime. Once we responded with violence, with our own WMD, we became the aggressors, the destroyers; the terrorists became defenders of their homes, their culture, their religion.

A Corporate Shell Game?

The war on Iraq is more about economics, oil, than ideals. It’s about the military-industrial complex. It would be interesting to analyze corporate bottom lines in relation to the cost of war and so-called aid to Iraq, the development of its infrastructure, schools, hospitals. I believe the incredible sums of our children’s and grandchildren’s money we are spending are chiefly going to corporations.

I also keep asking who benefits from keeping the world’s second largest oil reserve off-line?

Is Violence a Vestige?

Violence is a vestige of our evolutionary past. Dictionary.com defines “vestige” as:

a degenerate or imperfectly developed organ or structure that has little or no utility, but that in an earlier stage of the individual or in preceding evolutionary forms of the organism performed a useful function.

Viewing footage of sheep or rhinos or other male animals rutting, competing for the right to mate, you see that violence once served to select out the healthiest, strongest, and most adept individuals to contribute to the gene pool of the species. But we humans don’t determine individual rights based on brute force. (At least, most of us don’t.)

The Courage of a Non-Violent Future

It takes more courage to put down your weapon and fight using non-violent resistance. Yet Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. both demonstrated that non-violence is more persuasive than any weapon. Non-violent resistance is not passive, it is not weak. It takes all the courage, wit, and will humans can muster.

In the coming Presidential election, Americans face a daunting choice. John McCain stands in the tradition of military force. He is honorable, though his temper could have deadly consequences if it had the world’s strongest military at his command.

Barack Obama represents the future. Much of the world identifies with him. He would be the first person of color to hold the office of President. But, more important, he voted against the war. He can demonstrate to the world that this war is not the American people’s war, but the war of a business and political elite, perhaps even the war of America’s enemies seeking to run the U.S. financially into the ground.

Not a bad strategy. You explode an IED that cost a few hundred dollars. Americans respond with weapons that cost tens of millions each. Before long, that amounts to quite a tab.

And even one life (on any side) is one too many.

A New Species?

Jesus never fought in war. His saying about bringing not peace but a sword cannot be used to justify war.

I believe that, in Jesus (yes, uniquely Son of God) and a few others, a new species is evolving, whom I call Homo spiritus, a species whose strength lies in the spiritual capacity to love and be loved, especially in the sense of agape love, and especially in the case of loving those whom it’s not easy or “natural” to love.

We have reached a turning point in human history, in fact in the history of all life on the planet. We will either learn to live together in peace, mutual respect, and cooperation, solving together the immense problems that we face, or we will die.

Unlike the dinosaurs, we still have a choice.

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