"I Enjoyed The War": A Meme For Sir Carton De Wiart

Thanks to Foreign Policy, I learned that the wikipedia biography of twentieth century British soldier, Sir Carton de Wiart, has gone slightly viral as having the best opening paragraph ever written on wikkipedia. See if you agree.

"Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Paul Ghislain Carton de Wiart[1] VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO (5 May 1880 - 5 June 1963), was a British Army officer of Belgian and Irish descent. He fought in the Boer War, World War I, and World War II, was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip and ear, survived a plane crash, tunneled out of a POW camp, and bit off his own fingers when a doctor wouldn't amputate them. He later said "frankly I had enjoyed the war."

Carton de Wiart was truly a larger than life character. His World War One service began with the gloriously named Somaliland Camel Corps, and he lost an eye while fighting in East Africa. Invalided back to England, he told his Medical Board that he wished to fight in France, which they would only agree subject to "the astonishing solution that if I found I could wear a glass eye they would consider me". De Wiart wondered if this condition was based on the Board's concern that the Germans not think that "we were reduced to sending out one-eyed officers". He returned to his Board wearing "a startling, excessively uncomfortable glass eye", was passed fit for duty, and promptly threw the glass eye out the window of his taxi, adopting the black eye patch which he wore for the rest of his life.

My favourite De Wiart story occured on his second medical return to England, after losing his hand in France. He was approached by a member of his club and asked if he would second the man in a duel against another man who had "been paying undue attention to a lady". De Wiart readily agreed, as the prospect seemed "a lively change from the sick bed" and because he thought "duelling a most excellent solution in matters of the heart". De Wiart then called on man who was giving offence to his friend, and assured him that his friend was deadly serious about pursuing the duel. After being unable to persuade De Wiart to have the duel called off, the man wrote an affadavit promising not to see the lady again. In De Wiart's words, "It was a tame end: it seemed to me that as he did not like the lady enough to fight for her, he needed a thrashing". This story can be found in Max Hasting's Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes and in De Wiart's own autobiography, Happy Odyssey (Cape 1950).

So, Sir Carton de Wiart, you glorious crazy old soldier, this meme's for you:

A Road Full Of Bodies: A Sermon

Preached at Christ The King Chapel, CFB Suffield, Crown Village of Ralston, AB, The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, 14 July, 2013.

Lectionary Texts For Proper 10, Yr C: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Psalm 25:1-10, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

I am almost finished my tour here at Suffield. This is my penultimate sermon here. Next Sunday's will be the last one and then I will be going on hiatus as a weekly preacher while I pursue two years of graduate studies. God willing I will still preach from time to time.

Our gospel reading today, the parable of the Good Samaritan, is Jesus' answer to the question of "who is my neighbour?". The questioner is a pious man who, we sense, is hoping to find reasonable limits on his religious obligation to be concerned with the welfare of others. The parable, the story of a religious outsider who helps a helpless stranger at cost to himself when religious insiders would not bother, seems to say that there are no limits on our obligation to be concerned with the welfare of others. In response to the pious man's question of "who is my neighbour", Jesus' answer is "everyone".

Like many of Jesus' parables which place ethical demands on his followers, this parable asks a lot of us. The Samaritan becomes involved in the life of the stricken man, paying a price in terms of time, convenience, personal goods and money. Regarding the latter, he doesn't even put limits on his risk, simply telling the innkeeper that on his return he will "repay whatever more you spend". While the Good Samaritan story is often mentioned in first aid courses I have taken, the price of concern for others here is considerably more than applying bandages or doing CPR while someone calls 911. The parable hints at a depth of love and self-giving that does not become fully visible to his followers until Jesus goes to the cross.

"A man was going down to Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers". Like the pious man who asks Jesus "who is my neighbour", I find myself hoping that God will allow me reasonable limits on my charity. As long as the parable is about a single body, about one person lying stricken, I can imagine myself rising to the challenge. One person seems doable. I could see myself stopping to help one person, especially if it was an unusual, even shocking occasion, like an accident on the side of a lonely prairie road. But what if the sight of that stricken person wasn't that unusual? What if the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was infested with robbers, and it was an everyday occurrence to find their victims? What if the road was strewn with bodies?

