May 19, 2004
Oaths
I’d just completed a tour flying bombers in Uncle Sugar’s Navy during the Great Middle War (aka WWII) and was back in school where we veterans were suddenly faced with signing a Joe McCarthy loyalty oath to prove we weren’t communists. The GI Bill was a nice reward, but the oath was a slap in the face.
There’s something distasteful about oaths. That we have to use them at all testifies to that about us which most of us prefer not even to recognize, let alone admit.
Our Judaeo-Christian tradition says that Human Being as a figment of God’s imagination is about freedom to choose: to reason, to create, to love, to live in harmony with all of Gods’ creation and, of course, with God [BCP p 845]. Why those choices need also sometimes to require an oath is downright insulting, surely to us and probably to God. But they do.
Because there’re always the questions, How come we don’t? And how can we turn it around and live in harmony, etc, etc? [When we can really answer that, we’ll be home free.]
But there’s help for all this. “Our help is in God,” it says. That’s not all that far from “So help me God” which happens to be a big piece of The Oath folk are usually asked to take after presuming not only to know the Truth but the Whole Truth, as well. That, of course, is some presumption on the face of it. Maybe only God would be spared taking an oath about that.