Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
I have been listening to the St. Matthew Passion (Karl Richter conducting) just now and saw for the first time (!) an obvious and primal significance: that the first stable recognition of Jesus as the Christ is by a Roman Soldier and members of his command (!!!) just after Jesus gives up his spirit. How important this is for us to notice, that it is Soldiers who first CAN recognize the Presence of God tangibly in another human being. The movie Ben Hur includes a scene — when Ben Hur is marching to the galleys — which makes the same point.
This is not a time for people of no faith. They cannot find any reason to be happy.
Our President has had a call and a definite sense of what to do about it and neither is related to his fundamentalist religious trappings. The family are deep New England Episcopalians, including GWB. It is not Rumsfeld or any bad guy controlling or giving him insane advise. It is possible that even Bill Clinton, in his shoes, would have responded as George as done. Very possible. The position makes awareness, as Lincoln also found out, and the Master can make the servants in the White House rise to it. It is about that simple. There are no restrictions on what God can or should do.
I think maybe Hanson at National Review has grasped the fact that transformation is under way. Tectonic shift is not the accurate metaphor for what is happening, although the cynics feel it is. To feel it as such gives them lots of fodder for articles. During transformation every object is prime candidate for cynicism because its existence is known to be impermanent.
Transformation is more accurate, and in all aspects of life and dimensions of existence, including weather! One could say that man’s spiritual creativity is breaking out from or peeling off and mirthfully casting away as mere playthings the various straight-jackets that tyrants around the globe have sought to impose on him.
We are seeing this in all three functions of man’s spirit: religion, culture and morality. All of these are undergoing transformation, under both human and divine causality. It is a curious time to pray … what for? … all is in hand and proceeding through transformation we cannot specify more than being faithful to the promise — the assurance of all religions — that it is soteriological, which in fact it is.
Still, Tillich — who saw this in the 1950s — has convinced me that we should pray the classic three elements of prayer: adoration, intercession and petition. For, prayer is a necessary and unavoidable response to revelatory experience — comprising both ecstasy and miracle — and so we should do it properly, employing those three elements of prayer.
Soldiers constitute a class of people who transcend what they are presently doing. There is a lack of military experience of our current civilian leadership. In this situation, it becomes even more important that the highest levels of leadership in the military speak out and “lay their stars” on the table when they see misguided acts — Pharaphrase of a line from a friend.
Traditionally, the civilian leadership tended to be victorious or at least experienced military leadership and/or families with a deep history of military experience. Many kings were seasoned battle leaders, all over the world, because they have the look of don’t [mess] with me. Examples include Rama, Alexander and Asoka.
There is another aspect to this. Jesus was in fact of a royal line of warrior kings and throughout the New Testament there are references to his lineage in this particular. During his ministry phase for example, he compliments another Roman Centurion — possibly but not conclusively the same one referred to just after he expires on the cross — for faith more than he found in Israel. The Messianic passages of the Old Testament refer to a royal warrior and are applied in the New Testament to Jesus to make the point that he himself is of a line of victorious soldier kings — House of David.
The importance of this tends not to impress us today unless we mentally place ourselves in the First Century Mediterranean world and think of what it would have meant to us, in all walks of life, then. It was a very, very, very powerful and therefore comforting assurance, especially when transformed, as it was by Jesus himself, from a mere political kingship to a spiritual one that was based in man’s own essence, which he shares with God and which transcended the bounds both of nature and of history, and certainly of culture, politics, morality and intellect. This was a most liberating Presence, the cultural, liturgical and theological responses to which came to be called Christianity.
All of the European thrones, with the British one preeminently, followed by the Russian one, claim lineage from Jesus through his children. In other words, they all claim the authority of divinely anointed or sanctioned warrior kingship.
The eschatological language describing the responsibilities of the Messiah — the Soldier/Governor/Protector of the weak/Maker of justice/Upholder of law — in both Old and New Testaments is premised on the Messiah — in Greek, Christ, meaning, anointed or chrismed — being of royal, kingly — that is, Soldierly — lineage.
Only soldiers have penal authority. ONLY SOLDIERS! The structure of being itself makes this the fact and none can alter it. The principle reason the heresy of Communism — and it is a heresy since it poses as an improved Christianity, obsoleting the latter — is such a disaster is that it specifically places non-soldiers or non-military persons — ultimately street thugs, the so-called “intelligentsia” or “elites” — in positions to exercise penal authority. This causes the chaos Communism is — viz. Pol Pat, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Harvard Faculty.
The importance of that is the centrality of the soldier in the administration and dispensation of this world’s affairs, and correlatively, the imperative soldiers carry to ensure they sacrifice their own lives, as Jesus did and as any great King does, to make a point and ensure a course correction they feel is essential. In Sanskritic terms, this — and other specific duties — is called “Kyshatria Dharma:” the soldier’s duty.
All the Avathars of the Lord are Kyshatrias. All the founders of religions — and most of the founders of monastic orders — are soldiers or born into military families.
This is not to say soldiers are unambiguously the answer to religious, cultural and moral problems. Behind them are their teachers, and it is in the healthy interplay of these two professionals, both of a special calling, that happy, healthy, prosperous civilizations expand and prosper. Certainly our Army’s Officer Code of taking care of the troops rather than our Navy’s and Air Force’s Officer Code of being taken care of by the troops is the Christ-ian — legitimate, proper, true ruler’s — attitude toward the administration of mankind’s affairs.
