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.
