Have I Got a Story for You!
“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men [sic] from doing things men [sic] have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” (The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien, 1990)
The Bible is a true war story. It is not about the battle or battles between Good and Evil. It is the story of the battle of all battles: God versus God. It is God who is set out to destroy the wonderful creation this same God made because this creation, these created beings, simply will not trust God to take care of them and instead continually take things into their own hands and destroy everybody and everything in their path. This Creator God, then, versus the same Creator God who simply can’t destroy creation because God loves it, them, all too much.
You cannot find moral rectitude here, try as we might, and oh my goodness do we try, incessantly and insistently. We try so hard to find it and name it because if we don’t eek out some sliver of a silver lining that gives us some personal agency and ability to act to legitimize ourselves we are lost to being pawns in a game, this war, that determines our identity, belonging, meaning and destiny, all with the total inability to do anything about it.
The Christian Scripture (Bible) is filled with stories of this story of death and resurrection, this God’s violent destruction and God’s non-violent resistance to the destruction.
If you tell this war story and search for a moral or a morality to which to attach yourself so that you can accomplish some balance or get your bearings in the chaos in which you find yourself in your life, you will not be alone in that search. Most of what passes as the Christian Church today is right there with you, using the story to prop up its own Rectitude and Righteousness (and, too, at the expense of those who think and feel and act differently than they do).
But if you realize that this War Story has no moral and indeed, no morality, you are in a position to know the truth and (as Jesus was recorded as saying in John 8) this truth will set you free.
