Thinking Anew: This is indeed a terrible Lent

This is a terrible Lent.

Wars rage throughout the world, and the war in Israel/Palestine hurtles onwards – although the death toll doesn’t even make the headlines any more.

War is vile, and it is always the poor who pay the highest price. There are no winners in war because, as Jesus warned, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world if it means losing their own soul?” In the words of Diana Butler Bass, “War is a sin. War is evil. And yet it continues. War is one of the rare things in human history that doesn’t vary. It is what humans do. Since before recorded time. Through the centuries. Now. You might say that our inhumanity to others is a sobering characteristic of being human.”

I was painfully struck by a war memorial some years ago in St Conan’s Kirk on the banks of Loch Awe in Scotland. It is to a young soldier called Ian Alastair Campbell who died in the Boer war in 1899 – “mortally wounded while giving water to a wounded foe”. I can hardly bear the spotlight this casts on the wretched absurdity of war. It was the task of Ian to kill his enemy. Yet as he allowed himself to glimpse his enemy as a fellow human being, he found himself needing to give his enemy a drink, because his enemy thirsted. Behaving any differently would have meant violating his own soul.

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Our freedom as human beings is bound up with refusing to cross our consciences. If our Christian formation truly includes the injunction by Jesus to love our enemies, war should always cross our conscience. Yet somehow it doesn’t. It becomes a necessary evil, or the lesser evil, or the ugly means to a better end or – bizarrely – “just” or “holy”.

People are prepared to suffer and sacrifice and show immense courage in the cause of war

Conscientious objectors to war suffer enormous penalties for their stand, sometimes for the rest of their lives. It is no coward’s way out, if anything, it requires greater courage. Gandhi remarked, “In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.” Refusing to engage in violence is not an accommodation of oppression or evil – in fact, Gandhi made it clear that if the choice was between violence or cowardice, the better choice would be violence. Martin Luther King agreed: “As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse, and that’s cowardice.”

Yet evil is real, and needs to be resisted. On the cross, Jesus showed us another way. He defeated the evil forces unleashed upon him by sacrificing himself for the love of the world, by giving up his life for his friends and his enemies. For the first three centuries of the life of the church, it was taken for granted that a Christian was not to bear arms or engage in violence, and there has always remained a marginalised radical church witness of non-violence down the centuries, like a golden thread.

When Christianity became the state religion of Rome and the empire was baptised (as it were), the church resumed the myth that violence can be redemptive. We think of the centuries of hatred and persecution of the Jews championed by the church: the pogroms, the blood libels, the othering, the ghettos, the forbidding of Jews to own land. We think of the “Holy” Wars of the Middle Ages – pilgrim knights with Christian crosses on their shields, crusading to the Holy Land to kill the “infidel” and gain a guaranteed place in heaven.

People are prepared to suffer and sacrifice and show immense courage in the cause of war. When the same collective willingness to sacrifice and suffer for the sake of others is offered on the path of non-violent resistance to evil, mountains have been moved.

Dorothy Day, absolutely committed to costly non-violence but also someone who deeply loved and was faithful to the Roman Catholic church, offered sensible and realistic advice: “One must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.”

Everybody who has been killed in war was somebody’s everything.

This is indeed a terrible, terrible Lent.