Remembering Angels

As remembrance day comes each year, I remember my grandfather William, and also Einstein's statement that: "a problem cannot be solved using the same consciousness which created it."

William, see above, amazingly managed to survive the fighting in the Somme in WW1, the so-called 'war to end wars'.

His photo represents so many other soliders who (along with their families) heroically suffered and died, and still do so even today.

And yet William would also defend the rights of conscientious objectors, ironically telling one in particular to: 'stick to his guns.' The freedom to refuse to fight was one of the very freedoms which he was fighting for.

One of the very many abused WW1 objectors was shipped to France and kept in inhumane conditions which gave him dysentery before being brought before a military trial, where he was told that his papers were marked 'Death', and asked if he was going to continue to resist? 'Yes,' he said, 'Men are dying in agony in the trenches for the things that they believe in and I wouldn't be less than them.'



And as the cartoon above reminds us, humans only heroically die for their countries when other humans heroically kill for theirs.

The history of world conflict demonstrates that one man's terrorist is perceived by another man as a freedom fighter.

As our capacity for destruction grows, Einstein's quote suggests that if we wish to survive as a species, learning to inhabit other planets may not be enough.

Unless we can learn a different consciousness, the insects could outlive us on Mars too.

Non violence seems rare now, but there isn’t one early church Father who interprets Jesus as advocating anything but strict non-violence, and Christianity was a persecuted pacifist religion for hundreds of years before the Emperor Constantine adopted it as the official religion of a state built on military domination.

The sanction of the Roman Empire opened up huge areas of influence to Christianity.

But before this sanction, soldiers were not baptised. After it, only the baptised could be soldiers!

As the Professor of Patristics Andrew Louth recently put it on BBC Radio 4's 'In our time': “Christianity became the ideology of the empire, and that is something that Christians have not found easy to cope with. Christianity before Constantine was a largely pacific religion. There are lots of stories of Christians being persecuted because they refused to serve in the army. This changes dramatically in the 4th century, and the Church has to find some way of ending up blessing guns.”

Hence the just war tradition. A just war can only be fought to redress a wrong suffered, and force may not be used for economic gain. The cause must not be futile, and it is not just if disproportionate measures are required for success.

Somehow I am reminded again of the value of a faith which is not based upon an ideology. Apophasis is the knowledge that we do not know God by affirming what he is, but by subtracting what he is not.

So in Rowan William's book: 'Wrestling with Angels", Williams describes Apophatic Christianity as a: "cross for human ways of thought" and says that the human person is: "a reality beyond the bondage of a closed conceptual system."

Apophatic Christianity is: "the fruit of the graceful indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and the fulfillment of the evangelical commendation of losing one's life in order to save it."

This comes in ecstasis - the going out of oneself - and also in contemplation - the "self revelation of God in silence", which shows us the root of all our sin.

Sin comes from our: "confusion of personality with individuality, the regarding of personal being as a bundle of repeatable natural characteristics deployed by a controlling independent ego, defined in terms of its opposition to and exclusion of other egos".

In other words, human beings are falsely separated and truly One, like it or not.

And whichever country we identify ourselves with, we remain truly One, for better or worse, so that whatever we do to others, we inescapably also do to ourselves. We do our best for our country, but we are more than children of a country.

That Child of God and Christian martyr for non-violent struggle Martin Luther King put it like this: "For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality".

The risen Christ to you all.