by your WebWeaver, Doug King

This was first published in the Spring 2007 issue of Network News, pages 3-4.

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A few weeks ago I deeply enjoyed a five-day retreat at a Trappist monastery near Atlanta. Five days with a dozen men on retreat, 10 of them Presbyterian ministers. Five days mostly in silence, except for the times of worship (beginning at 4:00 am) and times of work alongside the monks (including picking up trash along the road outside the monastery, and cleaning the nursery where the monks grow bonsai trees to sell). It was a good time.

I realized how much the silence meant when, riding back to Atlanta with three others, we very soon engaged in the same tired arguments: “Our church is losing members because we’re compromising with the culture.” “But we need to be faithful to Jesus’ love for all people.” “But we can’t let these differences split our church.” I began thinking a rule of silence for Presbyterian clergy might not be a bad thing.

But I returned home ready to say something for this issue of Network News. Our Witherspoon board meeting in San Jose a few weeks ago decided that this issue should focus on something we have not dealt with recently, but that still demands attention – and action: the war in Iraq. We’ve gathered a number of pieces on the subject that we hope you’ll find helpful, but I’d like to look at the issue of war from a slightly different angle.

To quote a line from one of the hippy types during the activist ’60s (was it Timothy Leary?), we might revise the old line “Don’t just stand there, do something!” – “Don’t just do something; stand there.”

I wandered into this line of thought from one of the books I was reading at the monastery, A Path with Heart, by Jack Kornfield. He writes as a teacher of Buddhist meditation, to introduce that practice to people with little background in meditation. He calls his second chapter “Stopping the War,” by which he means the war that rages within each of us. He quotes his teacher, Achaan Chah, as describing that inner battle thus:

We human beings are constantly in combat, at war to escape the fact of being so limited, limited by so many circumstances we cannot control. But instead of escaping, we continue to create suffering, waging war with good, waging war with evil, waging war with what is too small, waging war with what is too big, waging war with what is too short or too long, or right or wrong, courageously carrying on the battle.¹

Because we cannot accept the realities of life, including our insecurity and pain and loss and death, we are constantly struggling to protect ourselves from them, and we must defend ourselves against them – and the people who confront us with them daily – as our enemies.

This insight came to me in a fresh way, perhaps because it came through a Buddhist way of inhabiting the world. But it is nothing really new to those of us who are grounded in the Christian tradition. Paul certainly was painfully aware of this war, as he wrote in Romans 7:21-24:

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

But what does all this have to do with America’s current adventures in Iraq and elsewhere? Two things, I think:
First, this reminds us that the roots of this war (and maybe of all wars) are spiritual. We are in this war because of fear of those who are different from us, fear of being attacked and hurt again, fear of a world that is so different from the one we thought we knew. And it appears that those on the other side of the conflict, militant Muslims, are motivated by the same kinds of fears.

Our leaders, as well as the leaders on the other side, have exploited those fears brilliantly for their own purposes, perhaps to consolidate and expand their power, to enrich themselves and their friends, to make a name for themselves as defenders of democracy or freedom or Islamic purity or ... you can fill in whatever else should go in this long, long list.

We cannot work effectively against our nation’s culture of violence unless we understand the deep spiritual sources from which it draws its power.

But also we need to draw on the deep springs of peace to rein in the wars within ourselves, and to find the strength for the long, long struggle to transform our culture into one of peace, shalom, for all. Until we confront the deep conflicts within ourselves and in our cultures and religions and nations – what Paul called principalities and powers – we won’t move far toward true peace.

Certainly there’s a danger that such a focus might lead us to withdraw from the hard struggles in the political arena, but many great campaigners for peace have known they had to start there. Mahatma Gandhi once said:

I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better, is the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, is far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi. With him I seem to have very little influence.²

If the Witherspoon Society has a fault, it may be that we tend to emphasize head and hands over heart in our life as an organization, and many of us may do the same as individuals. We are deeply committed to study and reflection, and to action, but we may neglect the spiritual and emotional depths of our own lives. A number of people – from both left and right – have commented on one of the weaknesses of the Rev. Jerry Falwell as his subordinating his evangelical faith community to the political right wing in this country. I wonder whether we do the same thing, and so undermine our own witness for peace and justice, both in our Presbyterian Church and in our society as a whole.

So here’s an invitation to all you Witherspooners: Let’s talk about the spiritual roots of this war, and let’s deal with the spiritual wars within each of us, and experiment with ways to move toward peace, to use a title of a great book written during World War II by the Quaker scholar Douglas Steere, by “beginning from within.” ³

Let's restore to our lives, and even to the life of our church, the kind of balance that the 4H clubs seek, among head, heart and hands – and so take some steps toward the fourth “H” of health, which our Biblical traditional teaches us is really health for persons, for communities, for nations and the world: shalom.
 

NOTES

^1.  Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart: A Guide through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (New York: Bantam, 1993), p. 23.

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