Armistice Day

 It's only words....

Kurt Vonnegut, b. November 11, 1922, d. April 11, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. 

"The sudden silence was the Voice of God."

Precisely so.

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."

"The blood swept lands and seas of red...."

Yeats was not imagining things.  We forget; we would do well to remember.

My grandfather was a bomber in World War I.  I saw an old picture of his plane on his desk at his home when I was young.  He sat well forward of the pilot, in a bi-plane with an extended fuselage, a "snout," a "cockpit" like pilots and other passengers had on such planes.  Except he literally leaned over the side of the plane and dropped bombs by hand.  I never asked him about that war; I was too young to care.  My uncle was in France in World War II, or so I remember being told once.  He never talked about the war, either.  My brother-in-law was a Captain in the Green Beret in Vietnam.  He was in Laos and Cambodia before we were in (officially, anyway), either country.  His war experiences are a sealed book, too.  Perhaps it is just as well.

O Christ, son of the living God, have mercy upon us.

Thou that sits at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us;

And deliver us for thy Name's sake.

AMEN.

O Christ, when thou didst open thine eyes on this fair earth, the angels greeted thee as the Prince of Peace and besought us to be of good will toward one another; but thy triumph is delayed and we are weary of war.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the very earth groans with pain as the feet of armed men march across thy mangled form.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, may the Church, whom thou didst love into life; not fail thee in her witness for the things for which thou didst live and die.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ, the people who are called by thy Name are separated from each other in thought and life; still our tumults, take away our vain imaginings, and grant to thy people at this time the courage to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness, and faithfully to maintain the ministry of reconciliation.

TEACH US TO DO THY HOLY WILL, O LORD AND MASTER

O Christ, come to us in our sore need and save us;

O God, plead thine own cause and give us help, for vain is the help of man.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

O Christ of God, by thy birth in the stable, save us and help us;

By thy toil at the carpenter's bench, save us and help us;

By thy sinless life, save us and help us;

By thy cross and passion, save us and help us.

SAVE US AND HELP US, O LORD AND MASTER.

Prayer for Peace, the Evangelical and Reformed Church