What Does It Mean to Be A Warrior Who Follows the Prince of Peace?
It takes more strength to resolve conflicts peacefully than it does to cut the other person down.
For the past few months I’ve been wrestling with a conundrum.
On the one hand, the God I follow is the Prince of Peace. Whenever I or someone I love is in conflict, the way that I’ve been able to resolve things is through an open hand, not a raised sword. To put it another way: I’ve resolved conflict by helping the people I care about to set boundaries, or by gently helping the aggressor to find a healthier way of expressing themselves. I’ve never successfully resolved a conflict with a raised sword; cutting people down to size just doesn’t seem like it’s the way of Jesus.
On the other hand, I’ve loved martial arts since I was eight years old. I love training, I love sparring, I love knowing that I can defend the people I care about in a dangerous situation. The duration and intensity of this love suggests to me that this, too, comes from God.
But how can both of these things be true? How can I be a warrior who follows the Prince of Peace? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with.
Part of the answer, of course, is obvious: there are dangerous people in the world, and being able to fight helps me to protect myself and my loved ones from predators. My preference is to resolve conflict peacefully, but some people just want to hurt others, and I’d rather not be helpless if I come across someone like that.
But I felt like there was more to this question, so I kept praying over it.
And eventually I realized:
I don’t train to fight so that I can hurt other people. I train to fight so that I can resolve physical conflicts peacefully.
Essentially, I train so that I can be like Uncle Iroh in Avatar: the Last Airbender.
This realization made me get a lot more serious about my martial arts training.
Why?
Because, if someone throws a punch at me, it actually takes a lot more skill to gently put them on the ground and in a situation where we can talk about what’s going on in their life, than it does to send them to the hospital.
This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. If someone throws a punch at me, it’s relatively easy for me to respond by shattering their windpipe, or gouging their eyes out, or breaking their knees. Many of the most brutal techniques for ending a fight can be learned in the first six months of training.
By contrast, it takes a lot more skill to catch the punch, gently throw the person to the ground, and pin them there in a way that neither of us ends up badly hurt.
We have a saying in my dojo: the most dangerous person to spar with is a white belt. This, again, feels counterintuitive: aren’t black belts the ones who know how to twist an attacker into a human pretzel and throw them on their head? Well, yes. But the black belts I know also have the skill and restraint required to guide an attacker through being pretzelized and thrown on their head in such a way that the other person doesn’t actually get injured.
By contrast, a white belt is much more likely to panic and break someone’s knee, often by accident.
I think this is true in emotional conflict as well: it takes a lot more skill to resolve a conflict peacefully than it does to resolve it by hurting the other person so much that they stop wanting to fight.
We think that when someone insults us or our beliefs, that it’s a sign of strength to hit back and to crush them. We think we’re being strong when we cut the other person down to size.
But in my experience, this kind of “You hit me so I’ll hit you back” approach is more often a sign of emotional insecurity than of true strength.
I’ll use myself as an example.
A few years ago, I expressed mild support for a conservative position in the culture war and one of my progressive friends lost it on me. She started insulting me and attacking me. This continued, on and off, for a few days.
Eventually I responded by telling her that I needed to take a break from our friendship.
At the time, it felt like my response was an act of strength. And setting boundaries certainly can be an act of strength, especially for those of us who are recovering people-pleasers. I begrudge no-one their healthy boundaries.
But at the same time, my response reflected a lack of skill and of emotional maturity on my part. I didn’t know how to handle this friend’s anger, so I shut down the discussion. I lacked the tools to empathize with her and to minister to someone who was clearly hurting. I also took her comments personally, which put me into the fight-or-flight mode that made me walk out the door.
I would do things differently now.
When someone insults us and we try to cut them down or make them hurt, we’re often doing it in order to make ourselves feel strong.
But I actually think that the way to build real strength and to show that strength—both to ourselves and to others—is to try to resolve conflicts peacefully.
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