The days are long but the years are short. It feels like a short time ago that Greg Jarvis died as an astronaut. He was a friend’s brother-in-law. Because he was my uncle, when John Orahood crashed and died on the Mohave Desert, while flying an experimental early shuttle design, emotion was attached to those memories. I remember that it was my birthday, my quiet Mother had ‘words’ with aunt Carolyn, and one cousin was fake cheerful. I felt lost, having little experience with grief, and all the children were confused. I spent today at the Museum of Flight. My only other visit was years ago with visiting family, cousins, and the husband had a work history of secret government aeronautical projects. When Uncle John passed, there was a hanger to clear out – not a house. Other family, on both sides, had planes and pilot licenses. My own Father was a control-tower operator during WWII. I cannot even tell you how a plane gets lift off and I had a short season as a physics teacher. These flight concepts are like Dietrich’s writing, over my head. On planes we move up toward the heavens through shapes of clouds. Today I climbed steps to tour a Concorde jet, a supersonic passenger plane. I was on Nixon’s Air Force One. It all mixed together with recollections of family losses and the use of planes in combat. As soon as Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded at early flight, the progress was fast and then men start dropping bricks on their enemies. When I say enemies I don’t agree that the enemies were actually adversaries. That is in the politics of broken when who happen to be leaders of countries. The museum section of the Vietnam war was very thorough and sad. I remember hearing of older friends who left for Canada to avoid the draft. So planes became weapons and our history became complicated for people like Dietrich who wrote, in Ethics, of God’s love for man but not man’s love for man as we see during the early 1940’s.
Here are some of his thoughts from pages 74-84. I’m not summarizing but the following are all quotes.
“The ground for God’s love towards man does not lie in man but solely in God Himself. And again, the reason why we can live as real men and can love the real man at our side is to be found solely in the incarnation of God, in the unfathomable love of God for man….The guilt of mankind has fallen upon Him (Jesus). It casts Him into shame and death before God’s judgement seat. This is the great price which God pays for reconciliation with the world….Only the crucified man is at peace with God….The world will allow itself to be subdued only success. It is not ideas or opinions which decide, but deeds….When the successful figure becomes especially prominent and conspicuous, the majority give way to the idolization of success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and untruth, fair play and foul play (Nazi Germany)….Either the historical facts have to be falsified in order to prove that evil has not been successful, which very soon brings one back to the converse proposition that success is identical with goodness, or else one’s optimism breaks down in the face of the facts and one ends by finding fault with ALL historical successes….The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard. Such thought is a denial of eternal justice. Neither the triumph of the successful not the bitter hatred which the successful arouse in the hearts of the unsuccessful can ultimately overcome the world….It is out of pure love that God is willing to let man stand before Him, and that is why He sentences man. It is a sentence of mercy that God pronounces on mankind in Christ….God’s love for man has proved stronger than death. By God’s miracle there has been created a new man, a new life, a new creature….Where death is the last thing, earthly life is all or nothing….(The new man) lives in a world of death, but it is already beyond death. It still lives in a world of sin, but it is already beyond death….Only the form of Jesus Christ confronts the world and defeats it. And it is from this form alone that there comes the formation of a new world, a world which is reconciled with God….It is not Christian men who shape the world with their ideas, but it is Christ who shapes men in conformity with Himself….To be transformed in His image (II Cor 3:18, Phil 3:10, Rom 8:29 and 12:12) – this is what is meant by the formation of which the Bible speaks….The real man is not an object either for contempt or for deification, but an object of the love of God….The real man is at liberty to be his Creator’s creature….God loves the real man. God became a real man….Every day man dies the death of a sinner. Humbly he bears the scars on his body and soul, the marks of the wounds which sin inflicts on him. He cannot raise himself up….The new man lives in the world like any other man. Often there is little to distinguish him from the rest….And again, man is not transformed into a form which is alien to him, the form of God, but into his own form, the form which is essentially proper to him. Man becomes man because God became man. But man does not become God….The New Testament states the case profoundly and clearly when it calls the Church the Body of Christ. The body is the form. So the Church is not a religious community of worshippers of Christ but is Christ Himself who has taken form among men….The Church, then, bears the form which is in truth the proper form of all humanity….(and can) never lay claim to an independent character, title, authority or dignity on her own account and apart from Him.”
From me – God gives gifts. Men build planes then use them as weapons. Dietrich lost his life to another big evil, and I have lost family in the cause of flight.
