Tag Archives: battle of good and evil

Being The Crowbar of Destiny

Previously, I wrote about Winston Churchill being the crowbar of destiny during the early days of World War ll.  His story is epic in scope; one man takes a stand against the powers of darkness and prevails.

While Churchill’s story is momentous, there is another figure who served as an even greater disruptor of the forces of evil. His impact was so staggering that it can only be understood as the greatest battle ever fought.

I am thinking of Jesus Christ who was and is an unlikely warrior king, at least by human standards. He was born in obscurity; he grew up in a small, out of the way village in Galilee and he surrounded himself with followers who were anything but the great men of his time. Here is how Isaiah prophetically describes the one who will come to save many:

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” (Isaiah 53:2-4)

The ruling class of Jerusalem dismissed Jesus by saying nothing good ever came out of Nazareth. At Jesus’ hour of greatest crisis, all of his disciples abandoned him. By historical standards, Jesus died a criminal’s death; he was seen by his enemies as just another troublemaker who needed to be silenced because they counted him as a problem that needed to be eliminated quickly to keep their Roman masters at bay.

The truth about Jesus is that he came to put a stake in the ground for reestablishing God’s Kingdom here on earth. His time on earth might be viewed as a beachhead with many skirmishes and battles still to come. It might even be said, when we view the patterns of history through a biblical lens, that Jesus came to enlist soldiers in this ongoing battle of good and evil. And maybe Winston Churchill, that great crowbar of destiny  was enlisted as one of those soldiers who would do his part to hold back the evil forces intent on killing and destroying.

How One Man Made a Difference

May 20, 1940. The army of the German Reich was sweeping across Northern Europe; four hundred thousand English troops were trapped on the northern coast of France; Neville Chamberlain had just resigned as Prime Minister and Winston Churchill had replaced him.

The English government was torn between fighting on against impossible odds or, perhaps more sensibly, signaling to foreign intermediaries an openness to discuss with Hitler terms of a truce.

Could Churchill, with all the odds stacked against him, make a difference? He himself describes the apparent hopelessness of the situation this way: Europe was sinking into “the abyss of a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”

If some of the leading figures in the British government had their way, including Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain, Britain would have winked at the evil they saw for the false security that their trembling hearts demanded.

Churchill saw the nature of the encroaching evil and he decided only a firm “no” was possible. He said he would prefer to die while trying to save the world from falling into a new dark age. “And I am convinced,” he said, “that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Facing these odds, Churchill’s decision and subsequent actions were heroic by any measure. If he had not been present at that critical moment of history; the darkness of Hitler’s malevolent empire would have, in all probability, spread to all corners of the globe.

Boris Johnson has recently written a biography of Churchill and describes these dark days of May 1940 as a crucial moment where one man changed the course of history. Here is how Johnson put it:

I don’t know whether it is right to think of history as running on train tracks, but let us think of Hitler’s story as one of those huge and unstoppable double-decker expresses that he had commissioned, howling through the night with its cargo of German settlers. Think of that locomotive, whizzing towards final victory. Then think of some kid climbing the parapet of the railway bridge and dropping the crowbar that jams the points and sends the whole enterprise for a gigantic burton-a mangled, hissing heap of metal. Winston Churchill was the crowbar of destiny. If he hadn’t been where he was, and put up resistance, that Nazi train would have carried right on. It was something of a miracle-given his previous career-that he was there at all. (The Churchill Factor p.30)

Johnson goes on to speculate about what would have happened if Churchill had not become Prime Minister in May 1940. He calls this ‘counterfactual’ history, but it is an interesting question nevertheless. It might seem fruitless to speculate about the world without Winston Churchill standing athwart history, but this particular case, the timely appearance of one man in a certain moment in human history made all the difference in the world.

An Anatomy of Temptation

Albert Einstein (1)Choices. We face hundreds of them every day. Managing the process through learned behavior and subconscious habits, we fail to acknowledge the implications of our choices. When faced with a decision where we pause and earnestly consider each path before making a choice; that is the moment where we are most susceptible to temptation. Temptation implies that deciding on a certain course of action has the potential for disastrous outcomes. Being tempted means that you know the right way but are overpowered by a yearning to do something that strays from that path towards a dangerous place. Then there is the problem of not making a choice at all; deferring choice is still a decision. All decisions have consequences.

The anatomy of temptation and its consequences are perfectly described in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They have been told not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they chose to disregard the prohibition. What happened next?

The first response is self-consciousness and shame; Adam and Eve suddenly realize they are naked and so they cover their bodies. The second is fear; they hide when they hear God calling out to them in the garden. Then they lie when they tell God that they hid because they were naked. Finally, they begin to blame others for their actions. Adam’s response to God’s question is masterful: “The woman you put here with me-she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12). And not to be outdone, Eve blames the serpent for her choice.

Solomon, the son of King David, is credited as being of a man of profound wisdom. But even Solomon knew that without God’s help, he would be as susceptible as any other man to making poor choices. When God tells Solomon to request anything of Him, Solomon answers wisely: “Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong” (1Kings 3:8-9).

As Solomon demonstrates, wisdom is the ability to discern between right and wrong. The outward and inward signs can often be ambiguous. We need discernment to choose the good path, resisting temptation to go the other way. “This is what the Lord says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will have find rest for your souls’” (Jeremiah 6:16).