Thus, stars on the table is entirely correct! They may be right, they may be wrong, but no matter, they are duty-bound to lay their stars on the table when they are convinced beyond doubt that a course of events is improper. GEN (R) Barry McCaffrey said the Vietnam Era Chiefs of Staff should have done this over what was happening to our Vietnamese allies. I am sure GEN (R) Norman Schwartzkopf shares that sentiment. I do.
[Note 10MAR14: McCaffrey lost the war on drugs and did not lay his stars on the table in consequence.]
The point is, if soldiers fail their duty in this particular — calling down street thugs for their pretense of holding penal authority — none else is available to do it. If soldiers do not object to bad courses, society must tailspin until soldiers appear who have courage to right those courses.
Our posture in Vietnam was betrayed by the Harvard Faculty and their ilk at Columbia, Princeton, Emory and other Ivies, not by our military. But our military should have called them down for it, as General of the Army Douglas MacArthur called down Truman and his retinue of Harvard seditionists. Just so, BTW, the left political wing, not the right, of our nation took down President Kennedy, who was so pro military — and so fed up with the dithering, seditious, Ivy League CIA — that he rates a strong approval in MacArthur’s Reminiscences!
It is the Christological— meaning soldierly — responsibility of every soldier — and, in a different way, of every teacher behind them — to sacrifice their life when they must needs make an ultimate determination regarding the welfare of a nation or a society or a culture. If they do not, no one can.
Soldiers on a field of battle do this every minute. That is the source of their authority, which is unimpeachable, irremovable, nontransferable, indomitable, unbreakable and irreplaceable, although, because of the exigencies of existence, neither unambiguous nor always properly employed.
Two further thoughts on this subject:
1- every soldier, formally in or out of service, has the duty to lay down their stars — their life in every aspect — upon any occasion of ultimate concern they deem themselves to be in;
2- the phrase lifetime of selfless service to the nation means just that. It is the guts of the USMA Mission Statement and its absence would trivialize the Academy mission and values.
I would not support the Academy if they were gone.
Willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the ultimately important — and for soldiers that is definitionally the security of the nation, which is one of the seven Mothers of every citizen — makes soldiers a class of people who transcend what they are presently doing.
Sacrifice defines soldiers, as MacArthur say in his Thayer Award address. He points out that soldiers, alone among mankind, are called to perform, as the condition of their professioinal status, the ultimate religious act: sacrifice or, in monastic language, renunciation.
The central paradox (unexpected reality) of life is that renunciation — of one’s life — is the condition of having anything at all, including life. The very first and most primal renunciation is taking birth, leaving the umbilical. Life after that event and even before is grounded in renunciation or it must cease. Renunciation is the door to everything valuable, honorable and uplifting. That is the central paradox — and the glory — of life. That is how the world works.
Soldiers, of all people, are closest to that reality by virtue of their calling. This sets them apart, defines their duty absolutely and infuses them with plenary responsibility and authority for conducting man’s affairs in this world. And they have to do it, no matter what their rank, condition or status in life, or the world falls apart.
Every West Point Graduate’s responsibility for our national welfare is just as great and just as fraught with ambiguity and danger as is John Abizaid’s. That is the life we were called and responded to with affirmation. It is what we do, who we are, how we live.
Update 1: On 27 January 2015, Marine GEN (Ret.) James Mattis addressed the United States Senate Armed Services Committee on the subject A New American Grand Strategy. At Hoover Institution, who published an adapted version of General Mattis’ address, I commented as follows:
Not that it matters, but, I both appreciate and despond over General Mattis’ address here. Appreciate because (1) as a genuine warrior he says what he sees and eloquently and (2) his heart is unalloyed courage and compassion. Despond because (1) his address reflects lack of situational awareness — half his auditors at least regard the nation state, including USA, as obsolete and perishing — and (2) his address, although latterly specifying or implying serious tactical weaknesses of current operations, transits the periphery of his title: grand national strategy.
It is rare for a military leader to grasp and execute the several strands — principally diplomatic, economic and military, but others as well — of grand national strategy sufficiently to create a rational grand national strategic *goal* that is also inspirational. It is rare for anyone to be able to do that. General David Petraeus has that ability, which is why the Anti-American, Globalist-partisan US Justice [so-called] Department is persecuting/prosecuting him. Asking Congress or a bureaucracy to develop that ability and execute with it compares with asking a herd of cats to organize an expedition to summit Annapurna. Distilling and serving a happy grand national strategic *goal* is a personal, leadership thing few can do, but some definitely can and do accomplish. Their thoughts merit discovery and attendance.
The cynosure of a nation is not her grand national strategy. It is her grand national strategic *goal.* Given what we see now, project and anticipate — always expecting the unexpected, as General Mattis mentions, thankfully, in his address — where and what do we want to be as a nation three, five, ten, etc. years hence? What is our goal? What do we really, truly — as a nation — want for and of ourself to be, to do, to think? What is our inner necessity as a nation? What are we on this earth to accomplish as a national presence? And why do members of Congress not live in the states from which they were selected for office?
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