In the opening of his book Exclusion and Embrace, Croatian born theologian Miroslav Volf asks this very question. Exclusion is Volf's word for the human capacity, seemingly innate, to switch off our concern for others and even to seek to harm them because of their difference from us. Volf's own experience of wars in the former Yugoslavia allowed him to see this tendency and its extremes, such as ethnic cleansing, first hand. Ethnic cleansing for Volf is an extreme version of the human tendency to practice exclusion, where "Like the robbers in the story of the Good Samaritan we strip, beat, and dump people somewhere outside our proper space half dead." It is also possible, and indeed more common, argues Volf, for us to practice exclusion by abandonment, excluding others by placing them beyond the reasonable limits of our concern, so that "Like the priest and the Levite ... we simply cross to the other side and pass by, minding our own business".

For Volf as a theologian, exclusion is not simply a human tendency or practice that is to be lamented, avoided, and legislated against. Rather, it is part of our sinful state, meaning the distortion of God's creation and intention for the world. Because sin leads us to see the world in a self-based way, as a ceaseless competition "in a world of scarce resources and contested power", we default to a position where the best we can hope for is that we and those like us come out of this competition on top. This stance leads us to dehumanize others, not in the sense that we would willfully harm others, but in the sense that we can manage to ignore them, and see the suffering of others as the normal state of affairs. As Volf puts it, "I reason: the road from Jerusalem to Jericho will always be littered by people beaten and left half-dead; I can pass - I must pass - by each without much concern."

The opposite of exclusion in Volf's book is what he calls embrace. He defines embrace as the willingness to meet the stranger and to be open to the needs of the stranger without insisting that he or she be like us. This tendency does not come naturally to we who are so thoroughly implicated and grounded in the world of sin and exclusion. Embrace is practiced literally by the Samaritan, who is often depicted in art as physically lifting the beaten man from the ground and placing him on his donkey (or whatever animal it was). Embrace is a stance that is only possible to us because of the self-giving, what Volf calls the self-donation, of Christ. It is only the self-giving of Christ on the cross as the culmination and embodiment of his life, character, and teaching, that breaks the rule of exclusion and allows us to see another way, which the gospels call the kingdom of God.

Left to ourselves, we will not rise to meet the ethical demand of this parable, despite Jesus' final words to his questioner, "Go and do likewise". As Volf would say, we are too deeply implicated in the system of exclusion to successfully meet that challenge. The parable only works if it is seen as an opening, as a partial breaking through of God's kingdom. The key, I think, is Jesus' explanation of the Samaritan's motives that he is "filled with pity". The emotion of pity is often given in the gospels as the motive for Jesus' actions (eg Mk 1:41, Lk 7:11-17. Pity is the dynamic of embrace. It allows us to meet the stranger and to have some glimpse of their condition, some empathic connection that is not exclusion (defined as domination, the desire to remake the stranger into our own image, or destruction, the desire to remove the stranger through violence or neglect). Pity and self-giving are the powers displayed on the cross, for all our sakes. They are intrinsic to the mind of Christ which Paul exhorts us to take on and be transformed by. It is a tall order, to be willing to look on the stranger, to approach them, even embrace them and take on the dirt and blood that might come with the embrace. But that is our calling as followers of Jesus, and it is what he gives us the power to do, however reluctantly, for have we not already stepped into that kingdom ruled by embrace rather than exclusion? As we heard Paul say in our second lesson, "He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins" (Col 1:13-14). Amen.

Is Syria The West's Latest Moral Failing?

First, a small preamble to this post. I have no special expertise in foreign policy. I'm just a guy who watches and reads the news, and who has been trying to make sense of the ongoing debate (which apparently has been resolved, sort of), as to whether the West should intervene in the Syrian Civil War. Last week I posted a review here of UK historian Michael Burleigh's book Moral Combat, an ethical study of good and evil in World War Two. I suggested in my review that Burleigh makes the case that it is still possible to think about war with moral clarity. Thinking of Burleigh in light of what's going on in Syria set this post in motion.

As the death toll climbs towards one hundred thousand in Syria, and some political figures in the West are comparing this moment to our moments of shame in the 1990s when we did nothing in Rwanda or Bosnia, I've been wondering if it is possible to speak coherently of good and evil in the Syrian conflict, and whether there is a moral case for the West to intervene.

