O Troubler of my Soul

I have been wrestling a bit lately with the nature of greed and its relationship to violence and the role that fear seems to play in most of our defensive postures.  So this morning I read this.  Once again Richard Rohr has said essentially what I have wanted to hear for a while, but I have this one little problem: reality.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that what St. Francis (and recently the Pope who took the same name) are saying about acquisitiveness and greed leading to violence and oppression are absolutely true.  Sin tends to beget bigger sin.  What I mean is that there are things I am not willing to just give up, and things I would fight to keep.  I lean towards pacifism, but I suspect that if my family were threatened I would not have the courage of that conviction, and I would be perfectly willing to cut throats in defense of my wife and children.  The glorification of violence in our culture makes me nervous, but try to hurt my kids and I will totally go all Rambo.
It's idolatry, I know.  I will make no bones about it.  I said last week that I hope I would have the courage to die for my faith, but that I refused to kill for it.  Well, I'm pretty sure I would kill for my kids, I just hope it never comes up.
I know that I am like the rich young ruler who Jesus tells to sell all that he has and follow, but he can't because he's too attached to things.  And the man who asks to be able to bury his father before he goes, I get it, I am guilty of being attached to things, to security, to the illusion that I am in control enough to be the protector of those I love.
Here's what I want to say about all of this though: as much as I admit to a sinful attachment to my wife and kids, as much as I admit that my principles of loving my enemies and praying for my persecutors would go right out the window if they came after my family, I think we need to start drawing different lines in the sand.  We have taken self defense too far and we have crossed so many ethical lines that it's hard to imagine that it all started with the simple and righteous desire to protect our children. How do you get from defending your family to dropping nuclear bombs and the policy of mutually assured destruction? It's utter madness. Somewhere along the line we started fighting to protect ideologies not people, people were only the abstract foundation of our will to power.
We believed that there is a reachable point where we can be so strong that no one can threaten us any more.  That is the ultimate delusion of empire, and it is megalomania. You fear losing something precious, you fight off the "enemies" to make sure it's safe, you find that in the process you obtain more stuff that also needs to be protected. It is how tyrants are born and how the most wealthy people are also the most worried about money. It starts with the simple, human, desire to protect what you love and it ends with wanting to rule the world.  We need to learn to put the brakes on that mad spiral.
How?  Well the path of descent that Rohr talks about is a model, but understand that most of us are not St. Francis, or even Pope Francis.  Jesus, and all scripture quite frankly, challenge us to put our trust in God and stop trying to protect our stuff on our own.  At the same time, despite what the prosperity Gospel might tell you, God doesn't give us guarantees that our stuff is going to be safe.  Children die, things are destroyed, and as we learn in Job, it's not because of anything like Karma or works righteousness, it's just the way things are.
We are never going to be strong enough to change that.
In fact, most of our efforts to change that only result in more children dying and more things being destroyed.
I would suggest that this is a deep truth in so much of Jesus' teaching: violence will not solve anything, in fact, it will succeed only in making things darker and filled with greater horrors.  We will not be able to experience the Kingdom of God until we learn this.