Recently I have been thinking a bit about how violence, conflict and war are a part of our human existence; now and throughout the history of humanity. A few different things have spurred on this prolonged train of thought, I think beginning with my study of Lamentations last year (not really directly as part of my thesis work, but sort of a later, side-tangent, personal reflection), as well as watching some television and movies centred around this theme of violent and devastating conflict within humanity, and some books I’ve read over the past year. I feel like I keep being shown that the amount of people who have lived their life on this earth without being seriously affected by the evil of war, or life-threatening circumstances, is proportionately small.
As I was working through Lamentations, and would tell people I was studying it for my thesis, I was often asked what I thought of, or if I had come up with ‘an answer to’ the terrible violence and destruction and desolation within some of its passages – a question, I guess, based somewhat on the assumption that such a portrayal is so ‘extreme’; not at all what we want to find in God’s word, where we seek hope and peace.
However, after some of the accounts about people’s experiences of life in our world I have recently read, heard and seen, I can’t get away from the fact that this ‘extreme’ portrayal is actually what our world is like for so so many people. I find myself reflecting that for me, living a very comfortable life in Sydney, it is so so easy to be blind to, or in complete denial of, the reality of suffering or the threat of imminent death that so many people face around the world today, and have throughout history. Life is so far from peace and health and goodness, and instead everything is unstable, untrustworthy, dangerous. It forces me to ask what on earth could possibly answer this problem. ‘Problem’ hardly even seems like an adequate word to use – so detached, impersonal, trivial…
I found this passage in Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, which just makes my stomach churn.
“Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, ‘Is it an anti-war book?’
‘Yes,” I said. ‘I guess.’
‘You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?’
‘No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’
‘I say, “Why don’t you write and anti-glacier book instead?”‘
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death.”
It is so devastating. The idea that the brokeness, the powerlessness, violence found in humanity was as much as part of a life as the inanimate objects of nature. And that we were inadequate to do a thing about it.
I give thanks to the one who made glaciers that he has given a decisive answer to “plain old death”, as well as wars, and the violence in humanity that brings them about. I am so hanging out for the time when they are completely eradicated and we live life without suffering, hate and fear. True life, thanks to Jesus. I pray that he will help me, while we wait for that, to be a servant to those in need and especially to point them to that hope. I, on my own, am helpless.
