Local opinion: The spiritual insanity of war as a path to peace

I was invited to play my harp at a banquet on the Tucson campus of one of the world's largest manufacturers of guided missiles, advanced air defense platforms and military electronics. The walls of the building where I sat playing peaceful stringed music were covered with life-sized photographs of machinery of war. The situation felt incongruous, disorienting.

As I sat there, I thought of the poem, “The Diameter of the Bomb,” written by Jewish poet Yehuda Amichai, which paints a picture of ever-widening circles of harm caused by a bomb of 30 centimeters, with a range of 7 meters, that killed four and wounded 11, including a young woman dead and now buried in her hometown more than 100 kilometers distant, and the solitary man mourning her death “at the distant shores of a country far across the sea.”

What does war do to the warriors? My brother-in-law came home from Vietnam physically intact but destroyed emotionally. He abandoned his wife and infant son and wandered off into darkness, chased by demons, until his tragic death years later. A life wasted by war. A family destroyed. Ever-widening circles of sorrow rippling out from that one little family.

What about the orchestrators of war? What does it do to the human heart to know your efforts resulted in the destruction of another human heart?

I have read the full text of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s 52-minute State of the Force address on Sept. 30. While proclaiming that the United States is a nation “whose God is the Lord,” Hegseth struts out a clarion call for lethality and high-end kill chains in American warfare performed by soldiers and officers bursting with testosterone who are svelte, handsome and raw-boned.

“You are the real 1%. In the middle of the Profession of Arms. You feel comfortable inside the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is your calling card and victory your only acceptable end-state.”

He gifted each person present with a book of his speeches, prefaced by words of President Trump: “I will unleash you to be violent, lethal and unstoppable — and I will always have your back. Godspeed.”

Late in his speech, Hegseth announced the creation of a new department: the Office of Religious Affairs, “Because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual. God is good. Evil is not. America's military must understand the difference.”

Hegseth sports on his body the words Deus Vult, or “God wills it,” the cry of medieval Crusaders as they rode off to slaughter Muslims and reclaim the holy land.

In his Holy Week Masses last April, the American Pope Leo XIV, spiritual leader of the world’s 1.28 billion Catholics, said, “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.’”

Hegseth and others mocked the Pope, advising him to stay in his own lane, to stay out of world affairs. President Trump proclaimed that Leo was “weak on crime, and terrible for foreign policy.”

Speaking about the insanity of war is definitely the correct lane for people of faith and for those who shepherd them. We can no longer remain silent in the face of the destruction of our fellow human beings and their life resources, all in the service of pride and power. Our brothers and sisters are right now dying or being changed forever by war. These are our own flesh and blood and heart and soul. Do we not perceive it?

We can cry out against war, the instruments of war, and our suffering fellow humans. From our pulpits, in our public prayers, in our bulletins and announcements. Or we can continue to smile and play our harps while the bombs and the bullets rain down.