-The only question that remains is- What are we going to do about it-- (1)So here is a test. Take an inventory of your actions after you have permitted temptation to win. Do you feel like you want to hide? Are you experiencing shame and fear? Do you feel the need to lie to others or blame another for your actions? Maybe you knew the right thing to do from the beginning, but you were tempted to go the other way and you went. We have all experienced feelings of remorse and even despair when we have done what is wrong. The only question that remains is: What are we going to do about it?

The Battle between Good and Evil, the Search for Truth, the Beauty of Language: Three Novels that Changed How and Why I Read

Victory-UK editionIt might be possible to look at the arc of my life as a very long digression.  In the world in which I grew up, careers in law, banking and medicine were the norm. But my father was an advertising man, so my dream up to the time of his sudden death was to work in the business he had chosen.

But nudges of circumstance edged me off the usual line and landed me in the world of book publishing. Given that I have spent my life selling and publishing the written word, you would think that I must have been a gifted student of English. The truth is otherwise. Grammar befuddled me; Shakespeare seemed more like Greek; and most works of literature, such as Tom Sawyer, just bored me. My grades reflected my lack of understanding and interest, and I am sure my teachers wrote me off as ordinary.

Until, that is, the imaginative lights went on in my head. The book was Joseph Conrad’s Victory and the teacher was Ben Briggs. Mr. Briggs was a gifted energetic high school English teacher who loved his job; his enthusiasm could penetrate even the toughest walls of incomprehension. I now remember the breakthrough for me as a singular event on a specific day, but in reality, Mr. Briggs woke me up through a concerted every day effort. He broke through by diagraming the animating ideas behind Conrad’s novel, especially the battle of good and evil in this world. He made the conflict visual and epic. From that time on, English became a subject I enjoyed rather than one I abhorred.

Ahab by Rockwell Kent 1930Two other novels had a similar impact. During my second year in college, I took a lecture series on American literature.  Around October, Moby-Dick was assigned and I read it for the first time. The book was a revelation; apart from appreciating the strange humor in some of the writing, I came to see that Herman Melville was engaged in an ambitious metaphysical rumination on the mysteries of life. Like the obsessed Captain Ahab, Melville was searching for Truth behind the ambiguities of existence, reflecting much of the intellectual turmoil that existed then in nineteenth-century America and beyond.

The Great Gatsby is the third novel. It is a book I have read time and again and I never tire of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald was as much a poet as a novelist; he paints with words and I will conclude this with but one of many examples of why this book lives on today for me and many readers. Here is how the narrator Nick Carraway describes his first experience of the East Egg home of his cousin Daisy and her husband, his old classmate Tom Buchanan:

“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”

Tom-and-Daisy-Buchanans-house-East-Egg-Great-Gatsby-131

The Battle between Good and Evil,
the Search for Truth,
the Beauty of Language:
Three Novels that Changed How and Why I Read

Victory-UK editionIt might be possible to look at the arc of my life as a very long digression.  In the world in which I grew up, careers in law, banking and medicine were the norm. But my father was an advertising man, so my dream up to the time of his sudden death was to work in the business he had chosen.

But nudges of circumstance edged me off the usual line and landed me in the world of book publishing. Given that I have spent my life selling and publishing the written word, you would think that I must have been a gifted student of English. The truth is otherwise. Grammar befuddled me; Shakespeare seemed more like Greek; and most works of literature, such as Tom Sawyer, just bored me. My grades reflected my lack of understanding and interest, and I am sure my teachers wrote me off as ordinary.

Until, that is, the imaginative lights went on in my head. The book was Joseph Conrad’s Victory and the teacher was Ben Briggs. Mr. Briggs was a gifted energetic high school English teacher who loved his job; his enthusiasm could penetrate even the toughest walls of incomprehension. I now remember the breakthrough for me as a singular event on a specific day, but in reality, Mr. Briggs woke me up through a concerted every day effort. He broke through by diagraming the animating ideas behind Conrad’s novel, especially the battle of good and evil in this world. He made the conflict visual and epic. From that time on, English became a subject I enjoyed rather than one I abhorred.

Ahab by Rockwell Kent 1930Two other novels had a similar impact. During my second year in college, I took a lecture series on American literature.  Around October, Moby-Dick was assigned and I read it for the first time. The book was a revelation; apart from appreciating the strange humor in some of the writing, I came to see that Herman Melville was engaged in an ambitious metaphysical rumination on the mysteries of life. Like the obsessed Captain Ahab, Melville was searching for Truth behind the ambiguities of existence, reflecting much of the intellectual turmoil that existed then in nineteenth-century America and beyond.

The Great Gatsby is the third novel. It is a book I have read time and again and I never tire of it. F. Scott Fitzgerald was as much a poet as a novelist; he paints with words and I will conclude this with but one of many examples of why this book lives on today for me and many readers. Here is how the narrator Nick Carraway describes his first experience of the East Egg home of his cousin Daisy and her husband, his old classmate Tom Buchanan:

“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.”

Tom-and-Daisy-Buchanans-house-East-Egg-Great-Gatsby-131