Cure Thy children’s warring madness
Bend our pride to Thy control [
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This is a brutal environment. Day after day of minus 20 or worse. The days are short, the light milky, vulnerable almost hesitant. As if it were uncertain. There’s a kind of oppression, or certainly depression that crouches at our doors waiting for the slightest of invitations to come in.
Not helped by the news. Another Canadian soldier killed in Kandahar, the woman on CBC said, bringing our total to 107. What are we doing? Israeli shells bombing schools, UN refuge centres. Why do we do this to each other? It is a kind of insanity, a warring madness, the stupid unthinking response of people who have internalized and held too many resentments. That’s the trouble with living, with loving, these bloody resentments. We build up a repository of them, collect them like coins or stamps. We feel hurt, we resent, we retaliate, the other gets hurt, resents, retaliates, and we start again and soon its all just a mess of resentments and retaliations, and we trap ourselves.
I think Fosdick was on to something with his next line, “bend our pride to Thy control” - it’s pride that tells us we mustn’t let go of the resentments, they’re ours, we earned them, but its like mercury in the food chain, if we keep on holding on to them, they just poison us, and we end up literally or metaphorically bombing schools, killing innocence/innocents.
And maybe there’s some other way to bend our pride, but I don’t know it, it’s only when I finally, sickened by my own toxins, turn to God, and offer the bit of pride that I’ve been clutching. Offer the resentments. It’s then that I can let them go. Stupid as it sounds I’m resenting the weather these days, telling myself how hard done by I am with this bloody cold stuff. I just add them to the collection of hurts from my marriage, my work, my home, my history, my whatever.
… the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat. [
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And if I stop and think, with even a moment of clarity, I realize that it’s all foolishness, I don’t need to do it.
The curious thing is that when I let them go, these resentments, release them into God’s hands, shortly thereafter I usually realize it wasn’t really the other that’s been giving me trouble, it’s been me all along. And I don’t have to do it to myself. I know where most of the toxins in my life came from, I put them there. And when I let them go, entrust these moments, these relationships, my life, my future to God’s oddly shaped hands, suddenly I can breathe again, walk again, enjoy again. But to get there I’ve got to deal with this pride stuff, reshape it, bend it to Divine control, release it to the Source, whatever. A fairly simple step really. But it changes everything. Could work in Gaza too.