Faith and War

I got this from a friend today. I like it. Read it. Think about it.

Faith: Bob Lively
Twain knew that in wartime, many Christians ignore teachings
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, April 2, 2005
From a Judean hill Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." And for the most part, humanity has either ignored this message altogether or embraced those tweaked, twisted and diluted redactions authored by ideologues to make Jesus' words bless whatever political agenda, including pre-emptive wars, that suits them.
Recently I saw a bumper sticker that proclaimed, "War is Peace." I decided even before the traffic light turned that this declaration had to be the worst syllogism ever. War is death, destruction, wanton violence, and the human soul's willingness to abandon what the Bible teaches is right, decent and sacred.
Thirty years ago, I visited Hannibal, Mo., the boyhood home of Mark Twain, where in an out-of-the way bookstore I purchased a paperback copy of a book containing Twain's "The War Prayer," which was dictated in 1904 and published after his death. Outraged by American intervention in the Philippines, Twain begins his story in a church on the Sunday morning following the nation's declaration of war: "Next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams . . ."
During the service, the preacher makes a long prayer asking God to help their sons and brothers and fathers crush the foe and to give glory to flag and country. Then an aged stranger, a messenger from God, enters the pulpit and pushes the preacher aside. He tells the worshippers God has heard their prayer and also their unspoken petitions, which he interprets as follows:
"O Lord God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with pale forms of their patriotic dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst . . . for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives. . . . We ask it in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the source of all Love."
Of course, we know the response even before we read it. Twain writes: "It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said."
Twain was a genius and a prophet. Near the end of his life, he penned this revision to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic": "Mine eyes have seen the launching of the orgy of the Sword; he is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored; he has loosed his fateful lightning and with woe and death has scored; his lust is marching on."
Who would possibly say "Amen" to this? Today's American religious right, to begin with.
Bob Lively is on a six-month break to write a book. He teaches at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church every Sunday morning.