Art of War

Today’s service at the First Unitarian Society in Newton was put together by our new music director Anne Watson Born. She asked me to do the “reading,” which I was happy to do. It was Denise Levertov’s “Misnomer.”

They speak of the art of war,
but the arts
draw their light from the soul’s well,
and warfare
dries up the soul and draws its power
from a dark and burning wasteland.
When Leonardo
set his genius to devising
machines of destruction he was not
acting in the service of art,
he was suspending
the life of art
over an abyss,
as if one were to hold
a living child out of an airplane window
at thirty thousand feet.

It pushed a lot of buttons for me.

Not least of all fired by a recent spate of postings at the UU ministers’ listserv regarding guns and target shooting, and the happy opinion shared by a dozen or so contributors that just too many religious liberals are just too fired up in their opposition to guns, or in favoring gun control – it really wasn’t all that clear to me. There was also a little lip turning at “political correctness,” which in the circles within which I move I’ve noticed of late often precedes the expression of one obnoxious opinion or another. Makes it okay, apparently…

I’m not suggesting my gun fancying co-religionists are standing for violence or some other obnoxiousness. Although the other part of the kick off for the conversation had something to do with “the art of Zen and…” to my mind a noxious turn of phrase signifying that something or other is going to be made spiritual. Or, perhaps, profitable…

Thanks to its history Zen must share space with violence, if for no other reasons than in China it is associated with martial arts and in Japan with militarism. And now thanks to Robert Persig Zen is apparently irretrievably connected to the art of just about anything…

As a practicing Zen Buddhist with little sympathy for guns (although I admit I share the general male attraction to things violent, and guns are so shiny, and so loud…) I’d been put in a bit of a bad mood by the thread on the list.

And then Levertov’s poem floated before my imagination.

It does seem to speak to the dilemma of our human condition.

The spirit soars, a bird toward heaven. And inevitably, a wing tangles in a branch, and our bodies tumble back to earth.

Spirit and violence, art and war.

Like love and hate.

Life and death.

Leonardo put his art to violence. And Levertov called him on it.

Such is our shame, it seems.

And our hope, it appears, if we are to have it, must find room for both…