Wednesday 12 October 2011

The Battle of Gettysburg: A Meditation on the Quaker Peace Testimony


Battles change history. Marathon; 1066; the two Battles of Hakata Bay; Bannockburn and Culloden; the successful siege by the Turks of Constantinople in 1453, and the unsuccessful Siege of Vienna in 1683; Stalingrad: again and again battle defines history. In so doing, it offers an opportunity for men to construct a defining narrative -   for men to impose themselves on events, and in so doing to achieve meaning and purpose.  

Battle also allows men to define themselves.  In his opening to his book Going to the Wars, Max Hastings talks about a crucial  fact for men of my generation who grew up in the years following the Second World War – we always wondered how we might measure up compared to the older generation around us who had fought in that war.  In a group of Quaker men, some years ago now, gathered to discuss men’s issues, the one issue we agreed that defined being male was the need not to be thought a coward.

So the field of battle is also a field of dreams.  And time and time again in history men play out their dreams through battle.  Unless we Quakers comprehend this, truly understand the powerful forces that motivate men to fight, our call for the human race to allow itself to be transformed so as to build the kingdom of heaven, where metaphorically the lion lies down with the lamb, and peace and justice reign supreme, falls on deaf ears. 

Shakespeare understood this.  The speech he places in Henry V’s mouth just before Agincourt perfectly captures the sense of purpose, of subsuming one’s life into a greater struggle, of achieving a brotherhood with one’s neighbour; it   shows deep insight into the  male psyche:


From this day to the ending of the world,
.. we ..shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."


Indeed, this “band of brotherhood” can extend even to the enemy – John Macmurray  in his Swarthmore Lecture recalls how he felt he had more in common with the enemy in opposing trenches in the First World War,  than the  congregations to whom he preached the futility of war on his periods of leave. There was a clarity, even purity, of purpose, and a refusal to engage in rhetoric and flag waving on both sides, in stark contrast to his own countrymen  who sickened him with their jingoistic slogans encouraging war,  whilst sitting at home.   It was as a result of these experiences that he left all Christian churches , though continuing to practise and attend conferences as a Christian, until he retired from his post as Professor of Philosophy in Edinburgh, at which point he became a Quaker.

So what has this to do with Gettysburg?


Well, we visited Gettysburg on our first two consecutive days off last week.  We had visited before, some years ago, hosted by an American couple who hired a tour guide for the day.  This time we visited a much revamped museum, superbly curated, with a good film narrated by Morgan Freeman, and bought a self-guided audio tour.

It is a pristine battle field.  No building development has taken place, so it is very easy to see the sites  of the three days of fighting, study the points where troops moved, and why, and  to recognise the different phases of the battle and what the generals, especially Robert E. Lee, was trying to achieve  It is a physically very lovely landscape. On a beautiful sunny day to gaze out at this Pennsylvanian landscape, it is a feat of the imagination  to visualise the sights and sounds of battle – to see this serene landscape   transformed by shot and shell into carnage and horror. 

 On this field of battle men were conducting a fight about meaning – the nature and meaning of America as a country.  Soldiers – most of whom were not professional soldiers, but very ordinary young men from quite ordinary occupations- fought fiercely, but above all courageously, with honour and valour.  Men from Alabama fought  with incredible ferocity, after marching twenty five miles overnight, suffering from hunger and raging thirst, attempting to take a small lump of rock, an objective they could have walked up only a few minutes earlier.  Young boys from Maine – Maine! – many of whom I’m sure had never seen a black face, were told to hold a position “With all due hazard” – i.e. to the last man.  They fought fiercely to retain that position, against young boys who fought equally fiercely to take it.    A Union officer asks if an order is meant, and assured that it is says, “Well it is murder, but it is an order” and leads his men to almost annihilation.  Running out of ammunition, a Union Colonel orders his men to bayonet charge the enemy, who surprised and shocked, retreat, enabling the position to be held. Again and again men of both sides show remarkable heroism in the face of overwhelming odds.   


  Little Round Top

(From this point,Union Brigadier General Gouverneur Warren saw this point - vital to the Union line -  was undefended, and asked for reinforcements.  They arrived minutes before a force from Alabama.  What followed was some of the fiercest fighting of this battle, and the war.)




The North Carolina Monument 
It has been ever thus.  The horror and the pity of all battle, at all times, has been captured in Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles'  version of Shakespeare’s Henry 1Vth Pt. 1 and 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngy17MrSrMo), where behind the valour and brutality portrayed on the screen, , the music weeps plangently on our behalf,  and on behalf of all humanity.But despite all the horror and carnage, I believe Shakespeare invites us to despise his creation Falstaff, who says “honour is a mere scutcheon” and in cowardly fashion avoids all engagement with the fight.




