The Spiritual War

It should not surprise us that the great spiritual war we must fight in our modern day and age is to love one another.  The world runs, it seems on war: whether between states or more commonly between ideological factions, or between businesses who compete not as fellows, but as enemies bent on market domination.  Our marriages are wars, our friendships are wars, we even war near constantly with our children.  That war is part of life in a world beset with sin and death should not surprise us; but we must find the root of these wars and do battle against it.  Is not the source of this trouble that we do not see each other, from the most famous celebrity to the most outcast homeless or most deranged criminal, as being made in the Image of God, as icons of Christ Himself, however damaged?  Can He not restore that which is His and was made to refer back to Him, the Source of all Good and Life?  It is strange, then, that we must war against war, but we must.  Life comes only through the death of God on the Cross; we must join in that war, but it is not a war fought with the weapons of world, whether those be material (guns, bombs, and so forth) or passionate (malice, hate, indifference, apathy).  Rather, this war is fought through prayer, especially with the Psalms, and through acts of justice, goodness, mercy, humility and kindness.  That our churches have spectacularly failed to train us for this contest is one of the greatest obscenities of our age: we must go to our pastors or priests or prelates and demand of them training in the spiritual life that overthrew Rome and Gaul and Persia.