War is a way of declaring the absence of insight.
It is despair writ large. War is each murder and each greed lust ambition power taken to full height. It is deception and deviation as twin celebrities posing full face photos for mass consumption. Artifice as ascriptive achievement.
War is the failure of imagination to see the true relationship of me to myself, you to yourself, earth to ever-present-originator.
The God
Is near, and hard
to grasp.
But where there is
danger,
A rescuing
element grows
as well
— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLEIN (-- Epigraph, in Tomas Halik’s Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty)
It is memorial day in this morally ravaged country. The dead lay silent in their ground. On town streets bands and cars and marching children put a face on helpless celebration of sorrow for the things done, lives lost, souls and psyches stunned and devastated.
People sometimes come to a confessor, at least to the confessor whose confession this book is, in situations in which their entire “religious system”— their thinking, their experience , and their behavior— is in a greater or lesser state of crisis. They feel themselves to be in a “blind alley” and are often unaware whether it happened as the result of some more or less conscious or self-confessed moral failing or “sin,” or whether it is to do with some other changes in their personal life and relationships , or whether they have only now realized the outcome of some long and unperceived process during which their faith dwindled and guttered out. Sometimes they feel a void, because in spite of their sincere endeavors and often long years of spiritual search they have not found a sufficiently convincing answer in the places they have looked so far, or what had so far been their spiritual home has started to seem constricted or spurious. Despite the uniqueness of individual human stories, after years of practice as a confessor one discovers certain recurrent themes. And that is the second aspect of the confessor’s experience to which this book seeks to provide a testimony. Through the multitude of individual confessions, which are protected, as has been said, by the seal of absolute discretion, the confessor comes into contact with something that is more general and common to all, something that lies beneath the surface of individual lives and belongs to a kind of “hidden face of the times,” to their “inner turning.”
(--Halik, Tomas (2012-01-10). Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, Kindle Locations 125-135).Will we relent? Change our mind? Come to senses? See what is real and true?
One can hope.
Without optimism.
Hope.
