Forty-Fourth Annual Time of Prayer and Fasting for
The Truth of Gospel Nonviolence
July 1-August 9
Our Lamb has conquered. Him let us follow.
FAST FOOD AD 2026, Seventeenth Helping
Dulce et Decorum Est
Pro Patria Mori
There must have been at least several thousand battles like Megiddo (Armageddon) over the millennia before 1479 BC, and there have certainly been thousands like it since. For those who were there, each battle was a matter of life and death, with the whole future seeming to hang in the balance. And they were not entirely wrong in their perspective, if the future is defined simply as the rest of their lives. From the historian’s point of view empires rise and fall, whole peoples appear and disappear, and borders fluctuate like droplets of rain running down a window as the centuries flicker past. But most people do not enjoy such a godlike perspective.
War was the most important task a ruler had. And although the language we use to describe what we do today disguises the similarities, war is still the ruler’s most important task. Look at the annual national war budgets.
Yet, all the effort and sacrifices entailed in fighting war—each of which seems so important at the time—doesn’t actually lead anywhere: in the end, it is cancelled out. The only thing that makes the Battle of Megiddo different to us is that we know about it.
It is hard to feel any sense of regret for the men who lost their lives on that day in Megiddo, because they have been dead 3400 years by now. It is impossible to care much for who won the battle because both sides lived long ago and far away and most of what they care for— their family, their friends, their language, their religion, their personal and political hopes and fears—has vanished utterly.
This is not at all the way we feel about the Normandy invasion of 1944, but if human history goes on long enough the day will come when Megiddo and Normandy will seem on a par: equally futile and equally meaningless.
Naturally we resist and resent that conclusion with all our strength. The war 4000 years ago was obviously a mere power struggle between political elites with no moral justification, whereas any war our own nation becomes involved in today is just and necessary. The soldiers who died on the battlefield of Megiddo died in vain, but if our men died in our war today it will be to decide the fate of mankind forever, or something like that. The men in the ranks in the army at Megiddo were deluded about the importance of their deaths, but the soldiers manning our tanks are not. And I am the Queen of Sheba!
-Gwynne Dyer from his book, War.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org
https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!
