Historical setting: 602 C.E. A cottage in the Vosges
Healing comes on summer winds. For me, my strength and wit are coming to me in pieces, sometimes with old familiar forms of comfort, sometimes in glimpses of new starts. Thank you, God.
Healing of spirit seems to be hovering around my oldest sons who are sorting hurts and apologies from terrors of brutality. They must make the hard choices from varieties of righteousness that are laid open before them. Have they simply been sheltered all their lives from cruelty? Is the only necessity for killing to gain food for our ‘superior species’? And now have they seen that, unlike the wolf or the lion, people hurt and kill for all kinds of reasons? Are these reasons always wrong for all people as I, a pacifist, believe? Or is there some version of righteous killing of people? Do enemies need to be annihilated, or sinners need to be punished? What is our duty to God’s righteousness?
They know well what I think, and I could simply say ‘because I know it is wrong to kill,’ they should accept my opinions and in that way show honor to this elder. I wish I could simply require them to live by my own values. But I know secondhand values only numb a person to nurturing their own sense of right and wrong. And they have seen with their own eyes the gruesome result of not returning fist for fist or slash of sword for the piercing of a spear. In terms of physical harm, pacifism must seem to them a dismal failure. What can I say?
So, they came to me with their woeful “sorry’s” that they intended only to smother my already dead body in filthy straw. They didn’t mean to lose sight of my lifeness. These errors are easily forgiven. Of course, I forgive them, God forgives them, and one day when they see it from another perspective, they can forgive themselves. But I, with this view from life and life again – and a soul continuing as we all are — know that a much more lasting and gnawing pain of conscience is the burden and the pain caused by taking another’s life. And when killing is simply to appease politics in a little king’s war, or for traditions of hatred, or simply for retaliation or flat-out fear, there is no physical hurt worthy of that spiritual pain.
Dear God may my sons have the clarity of mind to live as your love demands. Amen.
(Continues Tuesday, June 6)
Lazarus Ink 