War, and peace: Alastair McIntosh’s Thought for the Week
‘What might each one of us be doing now, to turn back future steams of war?’
Over recent months, I’ve been reading Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, War and Peace.
It runs to over thirteen hundred pages. My copy of the paperback was so thick and heavy that I had to borrow my wife’s hairdryer to melt the glue that bound it all together, and separate it into four parts. Only then could I render the experience one more of reading, than of weight-lifting!
But as Russia’s troops closed in upon Ukraine this week, a different heaviness beset me.
In researching the novel, Tolstoy had read French and Russian histories of the events – more than half a century previous – that provide the background to his book. He interviewed survivors and visited the battlefields. It left him with a powerful sense that war cannot just be blamed on one event, or one person. It’s a consequence of what has gone before.
‘There are two sides to life for every individual,’ he said: ‘a personal life, in which [one’s] freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of [one’s] interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity.’ This other side of life is built up of perhaps billions of prior events.
I’ve thought so much of that these past few days. What can you or I do about the shocking invasion of Ukraine?
There used to be a saying: ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’
Tolstoy’s sense of those billions of prior events that feed into the elemental swarm, invites a deeper question: ‘What did you do… before the war?’
What might each one of us be doing now, to turn back future steams of war?
I have no clincher of an answer. I just have humming through my head a Sydney Carter hymn I heard at Iona Abbey. Friends may know it. It’s about how we treat our neighbours, and the billions of acts of kindness and respect that set the seeds of peace.
When I needed a neighbour
Were you there, were you there?
When I needed a neighbour, were you there?
And the creed and the colour
And the name won’t matter
Were you there? Were you there?
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