There is such a lot of madness around in the world these days that it’s hard to know how to deal with it. For a poor scribbler like myself, it must be a forlorn hope that my few words can make even the least little contribution to straightening things out. Our minds are all but buried under whole avalanches of words. You may well ask, on what basis do I venture to add yet more, and ask you to read them? I can only tell you that these little pieces come into my head in the early hours, unbidden, and I feel impelled to share them.
What have they got to do with the Gannetsway? Well, Europe is rather too big a mouthful for me. I could not begin to keep track, for instance, of the politics and media of all the countries of Europe, and neither would I have the interest to do so. But, on the other hand, my own country of Ireland, and indeed Great Britain, are too, well, insular by themselves. The essential Gannetsway countries of Ireland, Great Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, taken together with the catholic sea, provide me with a patria, a portal to the universal, which suits me; in my inadequate way, I try to follow what goes on here and use this basis for taking my fixes, my triangulation.
Still preoccupied with Islam and Isis, this piece at least ends on a more hopeful note than it begins!
Advent Hope, 2015.
I have previously expressed my dismay at the way in which the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre. President Hollande, making scant progress with his economic and social objectives, seems to believe he has to counter the threat from the National Front with rushing about the world, his jour de gloire come round, thumping the drum for all his allies to join in the bombing of Syria.
Not to be outdone, the House of Commons has voted to do so as well. We don’t have to look far for conclusive evidence that their leading men have lost the plot, with the honourable exception of Mr Corbyn and those who voted with him. Both the Foreign Secretary and his Shadow saw fit to compare the battle with Isis with the Hitler War, and actually compared the sending of bombers to Syria with the Battle of Britain! Quite frankly, from the point of view of ‘the Few’ who fought that battle, and as it happens I knew one of them, this can only be described as impertinent. They fought, and many lost their lives, in a desperate battle against a threat of imminent invasion, and it was the invaders who were doing the bombing.
They were battling against the odds, but this Syrian affair is entirely asymmetric. The massively superior resources and technology of the advanced nations are pitted against a few crazed men, whose principal asset is indifference to human life, their own included. This needless to say is not a weapon that bombs can destroy; what they do do is promote the conditions on which that attitude thrives. The terrorists are left with even less to lose and more hatred of the West. From the point of view of protecting our own populations from terrorist attack, the bombing is likely to be counter-productive. It is the proverbial stick stirring the wasps’ nest.
However, Arabs may already have plenty of understandable reasons for hating us. Beyond the matter of Israel, and divers problems like the fact that the developed world bears the responsibility of slowly cooking them by way of global warming, we exercise a cultural kind of colonialism that strikes at their religion and culture, their very operating system.
At this point Mr Cameron solemnly accuses the likes of Mr Corbyn (and myself) of ‘sympathising with terrorists’. We are told that they ‘reject our values’; but precisely what are these values that they reject? I noticed a typical western reporter actually citing homosexual marriage in there, along with, it may be inferred, the rest of the ‘progressive’ agenda, such as our ‘rights’ to divorce and abort babies. Having disposed of fidelity, as of the permanent, generative and heterosexual aspects of marriage, we also apparently feel free to dispose of its offspring, and this is all supposed to be a matter of ‘western values’? But these are not values at all; rather they are anti-values. As a result there is in fact an appalling spiritual void at the heart of contemporary culture, that manifests itself in all kinds of self-destructive behaviour, which hardly need to be enumerated.
Real values are such as truth/honesty, justice/mercy, fidelity/peace, sustainability and life itself; and as a matter of fact they may be cherished by people of all faiths and none. However deeply buried, they are present in all human beings, even the Isis crowd; the task of people of good-will is to seek them out, especially in their enemies, and see what can be done to apply them to the horrendous difficulties of actual living. We may then be surprised by the potential for joyous transformation in us all. It is in the struggle to realise true values that friendship is formed and brotherhood discovered.
On the other hand it is painful for anyone to find that some people are intent on sweeping away their version of value. Admittedly, the fact being that breakdowns occur between differing narratives of what is of value, the first thing that anyone in a state of war does is to deprive the other side of their humanity, by denying them any true values, as opposed to our own good selves. In this case, we must first of all get very clear about what our values really are, and then go on to doing our best to appreciate those of our opponents and seeing if it is possible to find common ground.
For my part, I believe that it would help the West’s case no end if we junked the anti-values of the progressive agenda. It is precisely these that give power to Muslim fanatics: they have found our Achilles’ heel and how to prick it. Furthermore, the West’s amnesia about theology complicates the problem of conversing with Muslims no end. The sane way to tackle our problem with them is to begin by renewing and redoubling dialogue with them. They are the only people who can effectively deal with their own fanatics, as we have to deal with ours.
Perhaps the worst feature of the whole business is that one suspects the likes of President Hollande and Prime Minister Cameron know very well that the reasons they put forward for sending their bombers are bogus. These reasons seem to me to have more to do with prestige and influence and selling arms and not letting the Russians have it all their own way than anything else. There is the risk that the West will be sucked into a war behind the Sunnis, while the Russians and eventually the Chinese fall in with the Shias; the world shambled into the First World War on an equally bizarre basis! I don’t really understand the Shia/Sunni thing, but once one tries to identify the Kingdom of God with any earthly set-up, one is bound to run into this kind of problem.
Let us try to clarify the real issues. I am no theologian, but just possibly a seaman’s eye is good for spotting the essential ones, rather than submerging them in oceans of words. One such matter of metaphysics has to be the question, ‘what comes first, the acorn or the idea of an oak tree?’ Scientifically and logically, it would seem, it has to be the idea, and how can one account for this but by believing in God? Thus far, we can agree with our Muslim friends; but whereas they may be stuck in the desert with nothing but the idea of fresh green growth to torment their minds, we in Europe have it everywhere under our noses, even if we fail to give it the appreciation it deserves. However, in the very same reciprocal movement, in the same dynamic relationship between God and his creation, during Advent Catholics sing a wonderful old hymn to Our Lady, which includes the incredibly tight Latin words: ‘Tu quae genuisti, natura mirante, tuum sanctum genitorem.’ I make bold to render them inadequately: You who bore, with nature looking on astounded, your own holy creator.
It would seem to be impossible for Muslims to accept the paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation, whereby Almighty God became a humble human being who died on the Cross; however, this difficulty does have its counterpart in the difficulty that Western civilisation has with the absolute and transcendent authority of God. Perhaps being a seaman also helps me to imagine what effect the desert has on people, the sea being a kind of desert; and surely, whatever else it is, Islam is primarily a religion of the desert; a land where the sun, that most powerful physical image of God, burns in the sky but little grows; it may be contrasted with temperate Europe, where the sun is often obscured by cloud but lots of things do grow upon the land.
We may insist that God in his mercy does not choose to assert His authority by force, and it is not for any human being to do so; we may reserve the right to resist any such attempt, meeting force with force if necessary. Much closer to the spirit of Jesus it is, in humility and mutual forgiveness, to work hopefully for that realm of truth, peace and justice which some call Islam, some the New Jerusalem or the Kingdom of God!
Joe Aston, December, 2015.
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