Last week Aaron Miller wrote that while the present moment shows much peril in any Western (which in practice wouuld be mostly American)intervention, there is also the fear that history will look back and judge this moment, like Rwanda and Bosnia, a moral failing. "From where we sit today, it is easier to reach the conclusion that Syria is a trap for America. But once Obama's term concludes, there will be a different evaluation. People will forget the details and circumstances --they will only see the dead and the wounded, the refugees and the physical devastation. They will want to know why America wouldn't or couldn't do more. And that's partly why the pressure to do something will grow. Obama knows that Syria is the key story line in the so-called Arab Spring and that his own legacy will suffer unless he moves to counteract the negative appraisals currently gathering force. So, does he want to share the legacy of the last Democratic president, who failed to intervene in Rwanda and almost in Bosnia, too?"

There are lots of military reasons why intervention at the level of the no-fly zone would be a bad idea. It may very well be that the West has shot its bolt in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now has neither the force, the money, nor the political will to project much strength into the region. Nevertheless, as of this weekend, with US President Obama's decision to start arming the Free Syrian Army, it now appears that we are taking some steps into the conflict.

Leaving aside questions of how we proceed tactically, there is still time to ask why we should proceed. Is there an ethically compelling case for acting? The best, and most depressing, Syria analysis I've seen yet on FP comes from Marc Lynch. His article is well worth reading, but here's a quick summary. If the West wants to be idealistic, that is, if we are truly interested in ethics and humanitarian relief, then the only way to end the war and save more lives is to deal with Assad and his backers, including Iran and Russia, to bring about a peace that would allow the Assad regime to survive in some form. Such a policy might be a "stunning success" in terms of ending the fighting. allowing some return of refugees, and opening the door to rebuilding and redefining of boundaries, but from a realist point of view, it would be an "epic disaster" that would strengthen the position the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah triangle and weaken Israel's position.

From a realist point of view, Lynch says, the best thing to do would be to strengthen the rebels and prolong the war, thus bleeding our rivals. "From this perspective, Hezbollah's entry into the fray and the fall of Qusayr are not necessarily a bad thing -- Washington now has an opportunity to strike directly at one of Iran's most valuable assets in the Middle East. The enemy's queen, to use a chess metaphor, has now moved out from behind its wall of pawns and is open to attack. Fear of a rebel defeat -- and of a victory for Hezbollah and Iran -- should squeeze more cash and military support out of the Arab Gulf, Europe, and the United States." Unfortunately, this view pretty much guarantees more deaths, more displacement, and the spread of sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias throughout the Middle East. This course of action leads to a future of proxy warfare in the middle east for a generation, and from a humanitarian point of view is morally bankrupt.

So we have two depressing options. Idealism says to pursue a diplomatic, humanitarian solution at the expense of regional security and the balance of power. Realism says we should stoke a proxy war that will kill more people and further destabilize the region, and hope that by degrading our rivals something better might emerge.

To resolve this dilemma, I thought I would go back to Michael Burleigh thinks about Syria. His most recent comment, from April of this year, wasn't encouraging. Speaking of his own country, the UK, he writes, "Cameron’s government is once again full of moralising outrage, raising fears that it might soon be willing to send our war-weary forces into yet another hopeless conflict in the Middle East. Why this sectarian civil war concerns us, rather than Arab armies we regularly equip with billions of pounds worth of high-tech weaponry, remains a mystery to many British people. And if [we send] in troops, the result would be nothing less than a catastrophe." Clearly, Burleigh does not think this is an historic moment to rival Munich.

It may well be that, as Conrad Black wrote in yesterday's National Post, only the peoples of the region, Turks, Persians, and Arabs, can sort out the future of the region, and if so, the most we can do is to provide humanitarian aid where possible. I wonder, though, if that pragmatism will be enough for the ghosts of Rwanda and Bosnia, whose presence, however insubstantial, still haunts us as we debate what we should do in Syria.

For Christians, I think our responses to this terrible situation are somewhat more straightforward. There remain almost a million refugees from this war and their numbers seem to be increasing. Several of the denominational magazines that come across my desk now feature advertisements appealing for donations to organizations working with presons displaced by the war in Syria. As the Canadian Presbyterian magazine put it, indifference is not an option. Besides supporting these organizations as part of our own stewardship, we need to remind our elected representatives that the cause of displaced persons matters to us. Now is also a good time for Christians to reach out to local Moslem communities, and pray with them. Finally, we need to pray for our leaders, that God give them the courage and the wisdom to choose peace over the temptations of realism, security, and war without end.