Thoughts this Week

       Thoughts This Week

By Dan McDonald

 

            My life has often revolved around thoughts. I once was reliably Conservative. I think I felt I needed to have an unassailable world view to secure my place in the world. But then came so many varied thoughts. My unassailable world view became like the story of the Dutch boy putting his finger in the hole of the dike holding back the sea. As more and more leaks occurred in the dike the thought occurred that my project of defending my unassailable walls was failing. Today I don’t know if I am a Conservative, a Liberal, a Progressive, or just a confused soul caught up in the storms of life that I can neither control nor in reality explain. Shakespeare is profound. Lady Macbeth intrigues me, now sometimes I mumble to myself “out damn thoughts.”

            We live in a complex world. Our culture is filled with tension and diversity, with that diversity of others often treated as wholly problematic. I am tempted in my simple moments to imagine I have this complex world figured out. When I come to my senses I realize that Ecclesiastes’ understanding of reality is that the wise man learned through his pursuit of a series of pipe dreams to understand that to “fear (is that reverence?) God and keep his commandments – was all upon which he could rely. Beyond this we tend towards some escape valve of vanity. In my life journey of thoughts I have learned that I am not an honest person regarding what the truth is. Whether I was being my Conservative, my radical, my Liberal, my Progressive, or my Cynical expression of my self – there were always those statements from those people with whom I disagreed that I feared because I always knew I had no actual reliable reason from my perspective to be able to actually answer their concern. Whatever my little “o” orthodoxy I held at the moment, I was the kid putting his fingers in the dike to stop the leaking.

            This week I thought a lot about the Florida shooting. The Onion described how the only nation where this happens on a regular basis was struggling with how there were no answers for this dilemma. I suppose our culture is at points unique; both for good and ill. When something like a school shooting takes place many describe the situation much like a leaking roof. In the old Ma and Pa Kettle movies there was a running gag about how Ma Kettle wanted Pa Kettle to fix the roof. Pa Kettle described his dilemma. It wasn’t wise to fix the roof when it was raining, and it didn’t need fixing when the sun was shining. That seems to be the stock answer Conservatives have for gun violence.

            I thought this week about the prophetic hope we are given which describes how swords will be beaten into ploughshares. I wondered if that prophetic hope is something which we are idly to wait for, since it is out of our abilities to bring such an ideal world into being. Or is this like so many of God’s desires for humanity, something for us to discover how we are to participate in the vision becoming reality. What will it take for humankind to learn to make war no more? I began this process of questioning this week imagining the question like some cliché or tautology able to straighten everything else with the repeating of a favored mantra. But I am more of a mystic than a systematic theologian. My mystical view of the world tells me that there is mystery both in godliness and in ungodliness that defies our logic or our capacity to explain rationally either our hope of establishing righteousness or our desire to eliminate ungodliness. That truth of mystery is a reality even in our own attempts to develop personal virtues or do away with personal vices. There is incredible complexity in human behavior, and learning to make war no more is far more difficult than the simple phrase offers its wisdom to our ears.

            Beating our swords will require us to believe that the adoption of tools to cultivate goodness for ourselves and others is preferable to creating tools to defend us from those we fear. I must, hypocritically acknowledge that I still believe there is a necessity in a fallen world for building defenses against the perpetration of evil. Yet I know that every sword created to defend us from our fears is the creation of a weapon instead of a tool capable of cultivating goodness on behalf of my neighbors. I know that increasingly I must envision my life as meant to be a tool for a cultivation of goodness rather than a weapon for endless defenses from the perpetration of evil. I must believe increasingly that love conquers hate, and goodness and virtue is stronger than evil and vice. This must be a principle lived out by faith in the unseen. In the end I have no Conservative, Liberal, or Progressive answer. I have simply the echo of my wounded conscience asking me if I can invest more in plows than swords, more in the cultivation of love than endless defenses answering my fears.