Address
So today is the anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. In one way I am pleased that it is being remembered because it brings back to us the reality of that iconic war - that was so awful and so pointless. It stirs the images in our minds of the cemeteries with their thousands of white headstones and beneath each one the body of a young man.
It stirs the images of red poppies and parades - and the promises never to forget. Trenches, shells, gas, mud and broken landscapes-- - as if anyone ever could forget. Those who fought and survived have all gone - but we cannot forget because the images of that war are engraved in the memory of the whole nation. It is a timeless collective memory.
Sadly those images don’t inspire anyone in any country never to fight a war again. We side line that war as a special war - worse than any before - but take no heed of its message.
Maybe it is because it was a war without a principle to fight for or a cause to die for. It became a war because of power games between rival nations; it was war based on jealousy between powerful European economies.
The historian AJP Taylor said that it was war that started almost by accident - by train timetables for troops that couldn’t be changed. Because of all the posturing and preparations, the programme started to run and then no one then could stop it.
It seems to have been in an age when generals knew too much of their Bibles - that Saul could slay a thousand in a day but David could slay ten thousand - so perhaps they were at ease with those numbers and the biblical proportions of warfare.
Yet we all worshipped the one God. Each side prayed for victory - not for peace - but for victory - each side called on the Bishops and the clergy to bless the tanks and the guns. Christians fought against Christians - just as today Muslim fights against Muslim.
The Old Testament took precedence over the New.
You can’t help feeling that God must have left the stage. Angels walked among the dying but did not venture into the hearts of those who drew lines on maps.
And they dared not bring the bodies home. No processions of hearses through Royal Wooton Basett because the public might have become aware of the scale of the slaughter.
Last week I was sent a copy of a letter written by a Unitarian minister in Bolton on the eve of that war - and it stirred a little flame of hope - that not everyone was eager to go and fight this war;
He wrote against the country honouring old treaties that bore little relation to the present economies - and he wrote about the suffering caused by war:
‘Meanwhile our industries are threatened and our food already advances in price. It is not those who have the control who will suffer, it will all be to their social and financial advantage. It is the worker who will suffer and he must listen to his children crying for bread while he stands impotent.
In the name of Christ let us remember the horrors of war; on the battlefield slaughter and pestilence; at home famine, misery and death!
Then let us fight or clamour for war or prate of national honour if we will! But let us close our eyes to the despair of the widowed and the stricken and our ears to the cry of the orphaned; and let us cease to ask the blessing of God upon us and our land, for we shall have ceased to deserve it.’
Yours etc,
Edward Morgan,
Minister, Unity Church, Bolton.
3rd August 1914.
I expect his words were trampled underfoot by all the people rushing to join up and fight.
Channing in his sermon on war wrote about how hearts are stirred by the call to action and how the sound of the drums leading the parade make the blood of young men race.
I think myself fortunate that I was working abroad when the Falklands war came up - to us expats far away it seemed a nonsense but when I next came home on leave I could not believe my eyes and ears - enthusiasm and the excitement was everywhere.
Human nature seems to be changed by the prospect of war - or do we just respond to the propaganda?
Then there was the liberation bombing of Iraq - a thousand cruise missiles fired at Baghdad as a gesture of friendship and relief for the people.
The very first Unitarian service I attended had the theme of war. I can’t remember the details or why the subject was chosen - but I do remember the phrase that the minister kept repeating - ‘that this is the century of death’ - and it was of course with two world wars and the side shows of Korea, Kenya, Bosnia, Malaya, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Falklands, Israel, Russia, Vietnam, Aden, Egypt, Oman - and how many others?
Astrologers tell us this is the age of Pisces - the age of wars, religions, deception and illusion = characterised by mans inhumanity to man.
The good news is that this violent age of Pisces, said to be 2600 years long is due to end and we will soon be in the age of Aquarius, (from 2160) and that will be an age of spiritual enlightenment and personal freedom. It will be the age of the groups working together, respecting one another.
Religions will change - to be more like ours - where there is freedom of thought and conscience and a desire to build better communities and a better more friendly world.
In a positive way we can say the transition is beginning - with the coming of the United Nations, the European Union, travel and familiarity between races, overcoming discrimination. Go into any supermarket and it is populated by shoppers from all over the world. It feels good to be in an international age - but this progress is against the last flareings of the Age of Pisces. That’s if we are optimists !
Christianity in the Age of Pisces hasn’t done very well either. It has been a cruel, domineering, controlling, deceptive religion. It has persecuted and slaughtered while holding the cross aloft.
- but for many Christianity has been a personal transcending character forming experience - it has been an insight into the Age of Aquarius.
How could this Christian religion be so contradictory ? Maybe because it too was the victim of a power struggle - between the illusory age of Pisces and the spiritual age of Aquarius.
The Jesus of the Gospels taught about loving ones enemy, giving away your shirt as well as your cloak, turning the other cheek, about the power of prayer, about the direct contact with the one who was God, about transformation. This was the Jesus of Valentinus the Gnostic. Jesus was a teacher, a spirit guide, an icon of the perfect being. He didn’t have to physically exist because his life story was itself a parable. We had to strive to be as good and as spiritual. Only then would we see the material world as real and spiritual too - and not an illusion.
But the Jesus of Rome and of the Bishop Ireneus was a physical being whose God was the Old Testament God of wrath and punishment - and people had better conform and obey. That Jesus was the Messiah who would return with hosts of warlike angels to bring the world to an end with fire and sword.
Well I am for Valentinus and the spiritual age. I am for the development of the individual and the building up of groups of like minded people. Groups who work for peace in the world, groups who work to extinguish those fires from the age of Pisces.
I am for reading those gospels again as lessons in spirituality and not as the biography of a God - and I am for reading the teachings of the Buddha and others- because in the age of religions - some truths were revealed but we did not have the eyes to see or the ears to hear.
I want to ride the bandwagon that is Aquarius. Resist the siren calls to war and its drums and trumpets - but remember always the worst of that age of Pisces - when we cheered the men going to the trenches a hundred years ago.
Remember that with a collective shame and never forget the lesson of that futile war.
Let the time of war march away over the hill with its black masks and suicide vests until the sound of the boots and the drums and the bugles fade away into the sunset and the age of Pisces.
Let us gather our spirits around the flag of Aquarius, link arms and colours and dance our way into a new age of friendship and peace, our hands extended in greeting and the true God of the Universe found at last. We have to be the first.
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