I believe America has a model of heroic warriors that transcends war. We celebrate the Americans who toiled through the Second World War, calling them “The Greatest Generation.” Sometimes the heroic image has been equated only with the violence of the Second World War. Through this lens the Greatest Generation is solely remembered as the brave young men who gloriously carried guns into battle to risk their lives in the fight against the “evil” Nazis. However, I think respect for this generation goes beyond the war and recognizes that the virtues of courage, self-giving, and generosity continued to characterize them long after the war was over. Though they were not perfect, I associate this generation with the “American Dream,” which involves the willingness to sacrifice so that the next generation will have a better life. The heroic image of this generation is equally the young soldier at Normandy or the young mother sacrificing so her children could have a decent meal and the same person seventy years later, now a ninety year old, who is still collecting donations at church or volunteering at the local senior center. The important virtues associated with them transcended the battlefield.
We must resist the temptation to make violence the focal point of our memory of the Second World War generation. On every side of a war, there are frightened human beings driven by confusion, anger, resentment, and misinformation; most of the Nazis were human beings just like anyone else operating according to the status quo of their own society. Those we view as our enemies are people who are hurting just like us. If we value human life, then killing enemies, whether we accept it as justified or not, represents a political and human failure to understand that we are one family.
While I believe it is dangerous to associate the violence connected with the Greatest Generation and current soldiers with heroism, as we have seen, it is critical to ask what it is that makes them heroic. I believe the answer to this question is simple. Their willingness to give their lives for others models the selflessness that humanity must aspire to. Their willingness to die is incompatible with a belief that they are the god-like center of the universe. When saluting the old and young soldiers marching in a parade, we would do well to look past the rifle that they carry and consider the question of what comes first in our own lives. Is it lofty ideals like the search for truth, the struggle for a better world for everyone, the journey toward love and selflessness, and the commitment to a life of generosity (even giving one’s life), or is it more base goals that we prize, like self-preservation, apparent rightness, popularity, personal comfort, and control?
What we make of our soldiers impacts what our society becomes. Focusing on violence and self-preservation would take us in one direction, while focusing on courage, self-mastery, and selflessness would take us in a different direction.
Sister Ita Ford, who was murdered for her courageous work with the poor in El Salvador, advised her niece:
"I hope you come to find that which gives life a deep meaning for you. Something worth living for – maybe even worth dying for – something that energizes you, enthuzes you, enables you to keep moving ahead."
Ford was a nonviolent warrior who, like many champions of justice in Latin America, knowingly put her life on the line for her impoverished sisters and brothers. Her words remind us that these virtues are not exclusively for soldiers but are the prerogative of all humans. (The fact that three of the five Salvadoran national guardsmen who raped and murdered her and three other “churchwomen” were trained by the United States at the “School of the Americas” is further reminder that being involved in a military does not guarantee virtue.)
Exclusivity is a danger to be avoided because it appeals to the ego’s desire to be viewed as special and above others. It is appealing to suggest that joining a branch of the military, entering religious life, or choosing a specific career is a defining moment that proves our heroism, specialness, and value once and for all. It offers an alternative to the “what have you done for me lately” culture that allows a lifetime of effort to be nullified by one mistake or by a decline in our effectiveness perhaps caused by age, illness, or emotional strain. Exclusivity can be an effective recruiting tool when used in a political, social, religious, or military setting. However, it can undermine the journey toward selflessness by allowing us to believe that we are above others and that we already arrived at our destination when we joined the special group. The hero’s journey involves a willingness to sacrifice all, including reputation and group affirmation, in discerning the direction of one’s life. It demands that we find something bigger than ourselves to live for and spend our lives working toward that ideal.
THE BATTLE WITH SELF
We cannot forget who our primary struggle is with. If our aim is virtuous living, then our ultimate struggle is with the self, not against an enemy. A dehumanized enemy can serve as an excuse not to look at our own faults. If we view our primary struggle as one that pits us against the bad guys, we may not see our own destructive tendencies.
In the conclusion of E.E. Cummings’, The Magic Maker, Cummings recalls his response to a high school editor who asked him about the difficulties involved in a career in poetry. He references the inner struggle when he says the challenge is:
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day, to make you everybody else — it means to fight the hardest battle which any human can fight, and never stop fighting."
Cummings indicates that the real battle means not submitting to our own desire to take the easier path by becoming what society tells us to be. We must continuously and courageously struggle against our need to fit in and be affirmed, and, instead strive to be our best selves. As the classic song goes, we must start “with the man in the mirror.” Our undertaking is to get that person in the mirror “to change his ways.” The Four Agreements explains that, as warriors, our primary battle is against the “parasites inside us” that keep us from finding peace, love, and contentment in our lives. In Islam the notion of Jihad has sometimes been interpreted as a war against the other. This can lead to a desire to find someone with whom to fight; however, a Muslim student informed me that many Muslims believe the real Jihad is the war against the impulse of evil within oneself. The word itself literally means struggle or striving.
