Preferring Death over War

"A warlike people who think life is not worth living if one cannot bear arms. They prefer death to peace, others prefer death to war." - Blaise Pascal

Will historians judge America as a nation which "prefers death to peace?" I cannot help but think that they will. It is time we admit that the other nations judge us correctly -- we are a militant people who take delight in fighting our "splendid little wars."

I, for one, prefer death to war. My rationale for such a stance is rooted in the resurrection. When I see my life as a vapor, a mist and look ahead to the day when the lion and the lamb will lay down beside one another, I renounce violence in all of its forms and prefer suffering over inflicting pain on the Other.

America, you ask me to make you a god, to swear my allegiance to you and your violent ways. You demand that I demonize my enemy and desensitize my conscience. You mask the destruction of innocent children as "collateral damage." You insist on another nation's "freedom" at gunpoint. You ask me to deny my Master who taught me that death is preferable to war. You ask me to take the life of one who bears the image of our maker and call it "patriotism." You idolize those who participate in such violence as "heroes."

Well, I will not play your game. I will not allow you to define my values. I serve a different God. I will not pledge allegiance to your flag; I will pledge my allegiance to the Lamb Who Was Slain -- the One who moves the stars in the skies and makes the mountains quake.

I pledge my allegiance to unconditional, eternal shalom which was from the beginning and shall be forevermore -- the love within the Trinity which never coerces, never destroys, and always invites.

Ethics of Habit

I'm reading an excellent book recommended to be by a former professor and friend. It is called "Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics." In it, Samuel Wells argues, among other things, that virtue is first and foremost not a matter of learning to follow "the rules," but of inhabiting a story and learning to live in consistency with that story. Christian ethics are to be completely unique from the ethics of the world because we inhabit a narrative which is taught and guarded by the church alone.

In order to learn to inhabit the story properly, we must undergo training just as any athlete or solder or academic must go through training in order to excel at their objective. This training is long, slow, and arduous; it takes decades, not minutes. To illustrate this Wells shares this story:

"One day in the late 1950's, in an Edinburgh hospital, a child died tragically on an operating table. Later that week, two friends were talking over the sad events. One of the friends expressed sympathy for the surgeon involved, since he had expected an unexpected complication. The other, a colleague of the surgeon, strongly disagreed, in these words:

I think the man is to blame. If anybody had handed me ether instead of chloroform I would have known from the weight that it was the wrong thing. You see, I know the man well. We were students together at Aberdeen, and he could have become one of the finest surgeons in Europe if only he had given his mind to it. But he didn't. He was more interested in golf. So he just used to do enough work to pass his examinations and no more. And that is how he has lived his life -- just enough to get through, but no more; so he has never picked up those seemingly peripheral bits of knowledge that can one day be crucial. The other day in that theater a bit of "peripheral" knowledge was crucial and he didn't have it. But it wasn't the other day that he failed -- it was thirty-nine years ago, when he only gave himself half-heartedly to medicine."

I think this is a profound observation about what it means to live a moral life. It is not about making heroic decisions in the heat of the moment. It is not about figuring out what would be the right thing to do in some hypothetical situation in which two conflicting goods or evils must be weighed. Living the moral life is becoming a certain sort of person out of which moral actions will naturally flow without much thought. It is about establishing habits during the seemingly mundane moments of life -- changing diapers, cooking, cleaning, working, walking, talking -- which form us into a person who can inhabit the story properly.

I confess I have forgotten this. I've lived as though I'm in a sprint instead of a marathon. I want to make this day count.

Saving Words

The Lord has rearranged my life this week. I hit bottom and was in the pit. I couldn't look up anymore and felt overwhelmed. But, thank God, I saw a little Episcopalian chapel, walked in, and prayed the evening prayers with the two priests who were there. As we prayed, I was struck by two verses which have now come to control me:

Psalm 27:13-14 Yet I am confident that I will see the LORD's goodness while I am here in the land of the living. Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.

I have no profound theological insight for my blog at this point. I have nothing to offer at all. Except I wish to give witness to the fact that ancient words still speak and that God knows what we need to hear and when we need to hear it. I'm thankful for these simple words which I cling to like a life raft in the middle of the stormy sea.