The President recently was on the idiot box – a tool aptly named – and proclaimed that more troops were needed to achieve victory in Iraq. He noted that we are losing the war and that escalation was the necessitated strategy. I will be the first to admit that my memory is hazy, but it seems to me that the President declared that the war in Iraq had ended in victory and that the mission was accomplished. I feel as if we, the American people, are through the looking glass. If we won and victory was proclaimed – though I am still foggy about the identity of the enemy or the perimeters of the mission – then how can we be losing and require clarity as to the nature of the mission. Wasn’t “war against terror” ambiguous enough? I know that I’ve used St. Augustine’s Just War on more than one occasion to illustrate the point. A clearly defined objective is part of that construct. It seems that we don’t have one in Iraq and need more troops to accomplish the end that still remains undefined.
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I was thinking about the relationship between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. All three of these religions share a common root: the promise made to Abraham by Yaweh (Gn. 12.1ff). All three of these religious traditions derive from the covenant cut by God with the patriarch, a wandering Aramean (Deut 26.5), bereft of future that had faith in the promise made. Sadly we have not learned to come together as children of the same father, members of the same family. The issue was that of land and an inheritance, at least in a penultimate sense. Each tribe – Christians, Jews, and Muslims – make a claim to the territory but have forgotten that all are part of the same family and that inheritance may be mutual.
Family fights over inheritance are the worst. I’ve seen families torn apart by what each thought that their parents would have wanted, or worse yet when the will allows a measure of ambiguity that allows each to attach the force of law to his or her interpretation of the stated intent. Perhaps the real intent is that we live together in peace and harmony as brothers and sisters should (Ps. 133); the idea of being at one in the place of worship stands as the existential metaphor of a life that transcends nation or claim and seeks the greatest good for all. Everybody gets what they need. Nobody hordes because they trust that they will be given in their need as they give to support those in need.
So what does this have to do with a war fought on the pretext of lies? Much in every way, I fear and trust.
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The issue that stands at the heart of the Abraham story is trust. Abraham trusts God and it is credited to him as righteousness (Gal. 3.6, Gn. 15.6). What does it mean to trust, or to keep faith? Allow me a commonly used image; inasmuch as the Bible has compared the covenant with the people as a marriage, it is valid: is it enough to say that I believe in monogamy and then to claim that I am free from mandates to go and act in a way that belies my confession of faith? How can a person claim to have faith in his or her marriage while committing adultery? Keeping faith is not an act of intellect. It is ethical as much as it is spiritual or confessional. Christians are guilty of having separated faith from action by claiming that justification by grace through faith (Eph 2.8ff) does not require a person to act like they believe the creed that they are confessing.
Abraham trusts God. The sons and daughters of Abraham are called upon to do the same thing. The pressing question is what form that faith should take in the penultimate context of our existence. Shall we become bellicose in our orthodoxy, creating division as we litigate the terms of our parents’ will? Shall we realize that we are three children called upon to share the family’s farm, each taking responsibility for its wellbeing and each investing labor that all may be fed?
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We are called upon to place trust in our leaders. But this assumes not a blind obedience, but willingness to question as an act of faith. The terms of this war have changed to match the whim of the President who, like a child caught in a lie, changes the terms to match the context in the hopes that his dishonesty will not be revealed. What I find most disturbing is that Mr. Bush claims to have been “in the spirit” (Rev. 1.10) when he made his realizations about the conflict in Iraq, an allusion to the epiphany of St. John the Divine as he envisioned the apocalypse.
And tell lies and the family continues to fight, each child claiming the inheritance of the father whose tears are shed like drops of blood in the land that was once called Aramea…
Ah, But I am only a fool…
