Strange title for an article? Perhaps, but fitting to my life both before and after I found faith.
Years ago, I walked into a southwestern boutique store not far from where I lived in Houston, Texas, and saw a painting that seemed to dominate the store. The profiles of three Indians with 20-25 smaller figures of battling warriors are sketched in each of the torsos of the three main profiles.
The artist calls his work, Our Battles Are Many. Those images have characterized my life and so it has hung over my bed in the four different homes I’ve lived in since then.
My first article, written as a Christian Catholic, was published in Canticle Magazine in the late nineties under that same title, Our Battles Are Many. It described the steps and multiple missteps taken in my journey to my conversion.
Only recently did I discover that my battle-strewn path to God was not shared by all of us.
While discussing a recent post with two close friends, I was reminded of our unique paths to God. Neither identified with the notion of life as a battle. Nor did they see themself as a warrior.
One I wrote about in a post several months ago- a favorite worthy of repeating here:
This Jesus- this perfect image of the man-God
conjures up a man God I met in a poem known as The Dream of the Rood. This is an Anglo-Saxon poem written somewhere before the 9th century. And so this culture was a warring one; in that respect very similar to our own.
But in that long-ago time, the fighting, the bleeding and the dying were done face to face. The soldiers following leaders who demonstrated heroism and sacrifice to their followers,. Unlike our own, where the leaders view the deaths as collateral damage on sanitized reports and through satellite images.
The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet describes the Christ created by an Italian artist in the stained glass window high in bell tower of the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart facing downtown Houston.
Speaking as the tree upon which Christ is nailed, the tree speaks of Christ not in the terms we have grown so accustomed to, as wounded, bleeding, tortured but as a warrior, as a hero as striding with great courage to mount the tree-the cross.
On shoulders men bore me there, then fixed me on hill; fiends enough fastened me. Then saw I mankind’s Lord come with great courage when he would mount on me. Then dared I not against the Lord’s word bend or break, when I saw earth’s fields shake. All fiends I could have felled, but I stood fast. The young hero stripped himself–he, God Almighty– strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows, bold before many, when he would loose mankind. I shook when that Man clasped me...
