'Tis the wedding season! Earlier in the month our daughter Rebekah got married; yesterday our niece got married in the UK (which, sadly, I missed because of college commitments back home). In the early fall we will attend two more weddings of hopeful twenty-somethings. I confess that I love weddings. So much love. So much expectation. So much anticipation. The loving commitment of the wedding day is always hopeful. This "love in the air" caused me to read again Solomon's Song of Songs. I like to read it in a beautiful edition I gave to Jane on our first wedding anniversary. In it we pressed a few of the flowers from Jane's bouquet, then some rose petals from that first anniversary. Jane and I wrote our first book on the Song of Songs, The Kiss of Intimacy (1995). At that time we took the poem to be an allegory of the soul's love relationship with the divine. This week I read it, as it was likely written, as a subtle erotic celebration of love.The voice of my beloved! behold he cometh,Leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.My beloved is like a roe or a young hart:Behold, he standeth behind our wall,He looketh in at the windows,He showeth himself through the lattice.My beloved spake, and said unto me,'Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.'
Love and war show humanity at its best and at its worst. Acts of courage, dedication and self-sacrifice shown by those in the extremity of war are unequaled in the mundane round of everyday life. My student's will read journalist Chris Hedges' book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. In some strange way, war gives a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary. War is glorious technicolor. Everyday life a dull greyscale. Hedges wrestles with the horror and awfulness he has seen as a war journalist and the sense of emptiness he has felt when he is not in a war zone.But, clearly, war shows us at our worst. Philosophers and theologians make distinctions between that which is acceptable in war "ordinary killing" and that which is malum in se—an evil in itself. In international law we separate ordinary acts of war from "war crimes." To kill a soldier with gun or bomb is acceptable; to use rape as a weapon of war is malum in se. A thousand pound bomb is acceptable when used by the military, and disallowed when used by the insurgent. Big bombs are fine, but weapons of mass destruction not. For the soldier to bayonet the enemy until he dies is acceptable. When the crazed citizen does the same in a cinema it is considered an evil. Distinctions are necessary, for without them then anything goes and we slip further into the abyss. But distinctions are hard to make. The violation of human flesh is always an evil.Yet, love and war bleed into each other. I watched again the movie My Boy Jack (Director David Haig, 2008). The movie is based on Haig's stage play about John (Jack) Kipling and his family—his father, writer and British Empire apologist Rudyard Kipling, his American mother and his protective sister—during the First World War. Jack is killed aged 18 years 1 day. The story shows the complexity of love between all the family members, but also shows the power of love of country. Jack is sent to war in the name of love for England and Empire. "I vow to thee my country, all earthly things above," goes the hymn by Cecil Spring Rice:
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love.The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
So goes the mythic love of country. But how misguided. Mythic patriotic love separates "us" from "them." "They" become less than human, mere things to be destroyed. Such love sent a generation of young men British, French, German (including Jack Kipling) to their deaths in the futility of imperial greatness amid the myths of various nationalisms. Such love has a certain nobility to it (at least we tell ourselves it has). But what if the ancient myth Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country—is merely a phantasmagoria. What if the myth is a dream we tell each other to give the barbarity and foolishness of war a meaning it cannot bear? What if such is misguided, misdirected love, love at the service of the ignoble disguised as the noble? Still, it's the weddings season and I will enjoy with my young relatives and friends the hope that true love will conquer all. This, too, is a myth we tell ourselves. Yet, it is surely a better myth than that celebrated by Kipling and Rice.+Ab. Andy
Posted with Blogsy