There is little I can offer to productively build on Pope Leo XIV’s calm yet relentless dismantling of Donald Trump’s recent spasms of callous rhetoric, clumsy strategy, and poor taste, as well as the Holy Father’s bishops and cardinals’ refutation of the US hard right’s twisting of Augustinian just war. Without an extreme and bad faith interpretation of Iran as an “imminent threat,” this conflict was unnecessary, whatever the political and strategic considerations. A common talking point is that the regime was an immediate and imminent threat over four decades ago: a complete contradiction in terms.
We are now living in a world economy struggling more than it already is, in the shadow of a vastly diminished superpower little different to other major countries it accuses of predatory behavior. The loss of life, equally lamentable in Buddhism as it is in the Abrahamic traditions, has been tragic.
Particularly intolerable, in my mind, has been the Minab missile strike that killed 120 schoolchildren. Almost as a personal means of coming to terms with this needless bloodshed, I created some AI art of the children reuniting with a benevolent and playful heavenly being in a celestial playground of repose and fun. While their last sights and sounds were fire and blood, I hope what they see immediately afterward are castles made of candy, while hearing the excited laughter of their friends.
May their next lives realize all the dreams that they had, in these lives that were so abruptly and cruelly stolen from them.
On Saint Augustine of Hippo: I have made no secret of the Doctor of the Catholic Church’s influence on my own ideas about faith and belief. I think one more quality of Augustinian thought is its reflexive instinct for, and mastery of, self-reflection. Augustine is arguably the first major thinker in the Western canon to have written an autobiography; he charted his sense of individuality and changing of thinking through time and space.
This demonstrates a kind of mindfulness, almost Buddhist in its power, that can attempt to understand why the mind believes and why it doubts. It is harder to tell ourselves lies that justify brutality when we are, conversely, brutally mindful about our inner being.
Related features from BDG
Buddhistdoor View: The Sad Contradiction of Humanity in Artemis II and the Iran War
Buddhistdoor View: The Great Unraveling – Uncertainty as Teacher in a Fracturing World
The Roots of Harm: A Buddhist Reflection on Power and Compassion in Turbulent Times