violence, leadership, & wild brave hearts

Violence

Leadership

Wild at Heart

BraveHearts

Men

These words have been traveling around at high velocity in the cerebral cortex for the past few weeks.

Our men’s Bible study just finished a study through the book Wild at Heart by John Eldridge. If you have spent any time at all in any church in the past fifteen years, you have probably heard someone talk about, give you a copy, or invited you to a similar book study. This book, though growing in age & possibly decreasing in popularity has become rather ubiqious as the manual for Men. I have somehow avoided reading it until this class—even trying avoiding this class until halfway through I was roped in by a gracious invitation.

Last night was our final meeting; we watched Braveheart and ate chili & ‘dogs. I had seen the movie a lot, it was one of my favorites back in junior high & high school, but I hadn’t probably seen it since then. I definitely understand the movie in a way that I never understood it before. I was always drawn to the lead character, William Wallace; he is the hero. But last night, what struck me more than anything were the nobles of Scotland and the King of England. These people had the power to change things. I don’t know my English/Scottish history well enough to really say anything of substance, but at least from what I saw in the movie, Scotland could have been independent of England a lot earlier if only the nobles would of stopped fighting among themselves & taking bribes from the King of England.

The great thing that Wallace brings is that uncompromising spirit. He wants freedom for all and won’t stop for anything less, even if it means his life. In one of the last scenes before he is captured, he is talking with his two closest friends. He pretty much knows that this meeting with the Nobles is a setup, but he tells his buddies that it is the only chance they have of defeating the English. He is saying that he is believing in the impossible and acting on that faith. That seems like a leader to get behind. That is what makes Wallace so great.

But what is missed are all those nobles, who have had the power for sometime. With the character who becomes King of Scotland in the end, we see the generations of power that have been passed down, not through true nobility but through backstabbing and compromise. It seems that more often we are like those noblemen. More concerned with our well being. We work for the man, because it pays well. We try to distance ourselves from the reality of the selling of ourselves to the machine. We make lots of really great excuses for what we do. But it seems that we are selling our birthright for a bowl of soup.

So how does violence and being wild at heart fit into all this; what does it really mean to be a Man of God. Eldridge talks a lot about our warrior spirits, how we need to go to battle, but how we have been living quiet lives of desperation. That all sounds very good, he even gives us a glimpse of who the enemy is—satan, the devil, the evils spirit of the other realm. But it seems that he fails in giving us an idea of how to actually live it out. It is all about following your passions at the beginning of the book, live the adventure & take your wife with you. That is all great stuff, but it seems to dramatize life in a way that life really doesn’t play out. The Braveheart movie makes everything move very quickly, but in reality these people had horses as their faster way of moving, even then horses have to stop to eat and drink. If you were to look at the reality of what was happening, most of the story would be about a bunch of men walking from here to there. Then after a battle having to walk back, but now having been wounded to walk with that pain. That isn’t exciting, adventure type stuff, but it is reality.

Violence is violent. It disrupts life.

Being a warrior is a hard life. Wallace lost is wife, not at the end of the story but at the beginning. Losing everything he had was just the beginning of his struggle. Could any of us desire that as the next chapter of our life, without knowing anything about what would happen after that? It is easy to get excited about adventure, pictures of Colorado mountaineering or African safaris. I’ve been on the tops of fourteen thousand foot peaks, the pictures are a lot nicer to look at when you are at home where it is warm and safe. It is brutal up there. We Americans don’t like the hard parts of life, we just want to have the glory of the finished product. Every success costs a price. To get to the top, it takes a lot of work and a lot of leaving things behind. Wallace never got the family farm that he intended. We say that is okay because he got something much better. That is easy for us to say, but how many of us will fight for something bigger than us—when it will cost us everything we want and hold dear.

I have said nothing really of the violence of the movie, it is extremely brutal. It was hard for me to watch, not because of some kind of queasiness, but because the violence just seemed so unnecessary. The sadness of violence was partly linked to seeing the failure of the leaders. Though the violence wouldn’t have been completely lost, it could of been limited. The whole story swings on the decision of the King of England to force prima noctes, the right of the nobleman to sleep with the bride on the first night. He decides to do this only as a result of his desire for absolute power and control.

Both Jake Tolbert {here} and Tad DeLay {here1} & {here2} have posted recently about violence. I am very partial to their points of view. I am very much a pacifist at heart when it comes to my personal life. But I definitely have struggled with the question as it relates to larger sets, such as the community or the nation-state. In my more naïve years of life, I would have not even recognized the difficulty of pacificism at the larger level, not that I would endorse violence without question at any level.

I would say that our previous & current actions in Iraq are/were completely morally wrong; I would say that though we have some reasons for our attack in Afghanistan, it was still morally wrong—that is if we should take the Bible’s commands and proscriptions seriously. I don’t think that in either case, our actions we justified as keeping us free of looming danger were truly justified, and we shouldn’t consider our place as one of a moral agent for the Lord God to repay their grievous acts with similar actions, since we also have much much blood on our hands.

But where does that leave us? In some sense I think that the battles waged on the part of William Wallace were just, but I don’t necessarily see the same thing when I read of God commanding the Israelites to go forward wiping out certain peoples completely along the way. God says that he will protect them in battle not because of their righteousness but because of the others’ wickedness. Which somewhat balances the scales of justice, but why couldn’t God do it some other way. Why do the Israelites have to be shown as militarily powerful to the nations, so that God can be shown as powerful? I just don’t get it.

In some of my philosophy reading yesterday, there was a section describing how Derrida’s philosophy is played out into the political realm. It describes how his later philosophy of the other, hospitality, friendship, immigration, all points to a philosophy which is completely opposed to talk about ‘we’ or ‘us’ because of the exclusion that it creates. There was a statement about how state boundaries are all based on presumed violence. We stay on our side and you on yours because if you cross this line I will destroy you. You can see this with any war as an example, once one people cross the line then war begins to protect one’s side of the line.

Jake draws good attention to the tension of pacifism. Mike who he references believes that the rules change when you go from individual to state. It certainly seems like that is so. But is this an is/ought distinction. Is Mike talking about how things is and Jake wants to believe in how things ought to be? I think it is Brian McLaren who talks about this in one of his books, how the pacifist is ahead of their time and we shouldn’t look down on that person for it. They want to bring the Kingdom of God in, and they are trying to do that with their commitment to non-violence. Granted it is a very hard thing to hold consistently to. It is easy to believe abstractly in the ideal, but when the violence is personal it is a lot harder.

So where does all this leave us? I guess for the practical answer, we need to choose people like William Wallace. He was trained by his uncle to use his head before he was educated in war. We need someone who isn’t going to let personal grievances or personal gains get in the way of decisions.