And SO-"Give Peace In Our Time, O Lord"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 205, 30 August 1941, Page 6

And SO-"Give Peace In Our Time, O Lord"

TN one of the most familiar litanies in an order of worship known to most people occur and recur these words: "Give peace in our time, O Lord." No doubt there are other explanations of them, but the one most commonly held is that these words represent an attempt on the part of man to persuade the Almighty to put the world in order and to restore peace. It's like youngsters in the nursery appealing to mother to put away the toys and clear up the mess. Sometimes, in desperation, mother has to do it, but she knows full well that her children will not learn that way.

By Rev. C. W. Chandler

And now. like naughty children, we are crying out to our Father God to come along and clear up the mess, by making all our enemies good, and by restoring us to our former contentment. I must confess that I always feel a little bilious when I hear a congregation droning out the words of hymn 376 (A. and M.): "O God of Love, O King of peace, Make wars in all the world to cease." Castor Oil Needed It always sounds to me like a boy [with a stomach ache moaning. "O jdear! O dear! O dear!" In such a case a good dose of castor oil is better than any prayer. "I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell"in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me bui'nt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take away from me the noise of your song; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Thus spake the Almighty through the prophet Amos to Israel of old because of her disobedience. She had been flirting with the gods of the Ammonites, the Perizzites, tne Hittites and the Jebusites. j

For all the new-fangled notions about' education, I still think that there can be love in the end of a piece of malacca cane. It was through our hides that most of us learned that the fire was hot, that a nettle stung, that the ground was hard, and that it seldom pays to answer back.

We are learning through our hides, now, and this stomach ache moaning sounds to me most unmanly. We have sown the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind, and there's no use squealing about it. There's nothing we can do but take our medicine. This honouring God as a last resort is a libel on religion.

Moaning at the stable door when the horse has gone out is just silly, .and yet that is precisely what we are doing when praying for peace and preparing for war. We are divided between the service of God and Mammon, and just so long as bombs do not burst in our own backyards we are not completely out of love with things as they are.

War is exciting, and we love excitement. War is adventurous, and we love adventure. In war our noblest instincts get free play, and courage is rewarded. Compared with the dull and uninteresting routine of a peacetime occupation, life under canvas with the hardening influence of firm discipline is infinitely to be preferred. Looking back over the long centuries of our upward growth it appears that war and not peace is the normal condition of mankind. Christ came into the world to set men free from strife, but then that was only yesterday. In a non-Chris-tian world peace is an impossible ideal. Men must be twice born before they can be fit to inhabit a warless world, and all this talk about a New Order is vain until a radical change takes place in our present outlook, and until a completely new set of values has replaced our present reliance upon material means for the attainment of spiritual ends. We Liack Imagination A deplorable lack of imagination accounts for most if not all of our insensibility to the sufferings of others, and for the slowness of our progress in the Christian way. If overnight all our imaginations could be enlivened we should be a long way along the road to answering our own prayer about getting "peace in our time."

How could God set about answering this prayer anyway? By granting an overwhelming victory, or by raising up a man who could tower head and shoulders above everybody else, and by sheer dint of his spiritual superiority bring the world to its senses?

"How does God answer our prayers?" asks Dick Sheppard of his friend Laurence Housman. "Through our better comprehension of Him as a result of praying." answers the author of "The Little Plays of St. Francis." "I can't conceive of any other answer to prayer except in the spiritual change for the better which it makes in us—bringing us to comprehend better the all-comprehend-inpness of love."

God is love, and there is only one | thing God gives us in answer to our prayers, and that is strength. [Strength to bear our burdens, to fight with giants, to conquer sin and to gain the victory over all our enemies, "ghostly and spiritual." To me the problem is as easy as that. God. who is love, has one thing to give, and that is strength. He is omnipotent and can give us all the strength we need in life and death, in peace and war, without depleting His store by as much as would turn the scale "in the estimation of a hair."

This Is Strength Make one heap of all the armaments and engines of destruction in the world, and their strength would not be comparable to the strength of love which compels one Christian man to return good for evil, or to run a second mile, or to give his cloak to one who only asked for his coat. It has healing in its wings, and toughened steel is like vapour compared to its adamantine strength. Hate can turn wheatfields into marshes of blood, and lay whole cities level with the dust, but it cannot conquer love. Hasten the day when, instead of moaning and whining our oft repeated petitions for peace, we set to work exploring the possibilities of love in relationship to life and health, and peace, and happiness, and to all our earthbound relationships one with another.

One need not be a prophet, or the son of a prophet, or even a prophet's bootlace in order to discover in the present temper of world affairs a complete negation of most, if not all, of what constitutes Christianity as a way of life and a way of love. In co-operation and mutual helpfulness instead of in competition and mutual distrust lies 7T< future wealth and happiness • K *nd.