PASSING BELLS OF WAR

“What passing bells for those who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns.”

This is the opening line from Wilfred Owen’s poem Anthem for Doomed Youth. Wilfred Owen was one of the great war poets, his poetry still captures the multitude of emotions around war. It is now accepted that the year 1914 changed modern society.

Now 104 years later we commemorate the centenary of the Great War, the war to end all wars. Instead the Great War only spewed more suffering and gave birth to a multitude of belligerent children. Owen’s‘passing bells of war’have never ceased tolling for lost lives.

There is something in human nature that has never been tamed since Cain killed Abel. Immanuel Kant the brilliant German philosopher spoke of the‘crooked timber of humanity’.

That twisted streak in the human psyche that resorts to violence. Laurence Rees is the former head of the BBC TV history programmes.

The closing words in his demanding volume‘The Holocaust’read,“Finally, although the contents of this book are distressing, it is important to understand how and why this crime happened.

For this history (the Holocaust) tells us, perhaps more than any other, just what our species can do.”In three weeks time Remembrance Sunday will also mark the centenary of Armistice Day and the end of the First World War.

We are forced as individuals and members of the human race courageously to ask searching questions about time and history, life and death, and God and man.

The issue of violence or non violence is sharply highlighted in the Attlee family. Clem Attlee was second in command under Churchill during the war but became Prime Minister in post-war Britain. He presided over some of the most radical social reforms introduced into British society. Such as the National Health Service and the National Insurance Act. Clem Attlee served in the forces, was wounded at Gallipoli, and decorated for his services to king and country.

His brother Tom, however, was a conscientious objector who suffered imprisonment for his pacifist stand. Who was right, Clem Attlee the serviceman or his brother the pacifist?

The Old Testament narrative of the tower of Babel is treated as an ancient and irrelevant story shrouded in history (Genesis 11.1-9).

It tells of the human race trying to reach to heaven, only to be confounded by God and incapable of communicate with one another because of strange languages. But translate that story into the reality of our modern day and it becomes eerily relevant. The tower of Babel stands for man’s desire for world domination, exemplified by modern superpowers. The Babel scattering of the nations represented violent instability among peoples. That is precisely what the entire global migration movement is demonstrating today. Millions of racially different Myanmar people have been displaced and dumped in inhumane refugee camps.

The chaotic conditions for migrants in European centres is intolerable. What is the twisted element in human nature that would bomb buses carrying children, and block a sea port thus preventing food and medicine from reaching the starving women and children in Yemen?

This is the uncontrolled dynamics of the scattering of the nations described in the story of the tower of Babel. But its central theme is happening right now. Frequently the United Nations declares another global area to be a humanitarian disaster. But the entire global scene is a humanitarian disaster. One ray of hope in the midst of this darkened scene was the recent award of the Nobel peace prize to Nadia Murad. She is a member of the Yazidi people, was captured and suffered as a sex slave under ISIS before escaping and becoming an activist against rape as a weapon of war.

The human race desperately needs to return to God. Not the God of any religion, nor the God of any denomination. The human race requires to return to God the source of goodness, the foundation of decency, the giver of life to all humanity.

Next week we return to God, not God of religion but God of humanity.

“Come let us go to the mountain of the Lord’that God may teach us his ways”(Isaiah 2.3).