One can see evidence of this internal battle in the lives of many heroic individuals. We see Jesus victorious over his ego when faced with temptation in the desert, victorious over his fear in the Garden of Gethsemane, and victorious over hate on the cross when he steadfastly continued to love. Dorothy Day, who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement, modeled the struggle to overcome our experience of isolation and loneliness by consistently choosing a life of love, social activism, and community. Martin Luther King’s triumph over hate was first and foremost the fruit of an interior battle. In fact nonviolent resistance is the result of emotional, spiritual, and psychological preparation. The “Freedom Riders,” a racially diverse group of protesters, trained themselves so that they would not respond with anger to the hatred they knew they would trigger when they rode busses into segregated areas of the United States. Nelson Mandella demonstrated a profound self-mastery while in jail and after being freed by refusing to be driven by resentment. Anne Frank and Helen Keller both could have given in to despair, but battled to seek truth and find good in the world. To achieve enlightenment the Buddha went inward first. There he learned that the source of his suffering, which was his own desires, and the path to liberation were both within him.
The Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, characterizes the nature of our primary battle:
"Instead of loving what you think is peace, love other (people) and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are war makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another."
Merton’s words convey the harsh nature of this struggle, and they do not allow us to continue the myth that we are the pure ones and that our enemies are completely evil. While I believe it is essential that we heed Merton’s call for self-awareness and internal struggle, his words also might be tempered with a reminder to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of this battle. If this harshness leads to self-hatred, we will not be a source of peace in our world and will likely not be gentle to our imperfect sisters and brothers. Rather than a violent war, this battle is a timeless quest for self-awareness and honesty. The battle requires fortitude and perseverance as we struggle to grow into our best selves, while accepting that all we can do is our best, which will never be perfect.
EVERYDAY WARRIORS
One of my closest friends was a true warrior and hero. Robbed of his ability to walk at a young age by Muscular Dystrophy, his example of calm strength and contentment was an inspiration. He didn’t complain, rarely showed anger, and refused to give in to despair. Life was hard for him, but he never appeared hopeless. Bravely, he fought for meaning and life amidst many setbacks. As many reasons as he had to feel sorry for himself, he remained positive and always thought of others. He was patient with those who helped him. This was especially amazing in his last two years when he had lost most of his ability to speak. He was not able to ignore the unpleasant realities of his life. Heroically, he lived with them.
Through my relationship with him and his brother (another remarkable person who battled MD), I met many heroic young men who also fought, and are fighting, this battle, all of whom are exceptional in their own ways. Every one of them has lost so much to this awful disease. Still, they refuse to be defined by it. Daily they fight a battle harder than I can imagine. Sometimes this battle involves overcoming incredible obstacles while still being just like everyone else; no less impressive of a victory is their ability to let go gracefully. Every time my friend let go, he defeated demons that I struggle with. He did not give in to resentment or feeling sorry for himself. He also did not give in to fears about what he might lose next.
I met him as a 16 year-old. Over the next twenty years, he lost his ability to write, swim, play video games, change the channel, eat, drink, breathe without a machine, and speak audibly. He faced so many of my worst fears, yet lived fully and truly enjoyed life. Once, I set aside our normal conversation topics (sports, TV, movies, friends, and old-times) and asked him what his secret was. His answer was something like, “I just try to appreciate every moment.” While I have offered similar advice and have heard it often, this is the first and only time it came from someone who I knew authentically lived it. His brother also lived this, especially in the joy he took being outside, whether he was enjoying his sunflowers or driving his chair around the neighborhood. My friends’ foe offered them every reason to not be peaceful and appreciative, but they battled to be with their family and friends and ultimately to live. Like my friends many in the Muscular Dystrophy community model the most basic definition of a warrior by the way they live meaningful and courageous lives.
Another group that has produced some admirable warriors is Alcoholics Anonymous. With the support of their community, they fight an ongoing battle with their “demons.” Their twelve steps are an inward journey that forces them to intentionally identify what keeps them from being their best selves. After they identify their character defects, their challenge is to trust their higher power enough to allow them to let go and experience healing. This journey gives them an opportunity to know and understand themselves and to struggle toward growth. Like Buddha’s Eightfold path, Saint Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, Don Ruiz’s Four Agreements, Islam’s Five Pillars, and many other spiritual paths, Alcoholics Anonymous offers its members a route to grow in self-awareness and ultimately become better people.
