Father Christopher Halliday, Saddleworth Team Rector writes
Christmas 1914, the first of the war, a war that should have been finished before Christmas according to all the armchair generals, saw Allied troops facing Central Powers troops across a stretch of “no man’s land” in France and Belgium.
A strip of land which in places was only a few hundred feet wide.
Inevitably, on Christmas Eve, troops on both sides began singing their traditional Christmas carols and so a truce got under way. In previous wars truces had often been negotiated to clear the wounded and dead from battlefields but this seems to have been the first time an unofficial truce took place on parts of the western front.
This Christmas there will obviously be opportunities to remember that truce and those many occasions when the enormity of what we celebrate, God dwelling among us, the Incarnation, has stopped us in our tracks and made us take stock of who we are and what we are doing.
We celebrate the birth of Christ, the Prince of Peace, in a world full of selfish and inhuman acts – but there is no doubt the story of Jesus’ birth in words and songs even briefly captures our imaginations and gives us a glimpse of how things might be.
The troops sadly did not lay down their arms for good; they went back to fighting again a few days later – but for a brief moment the glory of God was glimpsed even in the carnage of the World War.
This Christmas may we dedicate our lives to bringing the light of Christ into the lives of people around us, offering the hand of friendship even to those who seek to do us harm and practising in word and deed: Joy to the World.
