Faith And Collective Trauma 8

I am thinking of the words from Paul's letter to the Romans where he wrote that all of creation now groans and travails with the expectation of the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, or something like that. This passage, from chapter eight, has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it with my bowl of Shreddies (TM) or whatever I was eating for breakfast one Sunday morning during the summer when I was a fifteen year old teenage Jesus Freak. This is the same chapter where it is said that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called to his service. These words have stayed with me and I still often remember them. I am thinking right now of what a wretched and broken mess is our humanity, and what a wrecked and broken mess we have made of our Mother Earth. We also tend to get certain things right, for example, public health care and housing, when we are getting those things right. But, honestly, Gentle Reader, we are still so hobbled by greed and self-interest thanks to the vectors and apologists for global capitalism, and this chronic refusal to stop repeating old mistakes that I sometimes wonder if we really have a lot of time left. Our handsome Prime Minister Brainless and his bosses and masters from the corporate sector has dug in his heals, court order or no court order, and is determined to push through the purchase and twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline to what will amount to around ten billion dollars of our tax money. If our governments and their bosses from Big Oil insist on exploiting all petroleum deposits till they can no longer get it out of the ground, then we could well be so far gone in climate change from global warming that we will not have much of a planet worth saving. I also find it hard to believe, as I am sure you will, that there are people who still believe in armed and military conflict as necessaries in maintaining global order and pursuing the interests of nations. Some who still believe this tragic nonsense are Christians. Two of them whom I know as friends are Anglican priests! Two otherwise intelligent men (one of them anyway) and they see absolutely no contradiction between training men (and now women, too) to go out and kill people we don't like, and the Gospel of Christ which is, among other things, the Gospel of Peace. But Anglicans are notorious for their capacity for trying to rationalize almost anything. Or should I call us Angle Cans, as in any angle can. (and will!) Our military history is so full of myth and lies that it is impossible to have a rational conversation with diehard conservatives and other idiots who insist on believing them. We cannot invoke the Second World War as a necessary conflict for preserving world peace and freedom for the simple reason that we are the victors and therefore the least likely to know or want to know the truth about war. We won. Victor's justice. No one has any record of war crimes and atrocities committed by the Allies for the simple reason that those things have been erased from history. We do vilify the Russians for rapes and other war crimes, but they are Russians, and after the war they became our enemies. And they still refuse to call war crimes the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, likewise the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. But Canadians, and a lot of Anglicans, remain brainwashed and made stupid by propaganda and jargon. Try telling them that our poor soldiers did not make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, rather they were sacrificed by their governments. Cannon fodder. Just the other day at a meeting at work a South African colleague mentioned in a conversation that she didn't do military service in her country because there are no women in the military. (they still haven't figured out that for women to be really free and equal, that they might do a bit better than imitating the worst characteristics of men. Toxic masculinity looks bad enough on men. It is equally ugly on women.) Another colleague, an alleged Christian, said that they should start enlisting women if they want to be progressive. I piped in "If they really want to be progressive they would abolish the military." No one said a word, but oh, the faces in that room!