Helping the Church Sing, Think, and Worship Well
After the First World War, the Imperial War Graves Commission faced a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of men lay in the ground in France and Belgium, with nothing to identify them. The Commission determined to give each of them a headstone anyway, asking Rudyard Kipling to write the words that would go on the stones of the men who could not be identified.
Kipling wrote. A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.
His men breached the dams in August. Then the water stopped rising. The flat-bottomed boats sat stranded miles out, and the wind was silent for weeks. Inside the walls, people ate leaves and boiled leather while plague moved through the streets, and something close to a third of the city died. When a crowd gathered to demand surrender, the burgomaster stood in front of them and offered them his own body to eat before he would open the gate.
In 1887, a young man named Francis Thompson mailed a packet of poems to a London magazine called Merry England. He wrote them on scraps of paper. For a return address, he gave a post office, because he had no home to give. He was sleeping along the Thames, selling matches and newspapers, and losing a long fight with opium.
Twenty-two of their crew waited on Elephant Island for rescue. The three men crossed thirty-two miles of uncharted mountains in roughly thirty-six hours, with fifty feet of rope and a carpenter’s adze among them, and walked into the Stromness whaling station on the morning of May 20.
Royalists who had mortgaged their estates to fund the crown watched one-time enemies keep their positions and their property. A slogan began to circulate among them. The act, they said, granted indemnity to the king’s enemies and oblivion to his friends.
The Allied nations had the power to settle accounts on their own terms, and the appetite for vengeance ran high. They walked into a courtroom instead, took seats at a table below the bench, and let a tribunal control the gavel.
The bishop looks at the stolen silver in the soldiers’ hands and tells them it was a gift. Then he crosses the room, picks up two candlesticks Valjean left behind, and presses those on him as well.
For centuries, sailors crossed open water by fixing their eyes on one star. Polaris, the North Star, holds its place in the sky while the other stars wheel around it through the night.
Tolkien invented a word for that kind of rescue, a sudden joyous turn he called eucatastrophe, the moment when a hand beyond the hero brings the ultimate purpose to completion.
im Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming, and Roger Youderian dropped gifts from their small plane week after week, learned a few words of the language, and finally landed on a river sandbar to make contact. Within days all five were speared to death on that bank.