Neither these communities, nor their members are perfect; nevertheless, their paths involve a heroic, inward battle. Certainly there are countless other people who bravely face internal and external realities that create suffering for themselves and their world. In the midst of widespread suffering, their journey toward personal growth is an act of love that allows them to promote healing rather than hurting.
Perhaps love should be understood as the universal struggle. James Baldwin, a mid-twentieth century, gay, African American, writer and social critic observed, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.” Love means resisting our judgmental impulses and maintaining an open, sympathetic lens toward others. Enemies can easily serve to distract us from this painful internal struggle of being a loving person. Baldwin hypothesized, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” After four, little African American girls were killed during the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King offered the eulogy for three of the children. In his speech he addressed the community’s deep pain while resisting what would have been an understandable urge to resort to hate:
"Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace."
His reminder that life is hard gets to the core of our battle. Although compared to the tragedies that King addressed in this eulogy our suffering may appear trivial, we must acknowledge most people experience life as a real struggle. Understanding ourselves as warriors might remind us to not run from the challenges that love and life present but to engage them with courage, dignity, and hope.
Along with our spiritual masters, the brave people who battle various ailments (physical and psychological), and those who struggle daily with addictions, our soldiers can and should model for all of us the struggle with self, the battle to overcome fear, hate, selfishness, and ego, and the struggle to accept that we are not god. In turn, inspired by these examples, we should all intentionally engage in the noble struggle to overcome our own ego. Life sometimes feels like a battle for everyone, but we are not alone in this struggle. Perhaps the Marine motto, “leave no one behind,” would be a good motto for ordinary life, reminding us to not forget our brothers and sisters that are battling in countless ways every day.
PEACEFUL PATHS
Violence should not be understood as the primary path to addressing suffering in our world. There is another approach to a better world, but it involves an act of trust or faith. Pope Paul VI expressed it when he said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” Paul VI suggests that peace cannot ultimately be forced through violence but is most effectively cultivated by an active commitment to treat the other with love and justice. This builds on an ancient insight that is attributed to Aristotle, which observes that “poverty is the mother of all rebellion and crime.” If we want to limit war and crime, we can address some of their underlying causes — poverty, exploitation, powerlessness, and hopelessness. This approach requires that we move away from the simplistic view that the world is filled with good guys and bad guys, and instead recognize the other as human. The peaceful path of justice is a path of seeing the other. It demands that we work toward right relationships, where all people are respected, and their human rights are honored.
When we recognize that the other is like us, we can begin to consider the causes of their hurtful actions; after all, we usually believe that we have a good excuse for our own hurtful actions. Both our religious traditions and scientific observation indicate that we are all brothers and sisters. Theistic religions indicate that we are all children of the same creator-god. Other traditions affirm that we are all children of the same mother earth. Belief in re-incarnation invites the possibility that every life we meet, in war or peace, might be a deceased parent, grandparent, sibling, or child. Science demonstrates that we are all descended from common ancestors. Whether human or nonhuman we are all composed of the matter formed from the same exploded stars. The story of the Christmas truce indicates that war involves brothers and sisters fighting one another. It reveals that when British soldiers celebrated Christmas with their German enemies during World War I they discovered in the enemy a people with whom they could relate and for whom they could feel affection. The demonized vision of the other that validated their violence was suddenly debunked by reality. Another story describes how during El Salvador’s Civil War the Salvadoran army came to a town and slaughtered many of the peasant inhabitants. A young soldier came to the door of an elderly couple whose children had already been killed in the civil war. He opened the door and stared blankly at the couple for a minute. When his superior questioned whether there was anyone in the house, the young man answered that there was no one in there and closed the door. Later, the old man explained his two theories about why he and his wife had been spared, suggesting, “Either God sent an angel and it stood between us so that the young soldier couldn’t see us, or God sent an angel and it stood next to us so that he could see us.” I prefer the second theory because it indicates that the beginning of violence is the failure to see the other, and the remedy for it is seeing the other. We ought to be keenly aware that every war involves people, who are capable of getting along and loving one another, fighting to solve a problem that may not even involve them.
As a country we have, at times, been guilty of evil, selfish decisions. Do I believe that makes us an evil country? No! I know that I have been selfish and done hurtful things. This doesn’t make me evil. Instead, it reminds me that I am human and need to keep improving.
