5/8/2023 0 Comments War of the gods live![]() ![]() ![]() I hope we can come upon something new, which will help us in the very real and new situations we are facing, I hope there is a spiritual breakthrough of sorts awaiting us, so that we can learn to live together in a new and stronger and less 'adjusted' way - 'adjusted' to the forces in America which plunder other countries and our own country as well.Ares is the Greek god of war that was known for his destructive behavior. It is such matters I am discussing now with the families I stay with. And I feel that one's responsibility to the Church can no longer be expressed by the priest's or parishioner's traditional compliance before powerful and sometimes corrupt 'authority.' I would like to see the resources of the Church brought to bear upon the realities that the Church alone cannot deal with - though it can shed certain light upon many troublesome issues. More and more I see the need for flexibility in the Church. And then when one moves out to another scene, as I have been doing, and meets the people of very mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds, one sees how tragically unresponsive the Church has been - because it has not heard and been moved by the ethical struggles of people on the 'outside,' yet maybe nearer to Christ's own struggle. Just one instance is the Church's failure to face and deal with the social and political difficulties of believers. I think the Church as I have experienced it during, let's say, thirty years of membership in my order, the Church is speaking less and less to the realities before us. They are expected to prepare the next generation for the next wars and for an expansion of the same, the very same community. They are expected to join with other consumers. Once children come, even some of our more radical youth feel themselves no longer so free to protest various wrongs - because they need work and on their children's account feel more dependent on, more vulnerable to, the power of a town or city or county. I mean, young married people become members of a social community, and come under the authority of a political community. “I think that today young people come toward marriage as growing, searching men and women and suddenly marriage and parenthood is represented as a stoppage of all that. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.” Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. One is carried along, a zonked spectator.Įvery nation-state tends towards the imperial - that is the point. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first - just as the beast is the ape of god to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero and worse. ![]()
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