Why Do Men Fight?

“I’ve seen some bad fights break out during weather like this”

                                          ~ Louisiana farmer, circa 1976

I don’t mean to be gender exclusive on this one, but it’s just that I’m a guy thinking again today about why guys behave the way they do. It all started with a little rain. I had the day off and a couple of outdoor projects planned for the day. A thunder storm put those projects on hold and I sat on the front porch watching the rain come down.

While sitting there watching the rain, I remembered a brief conversation I had with a farmer one summer when I was working in Louisiana. There had been over a week of steady rains. “I’ve seen some bad fights break out during weather like this,” he said. “Farmers ain’t got nothin’ to do. One time they was some guys in a card game in the back of Jake’s General Store – weather just like we’re havin’ now – and two fellas got into an argument over who made the best combine. Before you know’d it they was beatin' each other up. Folks just get frustrated when there’s nothin’ to do. It don’t make no sense.”

I can understand the frustration. Even though a farmer wants rain, when it goes too long, they can’t be out doing what needs to be done in the field. Then there is the danger of loss of crops with ground that is too wet. People become acutely aware that things happen that are beyond their control. Add to that the fact that they probably won’t be getting much of a pay check for the week if they are hired hands. That can lead to highly irritable people. Many who are in such situations will find healthier ways to let off steam, but there are others who will simply give in to aggressive impulses.

Most people I know today are not farmers, but most still find themselves in situations that are beyond their control, especially in today’s economy. We hear about fights and scuffles almost every day. Fans get into fights at sporting events, violence occurs in housing projects. When I think about this impulse to fight, I also am distressed over my own country’s seemingly constant war activity.

After Viet Nam, I thought that we would see less military action, but that has not been the case.  I was opposed to the first Gulf War, and have been opposed to our subsequent military actions. After 9/11, we were shocked and didn’t really know what to do. We did have guns and tanks, so we responded by going to war. Except you need another country to go to when you wage war, and terrorism is not a country. Iraq was a country, and they were in that general vicinity (and they had oil reserves to boot), so off we went.

I was encouraged that many protested that action, crowds marched in the streets chanting “No blood for oil!” The Quakers had a campaign called “War is not the answer,” and I saw many of those signs in people’s yards. In spite of those voices, we as a nation went to war yet again. That was ten year ago. We are still fighting.

I am sure that two guys fighting in a back room in Louisiana over who makes the best combine resulted in some collateral damage, perhaps some clean up and repair expense, but when a nation goes to war, the collateral damage is exponential. Why are we so willing to spend billions of dollars we don’t have on war when we are so unwilling to spare any tax money on schools, healthcare, and infrastructure here at home?  

There is no simple solution, or else we would have found it by now. Nevertheless, I think that if we can give people meaningful work to do (rather than leaving them idle with no prospects) that will lead to a decrease in violence. If we as a country can imagine a national ideal other than fear of the enemy, perhaps we can curb the military action.

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, “There was never a good war or a bad peace.” Destructive fighting on a personal level or on a national level is not in anyone’s best interest. Maybe we should all just stop and ask ourselves why we are fighting. Backing away to allow some perspective, we just might say, along with that farmer I met down in Louisiana, “It don’t make no sense.”

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You may be interested in checing out the Friends Committee on National Legislation at http://fcnl.org and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2212023534&v=info

Happy Grass ~ First Draft

I was out cutting grass this morning, noticing how quickly it had shot up this week. After an unusually hot and dry May and June, we finally got a little reprieve with some afternoon rains this past week. I said to myself, “This looks like happy grass!” Right away I thought that would be a good title for a jazz instrumental. “If I were a musician,” I continued with my inner dialogue, “I would sit down and write a jazz number and call it Happy Grass. By the time I was finished mowing the lawn, I decided that even though I’m not a writer of music, I am a writer of words. Why not write a poem about it? So here it is – this is the first draft, so you know it will change.

Happy Grass

It was a tentative but tenacious hold

That she had on that dry, dusty piece of earth.

Her blades low upon the ground

Growth had slowed – all but stopped –

Conserving her life and energy.

Does she speak to her sisters

During the dry time?

Or is the mere presence of the other

All the assurance one needs?

After a season of drought,

Weeks of endurance,

 A few days of afternoon thunderstorms

Refreshed the land.

Without hesitation

She stood up and danced.

Blades, stalks and seeds shot upward.

So quickly a grace of green joined hands

And swayed in the wind.

She and her sisters

Were ever ready to rejoice

While always willing to endure.

After I cut the grass, I went out later to use the weed eater to trim the places where the mower can’t reach. The weed-eater wasn’t working properly because the little blade wasn’t trimming the line the way it should as the line was released. I said to myself, “Ah, my blade’s too dull.” Right away I thought that would be a great title for a jazz instrumental…

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Reflections on Trinity Sunday

The visiting priest said he accepted the invitation to give the homily weeks in advance, without realizing it would be Trinity Sunday. “Tradition among clergy is that on Trinity Sunday,” he told us, “you ask either the youngest or the most gullible priest to give the homily.” Nevertheless, he did a decent job in his remarks. He emphasized that the early Christians were finding that the old language was not sufficient to describe their new experience; hence they eventually came up with the concept of trinity to describe one God whom they had experienced in three personas of Father God, Jesus their Lord, and the Holy Spirit whom they encountered on Pentecost and also in daily life on earth since that time. He also made a point that attempts to explain the Trinity have never really been intellectually clear of particularly satisfying – leaving us to live with the mystery.

I have heard other theologians explain that the primary need for a doctrine of the Trinity is the belief in the divinity of Christ. If Jesus was the divine Son of God, and if there is one God, then we are led to the need for Trinity. I have an idea about why Christian culture has latched onto the concept of Trinity.  The key affirmation in declaring that Jesus the human was also divine lies at the heart of the idea that should be truly good news. The good news that came into consciousness is that humanity shares in the very nature of God. The good news is not just that “God became man (human).” The flip side is that in the person of Jesus we were able to realize that there is something divine about humanity.

I realize that these are heretical-sounding words. Meister Eckhart was declared a heretic because of his views on the union of humanity with the godhead. Church authority relied very much on the sin of human nature creating a chasm between us and God, allowing for adequate political control over the masses. Eckhart, however, saw that the good news of Christ really was good news, not condemnation.

So even though we as a people have never been able to say it out loud, when the Church created the doctrine of the Trinity, the people were acknowledging on some level that there is something truly divine about being human. We could say it about one human, Jesus, but we have some trepidation about saying that the very being of God lies within us as well. This is in spite of the fact that Jesus himself pointed to that reality of God-within-us. George Fox spoke of the light within – that spark of God that exists in everyone. Some radicals followed his lead in the Quaker movement but most saw that concept as too much beyond the pale of orthodoxy.

I would suggest that today, just as some 2000 years ago, we are finding that the old language is no longer adequate to describe our experience of life, or our encounter with the divine. I believe we can take that light that dwells within and find new ways to express the wonder that we see. It would be foolish to think that even a new language could do that experience justice, just as “Trinity” never quite described what people of faith have actually encountered. But that is why, as I have stated before, I prefer the wet fertility of poetry over the dry futility of doctrine.

Hercules

By Charles Kinnaird

Being half man and half god

You showed us something about ourselves.

The earthy and the divine in us

So mix and dance within

That we can see the joys of our mundane community,

The terror of madness,

And on occasion we can know

That we are able to fulfill impossible labors.

Being very god

And very man

You once (if only briefly)

Held the world on your shoulders.

Haven't we all?

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