The recognition of our imperfection serves various purposes. It makes us more patient with the imperfections of others and less likely to enter into simplistic judgment. It allows us to remember that our real challenge is to work to become our best self. This prevents us from turning ourselves and our interests into unquestionable idols. Another benefit results when an increased self-awareness enables us to see how our own hurting leads us to make harmful decisions. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, suggests the possibility that we are sometimes the victims of “wrong perception,” which is the assumption that the enemy only hurts us and is not also suffering. Wrong perception is the failure to recognize the enemy is a real person. Our fear, insecurity, greed, anger, and resentment tend to keep us focused on ourselves and lead us to define others based on the one-dimensional reality of how they affect us. Through a self-centered lens, we see the enemy’s entire identity as threatening us. The truth is that, as humans, our imperfect acts of hurting others are often an expression of our own experience of being hurt and feeling threatened. The movie Couples Retreat sums this up with a simple statement, “Hurt people hurt people.” Recognizing other people as hurting changes how we see and respond to them and opens up the possibility of addressing the underlying source of our rival’s anger.
Thich Nhat Hanh offers a personal story that demonstrates the possibility of changing our wrong perception regarding an “enemy.” Hanh recalls that in his own youth a French soldier came to his Vietnamese monastery and, at gunpoint, demanded the monastery’s rice. For some time he carried resentment toward the French soldier until he recognized that the soldier was human. Hanh considered the reality that had he been born in France he and this young man might have been friends. He imagined what it would be like to be sent to Vietnam, to be required to kill to survive, to watch friends be killed, perhaps even to be ordered to carry out atrocities. He further recalled this young man’s frail state and identified it with his own experience of Malaria. Hanh’s wrong perception was replaced with the recognition that this man, who had hurt him and his community, was also a hurting human — a brother. The result of seeing his enemy more clearly for Thich Nhat Hanh was not hate but love, understanding, and healing.
Isn’t this the model of Jesus on the cross, who said “Forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing”? As gods we can only see these wrong-doers as pure evil. Jesus and Thich Nhat Hanh, who do not operate as the center of the universe, invite us to recognize that those who hurt or threaten us are not demonic beings but lost sisters and brothers. It’s also helpful to recognize that we too are sometimes lost. Jesus demonstrates this in the story of the prodigal son. The prodigal son, who seriously sins against his father, is not described judgmentally as evil but sympathetically as lost. The self-righteous older brother of the “Prodigal Son,” who can only see the sin in his brother, is also lost. His inability to celebrate his younger brother’s return shows he is trapped by his own judgment and resentment.
Jesus consistently undermines his contemporaries’ efforts to demonize others. Violence subverts the possibility of seeing more clearly. It diminishes the hope of reconciling with the other and eliminates the possibility of correcting our own misjudgments. Finally, it prevents us from addressing the unjust realities that sometimes fuel hate and resentment. Justice calls us to stop reacting to symptoms and actively work to build right relationships with those who are hurting in our world. Unfortunately, if our focus is on our interests and preferences, then we will find ourselves viewing and treating other people as objects. If we can learn to see the other, then we might discover less violent paths to peace.
A NEW MEASURE OF GREATNESS
We have considered how as our own gods it is convenient to start with an assumption of our rightness. Operating as though we are all-powerful, we erase or adjust our history to fit with our divinely endorsed identity. For good or ill America is still the most powerful nation on the earth. We have an opportunity and obligation to set an example for the rest of the world; though, all people from all places share this responsibility. Rather than the gospel of (national) self-interest, we will best serve humanity by modeling a commitment to human well-being — recognizing that these orientations are not always identical. This must start with humility. Patriotism does not need to imply an assumption that we are and always have been in the right. Assumptions are dangerous because they shape thoughts without questioning, struggling, or searching. As individuals and societies we excel when we acknowledge and mourn our dark side as much as, if not more than, we celebrate our triumphs. Alcoholics Anonymous invites the alcoholic to begin by admitting a problem exists. Starting with our imperfections reminds us that we have plenty to grapple with inside ourselves. It is not evil that we are imperfect; it is human. To err is to be human. The question we are left with is: do we leave our collective tendencies toward ego unquestioned, or do we battle to embody the better angels of our nature?
Perhaps what we need is a world of warriors committed to fighting their internal battles, recognizing their fellow human beings as allies in this universal struggle, and attempting to be sources of support, encouragement, and community for each other as all people struggle to be about something bigger than their personal interests. Struggle need not be understood as a negative. Anyone who has ever climbed a mountain, ran a race, completed a challenging course of studies, raised a child, been in a long-term relationship, spent extended time in solitude, finished a difficult project, or achieved a significant goal might have discovered that struggle and joy are not incompatible. If you love what you are doing, then the hard work can be gratifying. Greatness is found in the willingness to struggle and journey not in a triumphant appearance. A spiritual warrior needs to fall in love with the journey toward personal and communal growth.
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