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.

 

Remembering September 11, 2001

World Trade Center towers collapsing on 9/11/01
World Trade Center on 9/11 shortly after the second tower had collapsed. (Photo by Wally Gobetz. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. From WikiMedia Commons)

September 11 is a day that needs to be remembered and reflected on for many reasons:

  • The tragic loss of life to several thousand innocent people.
  • The reminder that violent assault on any one individual reverberates through a family, a community, and a nation.
  • The recognition that for the first time in over 100 years, Americans were attacked on their own soil, challenging their assumption that security can be achieved through armed strength alone.
  • The killing of innocent people can lead to rage, a desire to retaliate, and calls for revenge.
  • Validation of the maxim that every time an invader takes one innocent life, 10 new people join the opposition.

The intent of Terry Jones, pastor of a small evangelical church in Florida, to burn more than 200 Qur’ans on the anniversary of 9/11 can be seen as a powerful example of rage, the desire to retaliate, and an act of revenge—the kinds of behaviors that perpetuate cycles of violence, hatred, and misunderstanding.

The loss of innocent American lives on 9/11/2001 was a travesty, as is Jones’s plan to burn the holy book of millions of peace-loving Muslims around the world.

Perhaps burning the holy book of millions is not as deadly as killing an innocent person, but as General Petraeus has pointed out, it certainly provides fuel for the small militant element within Islam aiming to harm American forces in the Middle East and elsewhere.

What does Mr. Jones know of the Qur’an? Has he considered Chapter 5, Verse 32: “[I]f anyone slew a person—unless it be for murder or spreading mischief in the land—it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.”

Does he understand that the message of the Qur’an, which overlaps significantly with the Bible, emphasizes peace and brotherhood?

Is he also aware that, like the Bible, the Qur’an contains passages that can be distorted by seekers of power within each religion to advance their own agenda?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology