Christmas miracle
Houston clergy honor truce of 1914 as a moment of peace during war
By the end of 1914 — months into history’s first great world war — the myth of national invincibility had dissolved in blood. More than half a million had lain wounded or dead at Marne and Aisne. And as Christmas approached, thousands shivered in frozen trenches, yearning for home, expecting death.
Amid carnage came calls for peace. From Rome, Pope Benedict XV implored that “the guns may fall silent at least upon the night the angels sang.” The plea quickly was dismissed.
Still, on Christmas Eve in France and Belgium, lighted candles dotted battlefield trenches. Warriors’ voices joined in carols, and — on one of Christendom’s holiest days — men intent on killing one another emerged from their ditches to exchange, food, gifts and greetings.
On Sunday, Dec. 11, Houston religious leaders — Christian, Muslim and Jewish — will commemorate that singular expression of goodwill in tandem with worshipers in Germany and England during a service at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church.
Donations collected at the “Prayers and Songs for Peace” will be offered to international relief agency Oxfam to assist millions of refugees displaced by Middle Eastern turmoil.
“In a time when a lot of the nation and world is turning to things that give personal satisfaction or personal victory, we’ve got to call for it to lay down every kind of arms and walk hand in hand,” said St. Martin’s Rector the Rev. Russell Levenson. “… Peace, service, love — those things last. Wars do not last.”
At the free service, Levenson will be joined by Imam Wazir Ali of Houston’s Warithuddeen and Al-Qur’an mosques and Rabbi David Lyon of Congregation Beth Israel.
Similar observances will be held at Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England — site of filming of the television series “Downton Abbey” — and
at a church in Marburg, Germany.
“We know that there are theological things that divide us,” Levenson said. “But we will come at this from a different angle: things that bring us unity. One of those is the shared freedoms of this country.”
The Houston service will feature patriotic and religious music as well as 10-minute readings by each of the clergy, drawing on teachings of their respective faiths.
The international observance was proposed by Highclere’s Lady Fiona Carnarvon, who previously has organized similar events in England. Last year’s Highclere service featured a presentation by former Canterbury Archbishop George Carey.
Carnarvon spoke at St. Martin’s during a 2015 visit to Houston.
Highclere, a 19thcentury castle standing on the site of the medieval palace of the Bishops of Winchester, was used as a hospital during World War I, Carnarvon said in an interview. “It was horrendous,” she said of the conflict that claimed more than 17 million civilian and combatant lives. “I don’t think they dreamt of what it would become. They thought they’d be home by Christmas.”
The Christmas season, she said, is a fitting time to commemorate both the 1914 truce and to work to aid Middle Eastern refugees.
“Our story is of refugees, Mary and Joseph, who were rejected, pushed pillar to post,” she said. “At the moment, we can look with horror at what is happening to families like ours in the Middle East. I know there are homeless in England and America, but those in Syria and Lebanon are being bombed and killed. They have no food. They have so little. It’s quite a broken world. It’s time to reach out, to take some step.”
In Houston, Ali said the 1914 Christmas truce “reminds us of the power of seeing the humanity in an adversary.”
“Here you have two groups of soldiers fighting on different sides of a violent war, finding a way to have small periods of peace,” he said. “It is our prayer that as citizens of the Earth we will all see our common humanity and find ways to live with each other in peace.”
The truces, a few of which preceded the 1914 Christmas season, came as the pope called for a respite from fighting and a group of British women wrote an open letter to like-minded pacifists in Germany and Austria.
As many as 100,000 troops participated in the impromptu truces, exchanging food, alcohol and tobacco as well as news about sporting events and laments for absent sweethearts. The cessations of fighting most often occurred between British and German troops, but incidences of French soldiers also laying down arms also were reported.
“It was extraordinary,” Carnarvon said. “It was a moment of peace that came spontaneously.”
The truces, which sporadically continued into 1915, often were opposed by commanding officers. By 1916, intensification of warfare, including the use of poison gas, dampened the desire of opposing forces to fraternize.
“Who knows? You can only guess,” Levenson said of the Christmas truce. “The spirit of God fell on the Allies in the hymns creeping out of the trenches. It turned the hearts of one another. … For however many days it went on, something miraculous happened.”
The lesson of WWI and other wars “that we were supposed to learn from,” said Lyon, “is that, in the end, we are just all men and women, and we all bleed red. … We battle for territory and ideology, but we are all human beings. The truce helped us on different sides to stand together. Sometimes we find new perspective, greater lights and, perhaps, real hopes.”