The lust for power and possessions - Rector's Rambling for November 11, 2018

One hundred years ago today this was the scene at Campus Martius on Woodward Avenue (where now is located a park and ice skating rink), when throngs of people poured into the streets to celebrate the end of the “war to end all wars”.

World War I was a most horrific event.  The entire European Continent was embroiled in conflict, as Britain, France, Italian, and Russian Allies fought off the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Turkish Axis powers.  The United States would join in the last year of fighting, but the Russians withdrew because of their own devastating Bolshevik revolution.

When Armistice Day finally arrived on November 11, 1918, over sixteen million citizens and soldiers were among the dead.  Such mechanical “advances” as the airplane, armored vehicle, and reliable machine gun, combined with the devastating concept of trench warfare, made for a most deadly and destructive form of combat.  By 1918 the world was weary and ready to work (or so it seemed at the time) to prevent such a thing from ever happening again.

The failed League of Nations (a precursor organization to the United Nations), and onerous war reparations imposed by the victors, caused economic disaster and fermented the rise of both Communist and National Socialist movements that then led to the dictatorships which took us back into world-wide war 21 years later.

But ultimately, war has, at it’s root, the sinful lust for power and possessions.  St. James wrote, From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?  Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.  Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. (James 4:1–3)

True for individuals, and true for nations.  May God help us all.