Anthony Fleg
from US NSP website: posted March 17, 2007
As a believer in a Creator
Greater
Than skin color, nationality
The reality
of us vs. them
The fallacy
of dominate vs. be dominated
Must be set free,
That Truth can reign
My thoughts, dear friends, center on the military complex I came upon recently on a road to nowhere, a dead end street. The guards at the gate and the heavy barbed wire told me that I was not welcome to this place that boasted itself as a site of “warmanship training.” Not that I minded, for I was simply lost, on a mission for an exit that did not exist, searching for a way out. With a screech of tires, and a hard turn to the left, I went to seek another way.
Leaving the analogies to explain themselves, I wish to explore, dear brothers and sisters of faith, how a love strategy can turn us from the dead end street we have committed to politically and spiritually in this country. As a believer in God, I turn to love because it is the unifying language of the world’s faiths. As a human, love is the lens through which I see each new day, as we collectively awake from a “small death” (as the night is referred to by many Eastern traditions), a reminder that there is something greater still left for us to fulfill. As a doctor-to-be, I turn to love as a healing force, a potent tonic for the ailments of mankind.
At this point, you might expect a sermon on love, filled with emotional prose and references to poetry on the subject. It is interesting and troubling that love is limited to the realm of feelings, private reflection, and intimate relationships. This Hallmark-card version of love is, by definition, banned from the realm of serious matters such as politics and public policy, much less international relations. It is not a topic that can carry a conversation at town hall, much less in the halls of Congress.
Patch Adams, MD has devoted his life to speaking to this issue and designing a model for health care and larger society that is grounded on love. He has traveled to the far corners of the world, asking people the question, “What is the greatest thing in life, the thing for which you live?” and has consistently heard a simple answer: love. Yet, when asking the same audiences to describe their love strategy, the means by which they live out their highly prized ideal of love, he gets confused looks and silence. In fact, in the hundreds of thousands that he has asked the question over the years, he has trouble remembering a single person with a well-developed love strategy. “People do not understand the question because we do not think of, nor do we talk about love in an academic, rigorous, or even applied way,” Patch laments. Could such a framework on the issue of war, a thoughtful consideration of how a love strategy can lead us from the road to nowhere to a real-life, political solution for our world (e.g. peaceful co-inhabitance), as opposed to focusing on securing victory for America at the world’s expense? Has the current conversation of demagogy, built upon a strategy of fear led us to place of peace and security?
Before we can make the screeching turn from our dead-end street, we must examine the consequences of our country’s fear strategy. Fear, whether real or perceived, has powerful, well-studied psychological consequences. It forces humans to constrict their concern for others and act primarily out of self-preservation (real or perceived), inducing a schematic of “us/good” vs. “them/evil” to justify otherwise intolerable actions. It dampens our personal concern for those being killed in lands far away whose crime was being Afghani or Iraqi (e.g. not a U.S. citizen) especially if we believe that their deaths are necessary to preserve our security; expressed on a collective level, this dampening effect leads to the silent masses that watch a war that trades blood for oil in the name of forcing freedom and protecting peace. We should also note that this same fear-response justifies thousands of young American soldiers dying as pawns for our (oil) security.
Domestically, it even excuses our in-attention to those suffering at home as political refugees of misplaced priorities, a point made during the war in Vietnam by Dr. King, who pointed out that the war the enemy of the poor. Related to this, fear distracts our collective eyes off the true enemies, the injustices and inequities that persist in our society and which wage war on our spiritual and moral ethos. Finally, a fear strategy leads to self-perpetuating conflict and violence in its stance that one must either be an oppressor/dominator or oppressed/dominated, and that force and threats of force are the tools by which nations interact, the means for subduing those deemed as threats.
Let us compare this to a love strategy, a schema of much different focus, and one which the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) has used as the foundation for which to understand our current war. At the outset, I will say that I am using the spiritual concept of agape or unconditional love, modeled for us in its Platonic form, Love, by our Creator. Love, in comparison to the constricted, arms-folded posture of fear, is symbolized by the open-arms embrace of a hug. It calls us to act in the interest of all, reminding us that our ultimate security lies in our ability to create a world of peaceful coexistence. It requires us to understand the other in order to eradicate this category altogether, and in doing so, replace ignorance and fear with love; as a American Indian mentor of mine, John Blackfeather of the Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation says, “We fear that which we do not understand…we cannot love until we understand.”
Founded on love principles, we can begin to build a love strategy, the means for which include respecting others’ autonomy, hearing their concerns and problems as our own, and engaging in true dialogue to come to mutual solutions Its tools are humility and honesty, bearing fruits of true diplomacy as equals before a most high God. As is reflected in the NSP’s Global Marshall Plan, a love strategy does not focus on the threat of war, but instead supports basic human rights as a necessary condition for peace.
The question of which strategy we will use to heal our world is an urgent one, as the U.S. throws billions more to spread the fire of war, while Britain proposes pouring 75 billion British pounds into further developing nuclear weapons. When two of the world’s powers decide to lead us down a path of blatant disregard for the other in a fear-driven model, disregarding international safeguards such as the United Nations and the global non-proliferation agreements, respectively, we cannot wait longer on the issue of love.
I implore us, as those of faith, to turn to Our Creator as One People, asking for guidance toward a love strategy for our own lives, families, and communities, that it may become global. Mother Teresa reminded us that love begins at home, that peace begins with a smile; moreover, “it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in that action.” We must “study fear no more” on a personal level, living with love toward ourselves, those on our street, those in our houses of worship, and those in our towns and cities. Make no mistake – living in fear of crime, of the homeless person asking for change, while living in ignorance toward those from the other side of town or other house of worship is the same spiritual act that leads us to a fear of other nations and peoples on the larger scale. We must begin to love locally in order to love globally.
Furthermore, on the issue of war, I am convinced that the masses who oppose the war do so from an anti-fear epistemology, which is limited in its ability to heal. However, as Rabbi Lerner is fond of saying, “It is not enough to know what we are against – we must also know what we are for.” Helping to shift this movement, and society, to a pro-love stance is a beautiful notion, with implications for change far broader than the current war. Linguistically, the difference between anti-fear and pro-love is subtle; spiritually, these are polar opposites. We, as a spiritual community, must prepare our collective hearts and faiths to pursue peace through love, not to merely oppose fear/war. Yes, we must turn from the dead-end street to nowhere, but we must make this move with guidance from above, humility of the heart, and an unquenchable thirst for love.
Dear brothers and sisters, let us commit ourselves to the work of creating peace through a strategy of love, that God Almighty may smile upon us.
When we will pay more to kill an Iraqi
Than we will to treat a sick child in Milwaukee
or to educate a little one in Kentucky
We have sold for a fee
The price of our soul (in moral depravity do we trust)
Out of this savagery we must
Turn to tools
And strategies of love,
Using our hearts to shove
aside all that hinders us from seeing our world as one,
Waging peace until it is won.