Across the top of the cenotaph in Auckland
Domain, as also in Whitehall and many other places, are the words chosen by
David Lloyd George: “The Glorious
Dead”. The words may seem noble and
fitting, but they have deeply offended some people down the years. Some poets have excoriated such sentiments as
trying to dignify and justify the bloody realities of war. One of the latest is the scorn and
indignation expressed in a vile heavy metal pop recording. I am not capable of listening to this, let
alone quoting it.
War, however, is as old as humanity (or in the
case of war, inhumanity), but war remains to this day what it always was, a
monstrous way of resolving differences.
It doesn’t work. It trebles or
quadruples the suffering. It is
blasphemous in its waste of human life, and in its laying waste of the earth
and all our resources. There was a
heart-stopping moment in one of those TV costume dramas, when some upper class
Londoners were all at a fashionable ball in 1914. Young men were falling over each other to
enlist. Some older person expressed
reservations about this, and one wifely matron in exquisite ballgown with tiara
and fan says, “Oh, they’ll be alright, they’re young…”
I don’t know why it is that we eventually default
to hatred, rage and violence, except that sometimes more powerful people than
us make decisions which leave us with no choice. But that’s not all of it. The violence, which resolves nothing, comes
from within us. Violence pervades our
society in peace as well as war, in our words as well as our deeds. It finds massive expression in much of our
sport, where it is often ennobled and admired, and considered valiant and
manly. There are plenty of sincere
people who wonder what is the matter with you if you object to physical or
verbal violence -- to abusive debate, for instance (If you can’t stand the
heat, get out of the kitchen…), with stomping in football or with brain
damaging your opponent in boxing, with keeping firearms and lovingly tending such
things.
The new person in Christ, risen (as St Paul
puts it) with Christ, is new and risen not because they have somehow acquired
an ethereal life which is different and peaceful, and means everything is going
to be alright.. We are new and risen daily,
when we daily choose the way of Christ rather than all our other possible
choices. We are new and risen when, in
silence and stillness, we consent to God before we consent to anyone or
anything else. We are new and risen when
one day it dawns on us that this is something we are not really doing ourselves
– it is being done in us, by our consent.
We are new and risen when the possibility of adversity has not stopped
us from choosing the path of love and justice, or from speaking the truth. We are new and risen when we discover one day
that we are no longer afraid, that love has cast out fear – when we discover
that we do not have to run the world, and that personal image and lifestyle are
not of great importance.
We may know what is intended, we think, by a
phrase such as The Glorious Dead, and we can honour that – but we have already
admitted into our hearts a gift of peace which is not capable of war and
violence.
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