How to be a Hero in a World Made for War

Today, the headlines I read are soaked in sorrow.

• A plane shot out of the sky, stopping the heartbeats of 298 souls.
• A four-year-old boy tossed from a  car to his death.
• New death toll from the latest action in Gaza: +500.
• A famous couple in the middle of a divorce, locked in a fierce, ugly battle over their $2 billion estate.

Someone, somewhere is always fighting.  And they’re fighting for things that they truly believe in.  They’re defending their truth which can seem almost noble – indeed, it can even be noble.  But the longer I live, the more reluctant I am to accept that we were meant to live like this. This scratching and clawing and making them pay and getting even is not the us we were born to be.  We can win fights by flexing our muscles and firing our missiles, but we will never win satisfaction that way.  And I wonder: If we were willing to stop pummeling each other, how much time, energy, intelligence and money could be rerouted to the fight against cancer and ALS and child poverty and clean water and homelessness and purposelessness.  What if we could divert this frantic need-to-win and funnel it instead toward a fervent need-to-build? Maybe then the  restless creative energy we use for retribution could be focused on developing actual solutions to the atrocities that have plagued humanity for far too long.

I love this quote by Thomas Merton.  It’s filling some broken places in my war-weary soul:

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war.  It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. -Thomas Merton

Fidelity to the truth. I want to live lashed to the altar of that sentence; stuck-like-glue to the truth that those who view peace as something worth fighting for are the happiest heroes of all.

With hope,

Bo