On War x

"Sin seem pleasant, beckoning at our soul from outside the door of the heart. But once we are deceived and sin is allowed entry by our will, sin turns against our trust and makes it's war against our love, seeking to completely extinguish the Divine spark and plunge the soul into the terrible gravity of the darkness of itself."

ALL OF WAR IS EVIL. But man often finds strange delight in the things of death, in the things of the night that seek after his destruction.

War has been defined by many military thinkers of their age but these definitions are served for purposes within their sphere of influence. War in the context of this discussion is more than a military affair, I refer to war here as a paradigm.

Every human being is possessed by his or her own soul and the unseen soul of a man or a woman is magnitudes greater in power and dignity than the visible corporal body. This aspect of our common humanity that makes us who we are can never be overlooked. For one can not dismiss that there exists in humanity a universal form of awareness, limited yet whole, that is constantly shaped and sustained by the common dialogue of the souls of all men.

War has a cumulative effect. What endures today as the human spirit is only a shadow of itself. This deterioration has greatly diminished our own broad understanding of our common humanity. Some have even forgotten how to be human. In ages past, this loss went by unnoticed as the battles and the labors that now define our present world have been fought in the most absolute terms possible. As a result, we have inherited destructive potential that far outstrips our whole world's combined ability to build and rebuild. Our world today is a world defined by tragedy for everything that denied war a free hand in the affairs of human civilization have been precisely targeted and removed. For we are all by war deceived.

We now come to an urgent sense of what is missing, of what war has taken from our midst here in our globalizing world. Our whole planet is wearied by our constant inattention to the things that really matter.

Even the notion of a just war seem to attribute human excellence to war itself. War is an ignoble affair, it is dirty, smelly, uncomfortable and grotesque, like a creature from hell. It is something best left to itself.

However, where the common good is threatened by those agents of war, all good men must respond to the defense of others. It is vital to those who fight on their communities' behalf that one must be doubly sure he does not stir for war but marches against it knowing in his heart that war serves only death and that war seeks to bring this death upon the sacred life of his or her nation. Therefore, one who is clear in mind and heart about one's convictions marches against war not with much trepidation and fragility but with great strength and force of will. For knowing self is half the victory. Those among us who are self-aware are not very likely to lose his or her command of either self or others.

One who perceives war as it really is know that this ancient bondage is not an enemy met for man alone. The best generals and the wisest sages would be utterly wasted on an endeavor as presumptuous as attrition with war itself. One can not long endure war without sin. This is true of all armies of all times and places for the climate of war is one that is hostile to humanity. It is this hostility that dulls the military. For life can not be inimical to life and this dilemma quietly confronts the soul of every soldier. Where each human being soldiering on the field fails to find answers to this contradictory truth, the military slowly loses it's exacting sharpness. It is this dullness that leads to unnecessary deaths from the civilian population as well as among friendly units. Attrition with war itself will lead to one becoming war-like and is exactly what sane souls wants to avoid. One may only effectively preserve what war has not yet taken away from the community that sustains our life. To exceed in the defense is perilous for in this is found the descendant path that leads to war itself, a path that no true commander of men will ever lead his brave, loyal and proven command into, a path of certain death, a path of inevitable defeat, the road of endless battle and a sure path into oblivion.

For victory is not secured by force of arms alone, arms and the combined utilization of the lethal power of the combat arms to bring about the necessary decisive turns in operational momentum to bring to bear enough military force to break the enemy will is certainly an aid to victory.

But the steel of the sword is only a base, corruptible metal and is truly worthless without the noble, incorruptible, exacting, military steel of the intact honor and the proven service excellence of those brave souls who redeem time and again from ignominy the virtue of the profession of arms. It is this kind of virtue that secure victory. It is the immortal sacrifice of the just that entire nation's recognize for it is the kind of valor that inspire the universal respect of all men and women of all times and places. For war has it's legends not because war is just but because there are men who are just.

Let us now perceive the whole of our exile time being spent from the time that Cain struck and killed his brother Abel in the pervasive darkness of the paradigm of war. It is not surprising that our humanity have now come to a deep conviction of our differences. Let us understand that war is not just an uncommon means to achieve common ends or a continuation of a political discourse carried out in the field of battle between opposing military forces, war is an intelligent synergy on it's own. War is the dominion of a principality of hell, high among the rankings of the fallen angels with a pride second only to Satan himself. This enemy of sacred life once tasked with the meticulous care of human communities is now obsessed with the destruction of whole nations. There is much more evil in war than can be fully accounted for by the woundedness of humanity.

