The day they laid down their swords and shields

This week is the 100th anniversary of the 1914 Christmas Truce among the World War I combatants in Europe.  It has been memorialized in films such as Joyeux Noel . 

It is memorialized every year in a stirring musical production (“All is calm”) in Minneapolis.

A group called Operation Plum Pudding is collecting letters from and newspaper articles about British soldiers who participated in the truce. 

A group of students from Brigham Young University have developed an emotionally intense interfaith video based on the event to promote the possibility of peace from their own Christian perspective.

If you do a search on Christmas Truce, 1914, you will find links to a myriad of both recent and classic news articles and videos on this event. It is encouraging that a brief experiment in peace has some status along with all the commemorations of war.

On this 100th  anniversary of the Christmas respite from slaughter, many of us take heart in envisioning warriors putting down their arms when courageous people on both sides extend a hand of peace. However, in 1914, as in the savage eras before and since then, many men in the upper echelons of the power structures  see  “fraternizing” (making unrelated people into brothers) as dangerous to their purposes. If you want your people to kill their people, you don’t want your people to find out that their people are human beings like themselves, with mothers and fathers, possibly wives or sweethearts, and perhaps children.

So, my question for this holiday season is how can we create a society, a world, in which people recognize that there are no unrelated people.  We are all brothers and sisters; killing, maiming, and destroying members of our families and the lands in which they reside is not a good way to ensure the survival of humanity or other life on the planet.