RADICAL MEANDERINGS

I'm reading a Jack Reacher novel, and I've come to a fact I was blissfully unaware of about the tribal women of Afghanistan.  They apparently are more feared than the Afghan male soldiers. Reacher, unfortunately, spells out several of their methods of torture. They are beyond anything I've ever heard of...it being a given I know less than nothing about torture and that's more than I want to know.

He quotes lines from a poem by Rudyard Kipling "about failed offensives and groaning abandoned battlefield casualties and cruel Afghan tribeswomen with knives. When you’re wounded on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your God like a soldier.”

All of this is by way of explaining my thought on awakening this morning: Is it the ruling consciousness of those torturing women, not the fierce fighting men with weapons, but the cruel consciousness of the women, that keeps Afghanistan poor, behind the modern world, and unconquered?

[I always hate to parade my ignorance but that seldom stops me...so following is my pitiful take on history.]

Is it that consciousness, that non-feeling consciousness, that turned back the Crusaders a thousand years ago (give or take), Russia some thirty-forty years ago, and has kept America in battle these last few years? All those who went to battle went with weapons made by man. Any weapon made by man can be defeated with another bigger, better and badder weapon made by man. And war goes on.

I believe that the human mind cannot long ponder that non-feeling consciousness without trying to overcome it...and the reasoning mind will invariably try to overcome by winning thus becoming like "them," only worse.

I believe, too, that an inhumane, godless consciousness can only be surrendered, not conquered, and surrendered only to God's grace, his love, its compassion. We are God's hands and feet on this earth and thus carriers of her love. Imagine.

Imagine loving our enemy as ourselves...and there it is. That's the open invitation for their surrender...not to us, not to our way, but to God, to love, to compassion.

If the reasoning mind spirals down to win for self, and the spiritual mind gives up to bring peace for all, why not give peace a chance?

Lift up mine eyes....

Thank you.