Many are the principalities who have fallen into the darkness that Sacred Scripture records these angels as hostile to humanity. Tasked by the Divine will with the meticulous care of whole human communities, it is within scope of right reason to say that in their fallen form, these once valiant defenders of nations entire have now become every nation's worst enemy. And what afflicts nations the most but war? War is to a nation as sin is to an individual, an evil in our midst. Both are just as deadly and just as relentlessly hell bent on the destruction of all life. War weakens the peace of a nation, robs her of her vitality and promise, and drastically cuts short her time, leaving her generations exposed to the war that means to do all men, women and children of every time and place a great ill.

But the noble commander acts decisively to preserve what war means to destroy - human life and the habitations and institutions that sustain, promote and fulfill human life - schools, hospitals, civilian homes, all places of holy worship, sources of clean water, marketplaces, crops and livestock - everything that responds to fill a common need; uphold human dignity at all times and places - never let war rob anyone of their humanity, do not break families apart, do not force civilians out of their homes, respect the holy sanctuary of holy places, do not do violence to those who have given up the will of war but instruct them in the ways of peace, limit the suffering of sacred life as a whole - from every human being, to the animals who can not speak for themselves, to the trees and plants that give us food, to the rich but limited bounties of our planet, the treasures of our natural world that belong to all generations of all nations, to preserve the honor of the profession of arms among the common people and suffer no one under his or her command to break this discipline.

If we take deep stock of what truly interests the good of human life, we will find much questions for much of those things which were once praiseworthy, excellent and of good report have lost it's sense of meaning in the darkness and many have forsaken themselves to despair.

There are two kinds of battles in the life of a man. There are battles one must fight and there are battles one must endure. None of these can be avoided without consequence.

Of the battles one must fight, the noble do so out of common need and a desire to master necessary means. The victorious do not see an enemy in men or machines, his enemy is the very cause that brought him out into the field and the lack that must be filled so that all of life may go on. The victorious is a master of his heart and possesses in himself humility born out of true regard for what is good as well as a genuine experience of evil. For the noble does not commit to the fight because he is noble, he commits to the fight to preserve the nobility of other men.The noble know the evil of war and the degrading suffering it brings to others and so takes the necessary measures to alleviate suffering whether the war be waged from within or without. The ignoble comprehend this not and so neither see the victory nor the honor in the attempt.

Of the battles one must endure, it is said that time is key. Indeed, these battles are those same battles that we exclusively fight within ourselves. Need is not the cause of these conflicts for these conflicts are always a question of choice.

Time exists as a flow which from eternity flow into everywhere and into everything in the visible universe all at once giving formal substance to the emptiness of mass and imparting with motion all created things save for one, man. Time's wonder is found in the motion of the things around us, from the sweeping arc of the stars in the night, to the flight of the migratory birds in the winter, to the busy line of ants industriously gathering up their food. Time and mass, space and relative motion, these are manifestations of the exact interconnectedness and measured precision by which our Creator have brought forth from nothingness our visible universe. This is not to mention the wondrous intricacies innate to all organic life. But man although created to inhabit this world is not contained within this natural order. Man seems at times an observer more outside than inside the workings of the natural world. Although man can actively influence the course of lower creation, no man is truly a master of these material forces unless that same man be first and foremost truly a master of the self. Time does for man what motion is significant to him, it stirs his heart to the truth and expands his hope. The motions of time that takes everything in our visible universe into it's proper course according to the purpose of creation takes place in spite of man who seem at times to perpetually stand in the calm of the eye of the storm. This is because the motions that matter to man are the movements of his heart, none but God and the person may ever know what gigantic conflicts have raged indefinitely in his or her heart. These are the battles one must endure and where one has discovered those sacred spaces hidden away within time itself, a secret place within the infinite reality of those worlds within, one will soon realize that peace is a gathering together of these sacred spaces. It is within these sacred spaces where mercy acts and where hope reside that the hearts of common humanity reach out to each other to become kindred souls to one another in the common way of virtue.

It is why the transformation from the old way of war into the paradigm of peace require common alms for common needs, it is to gather these sacred spaces in time.

Glory to God in the highest
Adoration to Jesus Christ
Peace to men of good will.