The waging of war is incompatible with following Jesus.
Brian Zahnd
From “Brian Zahnd: Postcards from Babylon”
Newsworthy with Norsworthy podcast — Jan. 14, 2019
The waging of war is incompatible with following Jesus.
Brian Zahnd
From “Brian Zahnd: Postcards from Babylon”
Newsworthy with Norsworthy podcast — Jan. 14, 2019
It would be legitimate and even obligatory for all sane and conscientious people everywhere in the world to lay down their weapons and their tools and starve and be shot rather than cooperate in the war effort. If such a mass movement should spontaneously arise in parts of the world, in Russia and America, in China and in France, in Africa and in Germany, the human race could be saved from extinction….
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Resentment unites anger, fear, and sadness in a kind of closed-circle, scissors-paper-rock game. In the absence of resentment, anger, fear, and sadness tend to heal each other. Anger can act like scissors, cutting through fear–the fear that like an enveloping shroud wraps itself around and threatens to smother the rock that is sadness. But that very sadness, which rises from the realization of our own transience and the ultimate futility of our human efforts to control, is the only tool we have to blunt anger–to forestall the resentment that anger becomes if it is nourished even after our fears have been quelled.
Anger and sadness butt against each other, steel against stone. But just as scissors “take” paper and rock “takes” scissors, sadness will finally take anger–if we let the sadness through. For sadness, shared, can heal. Anger storms in the hard passage between fear and sadness; cultivated, it turns into a jagged resentment that tears rather than trims and that resists healing. Denying fear and scorning the sadness that is shared, resentment refuses the possibility of going through and beyond the anger into forgiveness.
The danger of anger … lies not in anger itself, but in resentment, the clinging to and prolonged attachment to anger. Resentment is the refusal, out of fear, to cross the bridge of sadness and let ourselves back into the impermanent world of relationship. Anger as resentment refuses relationship, slashing at everything and everyone that comes close. But our pain can be healed only by some kind of closeness, some kind of connection with others. Sadness opens us to the need for unity and community.
From The Spirituality of Imperfection
By Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
George Kudrick didn’t go to war in WWII’s Pacific Theater to fight or kill anyone.
He didn’t go to represent the United States or its flag.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Jesus of Nazareth
From the Book of Matthew,
Chapter 5, Verse 9
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Jesus of Nazareth
From the Book of Matthew,
Chapter 5, Verses 43-44
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
From “The Chance for Peace” Speech,
April 16, 1953
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” … A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
From the “Beyond Vietnam” Speech,
April 4, 1967
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