In this case, 12,500 Confederate soldiers walked almost a mile across open country into a hailstorm of shot and shell, signalling the High Water Mark of Confederate ambitions – a battle in the heartland of the union enterprise, Pennsylvania, which, if won, would have inflicted a decisive blow against Union confidence and   might have led to a suing for peace, with two nations on the North American sub-continent entering into history. Instead, from this field  Lee has to lead away a defeated force, who never again would have the men or material to fight an offensive war; and  the Union forces took heart from this and the capture of Vicksburg a few days later, and went on to pursue victory.  And thereby created history. And the America we have today.





Quakers traditionally play the role of picking up the pieces of  wars, (see the previous blog and
http://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/experiencesinthefau.html ). Although in the American Civil War some Quakers felt led to move away from the witness of their religious community and fight against slavery, corporately Quakers oppose all war.  But it is not enough simply to oppose war.  We must speak from a deeper place.



Advices and Queries  ( http://qfp.quakerweb.org.uk/qfpchapter1.html  )  advises us  to look into our own hearts to understand the causes of war, and eradicate the seeds of war in our own lives:


 Search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war.

 Bring into God's light those emotions, attitudes and prejudices in yourself which lie at the root of destructive conflict, acknowledging your need for forgiveness and grace.

In my own life I have struggled with the Peace Testimony when I understood it as an intellectual construct.  It seemed to me that there must be a role for an army to protect the innocent and the weak – those unable to protect themselves.  There is a Paul Lacey’s Swarthmore Lecture is  devoted to this (http://www.quaker.org.uk/qn75-quaker-books ). 


I did not find this Lecture satisfying in the way I had hoped.  I finally realised that,  for me,  it did not seem to build upon our Quaker heritage, which points me in a different direction to working with the world’s ways, offers another model, and another way of looking at reality.  It seems to me that our history is leading me to see that Quakers do not live by the rules of the world:

 I told [the Commonwealth Commissioners] I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars... I told them I was come into the covenant of peace which was before wars and strife were.
George Fox, 1651

(my emphasis)

When  I have met Quakers who seem to most fully live in the virtue of that life and power, they show me that experiencing the Light or the Spirit at a deep level within oneself, one cannot destroy that light in another human being. My maleness needs to be about expressing my courage by being faithful to the Light granted me, and following that Light regardless of my own desires – George Fox refusing to fight back when being beaten by sticks by a mob; James Naylor embracing the hangman about to bore his tongue with a hot poker.  But even more deeply still, living in obedience to the alternative reality  I experience running through and behind and beyond the world’s defining, living my life by an inward reality (the depth I find at the very centre of my being),  when I fully live from this place,  I am freed of the need to define myself by those constructs –  honour and shame, cowardice and patriotism, which form the world’s thinking.  The world willingly expends human life in a circus of folly – the Russian Government sends young conscripts into  Afghanistan; American policy arms the Taliban, including Osama Bin Laden , to fight against these young men; twenty years late it is sending its own young men into battle against these people it provided with weapons .  The role of Quakerism is not to reveal the world’s shabby cynicism in the way of secular journalism, but to reveal an absolute truth – “The sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the wicked”:  we are all bound in the net of being, surrounded by the  abundance of the gift  of life – in this net, there are no enemies, merely people who as yet I have not called Friend.   To put it another way, we are all dearly beloved by God.

I am under no illusions as to the enormity of the task. I have heard from their own lips the stories of Quaker peacemakers who have sat next to those who have inflicted utmost brutality on the human body and psyche; those who have shaken hands with murderers in the pursuit of peace – their stories pierce one to the quick.  I also have to recognise that I have unhealed wounds within my own family.  These wounds represent the extent to which I have not allowed myself to be pierced by the Light, and therefore unable to speak as one gathered in the Light, speaking from the centre.  And therefore it ill behoves me to judge others who also do not speak from the centre, from a gathered place in which we can see, along with Divine Presence, that there are no enemies, just poor suffering humanity.  It helps me enormously that my religious community does not espouse any theory of just war : I have less to shelter behind and hide from the truth –that all war, for any reason, is an offense against that spirit which runs through the teaching of Jesus, the Buddha, and all the great prophets. 

I have always been moved by James Nayler’s final words; they speak to my deep place, even as I fail to comprehend them intellectually:

In 1660, after his release (from prison) , he set out on foot for the north, intending to go home to his wife and children. On the way, he was robbed and bound, and found towards evening in a field. He was taken to a Friend's house near King's Ripton, where he died. These were some of his last words:

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It's conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it, nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.











For further information about the Quaker Peace Testimony see:





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