Tread lightly on the things of earth

On Friday I read the news and discussion about an entire Marine squad wiped out in Iraq (linked article) —

In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

Every member of the squad — one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment — had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon … had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.

As I read, I was thinking along two threads:

• How many U.S. parents connect the dots between each of these Marines and “could be my child”?

  I do, automatically, and they’re not my kids. How can anyone not connect the dots? Each of these Marines is somebody’s child, each one wounded and each one dead an inconsolable loss to their parents, children, and families.

  Expanding outward, tragedy describes every human casualty of this war, U.S., Iraqi, or otherwise. Why is my child maimed? Why is my child dead? Is the answer crystal clear? Is the answer true? Or is the answer obscured by an all-rosey, all-the-time corporate media whose owners profit from our collective ignorance?

  As Will Pitt observes,

  The corporate media does not report the news anymore. They create consensus, they manufacture the common fictions under which we are expected to live.

• How torn I am between the temptation to give up altogether (or at least go into long-term timeout) and the determination to continue to fight against the Enemy who’s hijacked many of our politicians and churches lock, stock, and barrel.
  

In a comment Kimberley catches part of what I’m feeling:

I can’t stand living in a society this perverse …

 … our body politic is so strung out on rhetorical dope and shitty spiritual and civic educations to give a good damn about anything they can’t kick in the chin and feel superior to …

My problem is I can’t stand being identified with people, especially ones called Christian, who are deliberately ignorant, who lack foresight, exercise no empathy, and understand little about the faith and the Lord they profess to serve. This self-righteous evil we Christians do makes me ferociously angry.

<up onto soapbox>
“Being saved” is not a checkbox next to your name that secures you the right to do whatever the hell you want from then on. “Being saved” is a state of heartchange that manifests day in and day out in your interactions with your world that at least resemble those of Jesus with his world. Put another way, the fact of the heartchange is visible in the fruit you’re bearing, as Jesus puts it. If the fruit doesn’t resemble that attributed to the working of the Spirit, then the heartchange didn’t take or has come undone:

The fruit of the [Holy] Spirit [the work which His presence within accomplishes] is love, joy (gladness), peace, patience (an even temper, forbearance), kindness, goodness (benevolence), faithfulness, gentleness (meekness, humility), [and] self-control (self-restraint, continence).  —Galatians 5:16-26, AMP

Thus I believe that “being saved” must happen again and again and again. (And at this moment — visible even in these words — I am Exhibit A of someone needing fresh salvation.)

Because in the end, just as at the end of Narnia when the peoples of Narnia stream out thru the stable door past Aslan, some turning toward him and some turning away, it’s all about our willingness to live in God’s presence. Aslan consults no checklist of saved vs. unsaved; he lets each individual proceed in the direction of his or her own choosing.

Those who’ve chosen to live under a rock, in the darkness, have a hard time choosing to start living in close proximity with the sun. And most don’t. That’s not judgment so much as God-given freedom to choose at every moment of our lives, here and hereafter, whom we will serve.

Yes, I’m greatly influenced by C.S. Lewis. In particular by his wonderful book The Great Divorce, in which every inhabitant of hell is free every day to take a bus ride to heaven — and stay there as a permanent resident if they want to. But most don’t. This strikes me as real beyond real, just as Lewis’ narrator-from-hell found Heaven to be.

</off soapbox, mostly>

Later …

I see that Melanie, a DC-area Catholic lay spiritual director [now Anglican] whom I respect, assesses the situation less angrily and more productively:

Contemporary evangelicals are the spiritual heirs of the early Puritans, enforcing a very spartan moral code and excluding everyone else from their version of salvation. When religion becomes a force for division, rather than for seeking the heart’s deepest longings in a communal setting, it becomes one of the “powers and principalities” that the Bible decries.

As long as I’m outta pew, I think I’d do well to revisit Walter Wink. He shaped my thinking during the 1990s almost as much as Lewis with his, uh, powerful work on naming, unmasking, and engaging these powers Melanie mentions. I remember Wink’s compelling, level-headed thinking reminding me then that hope — and fruitful engagement — remains possible in the face of onslaught.

And oh, how I need reminding now: my own thinking is currently so off-level my head’s binging “Tilt!” The possibility for fruitful engagement with these thuggish powers seems as far from me now as feeling healthy did when I was in the thick of the flu last month. But the flu passed. And this imminent “screw you guys, I’m goin’ home” attitude of mine will, too. Then I’ll be back.

But not, I expect, anytime soon.

Next day:

Expanding on Will’s observation above that the media “manufacture[s] the common fictions under which we are expected to live,” I see that Bill Moyers, a truth-telling hero of a journalist, isn’t giving up in the face of onslaught; he’s engaging these powers head on. Bravo.

In a speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis (transcript, audio, video links), Bill says —

“The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets,” [Moyers] explained. “That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.” …

“An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical,” Moyers said. “And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.”

The point is made; the example is set: Out of my sadsack, and once more into my breeches to rejoin the fight. Yes.