To prevail in difficult times...
It is perhaps understandable that people look around the world these days -the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the Russia/Ukraine war, the cost of living crisis, NHS and train strikes, the climate emergency, the secularisation of the West etc- and can get easily depressed by the state of the world. However, if you take the ‘long view’ and put things in perspective you are likely to come to a view that it was “twas ever thus”, as Charles Dickens wrote in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ (1841). Throughout time the world has been plagued by wars, conflicts, financial and personal crises, disruptions with each epoch having its own particular challenges.
For hope I look back to my parents’ generation of the 1930s and 1940s which I think can rightly be described as probably humanity’s darkest bloodiest hour. It started with the Great Depression with around a quarter of people unemployed (in some parts it was as high as 70%), the rise of Totalitarianism through dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, and wherever you looked there seemed to be wars. Japan invaded China, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, Italy invaded Ethiopia, Hitler tore his way through Europe leading to WWII and the Holocaust - it is estimated that up to 200 million people died through these conflicts in the space of 15 years or so.
But then as with now there was Hope. If you wanted to pinpoint an individual human relationship and a time that probably saved the world then that was probably 9th August 1941 when British PM Winston Churchill had a secret meeting with US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. It was their first meeting, but they met at a critical point in the world’s history -Churchill and the British nation at that point had stood alone against Hitler-his Nazi regime had invaded Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and France, Russia was not expected to withstand Germany’s attack upon it, whilst Japan had signed a pact with Hitler and Mussolini. It was clear that Britain and Europe would only survive with America’s help even though Americans did not want to get involved in what they saw as a ‘foreign war’.
However, the meeting of these two great statesmen led to an agreement (‘Atlantic Charter’) where both countries agreed “..to ensure life, liberty, independence, religious freedom and to preserve the rights of man and justice…and promised to strive for a postwar world free of aggrandizement, territorial or other…”. It demonstrated the USA’s support for Britain and the Governments in exile against Nazism and Fascism and of course within a few months after ‘Pearl Harbour’, America was our ally across the world-and in time and with great sacrifice, the rest is history. What though did bind Churchill and FDR together in this great cause for freedom was their shared Christian faith and the meeting in 1941 exemplified that. On the Sunday of their meeting, the two of them and the crews of their respective ships took part in a church service onboard HMS Prince of Wales where they sang ‘O God, our help in ages past’ based on Psalm 90 and the more obvious ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. It was an emotional event and demonstrated the importance of Christian faith to unite people in moments of crisis. Perhaps Churchill’s thoughts on the event sums up not only what he and FDR put in place but also a clear point to our own futures:
“When I looked upon that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals…it swept across me that there here was the only hope, but also the sure hope, of saving the world from merciless degradation”. You can see a clip from the church service below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaLLsbQFfk8
Tags: Churchill, WWII, NHS, Charles Dickens, Ukraine, FDR, Russia, Psalm 90