"Where two or more are gathered I too am among you." 
~ Math 18:20 

When I think of a bulwark I think of massive structures.  Giant fortifications and enormous earthen levees come to mind. Towers to keep out threats.  Something we build for protection.  A wall garrisoned with troops and heavy artillery.   Oddly enough levees fail and walls are breached, so what exactly is the bulwark of our spirituality? 

Some questions that have arisen in this inquiry are: 

• Why is a spiritual bulwark even necessary?
• What would constitute a spiritual bulwark? 
  

Our modern age is full of things that former generations didn't have to deal with.  In times past there was work, family, god and allegiance to some fiefdom or lord or city-state.  Now  the attacks on our spiritual body are numerous, pernicious and constant.  Two that come to mind are TV and the internet; both of which are Pandora's boxes that deliver a host of attacks deep into our psyche about everything from peer pressure, medical ailments, legal problems, the economy, politics, war, race, and on and on.  Most of which cannot be verified and are quite honestly a stream of lies. 

How many of us are glued to traumatube?  

These information streams (if you can call them that) also have embedded inside them a horrific idea -- materialism.  That somehow the fundamental substance of our nature can be reduced down to the known.  Molecules, atoms, and the working of physics.  We have been so trained to think (no, far too generous a word) that if we only knew more about prions, quarks, or this or that molecule that science will save us.  TRUST THE SCIENCE.   The new god.  

But not everything is reducible to the sum of its parts.   This idea is absurd on its face and yet we continue to tear things apart trying to find "THE THING" that is important when the whole is what we ought to be focused on.  The conjunction and interplay of the parts.  Let's take water for example.  Hydrogen and Oxygen separated are explosive and dangerous elements yet together they are essential to life.  There is a syzygy at work we don't understand.  It is observable and common knowledge but ask a chemist why and they can't really offer an explanation; only abstract theories why things are the way they are. 

I propose that what holds us together spiritually is community.   More than a bulwark.  More akin to threads in a mycelial network. It is intelligent beyond our understanding and contains many nodes of knowledge.  When two or more are gathered in a spiritual community another being is present. 

Yes, there is some individual work to be done.  For that alignment of the temporal and the spiritual the individual must say "yes" and acknowledge that there is more going on than meets the eye. Once that psychological barrier is breached whole other worlds can open -- and do. 

~ Joseph Olejak

For the last year I have watched in horror as humanity has inflicted one wound after another on the body of the earth and on certain segments of humanity.  The maps of Gaza are a hellscape. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/09/g-s1-27175/israel-hamas-war-gaza-map

I have reflected upon these wounds and prayed often about what can be done to heal them.  If healing is even possible.  As Quakers we believe in restorative justice and maybe that is the problem ... in the areas where war crimes are being committed there has never been a true reckoning of the parties; only force delivering oppression.  The wounds never heal.  

One thought I've had is about wounds that are bound up too early; they fester and open up again often worse than the original injury. 

Our political bodies have failed us.  By taking sides in conflicts they have caused extreme polarization.  In doing so they subvert the natural healing process of conflict and perpetuate it. Like the recent phrase by Robert Work, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, "de-escalation through escalation."  It is as if he tore a page out of 1984.  War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.  The wound stays open.  Each wound inflicted is another insult that leads to another wound in a perpetual process of hurt, pain, and scarring.  

In the human body a scar closes a wound and then gradually disappears over time.  I cut my hand as a child when a horse I was leading spooked and slammed a barn door on my hand.  For many years that scar was a visible reminder of the pain, but also of what I did wrong.  Never lead a horse with a lead line wrapped around your hand.  It was a lesson.  And yet that cicatrix faded over time.  I can't even see it today.  My point is I had the injury, I felt the pain, I suffered and learned the lesson and now the scar has served its purpose and is gone.  

But is humanity learning?  Or do we just keep believing in the dark fairy tale that might makes right?  That somehow we can kill our problems out of existence.  That maybe genocide is the answer.  The question then arises "where does the genocide stop?"  Can any voice become a target of genocide? We could remember the words of Martin Niemöller

     "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
     Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
     Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
     Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
     —Martin Niemöller

If this is the case, we must come to understand that some wounds will never heal and that is a tragedy of untold proportions.  I fear that the emotional wounds of war may never heal because the post traumatic stress of those events are burned deeply into the psyche of those who experienced those disasters. The healing that might be available to the next generation is a life without fear of man made disasters. For that we must demand an end to war and remain steadfast in our faith.  Christ has given us an assignment to love.  We must be as fierce in the completion of that assignment as the warmongers are in adopting an ethos of destruction.  

It is the only way.  

In the end all wars end across a conference table.  How about we skip the carnage and just get to an agreement?  The sooner the better.  

~ Joseph Olejak