“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God.
For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility,
righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”
C.S. Lewis
“Righteousness acts never in its own interest,
but in the interest of fellow men.”
Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
(The Rev. Samuel Leighton Green)
Say what you will about battles, conflicts and wars…
…such that there is no such thing as a just war.
And that may very well be true…
For historians still question the necessity of such wars as WWI
yet concede to the fundamental importance and necessity of WWII.
Yet both wars were some of humankind’s bloodiest conflicts…
with each resulting in a catastrophically global loss of life.
While at the same time each war has helped to shape the world, for both good and bad,
as you and I know it today.
And as is the case with history…
importance becomes more real, more relevant and more personal when it is
picked apart and examined individually…
by each single person after person, after person…
for it is in the details of each participant that we begin to see things
more narrowly verses that of a generic and sweeping panoramic view of
the statistical and numerical.
The following link is to a story found on the BBC regarding
the Reverend Samuel Leighton Green.
Green was one of a special group of men who served during the brutal
trench warfare of WWI.
As a member of the clergy, he was exempt from the mandatory draft,
yet volunteered anyway as he knew someone would have to tend to those
“fighting lads” spiritual needs.
Green also felt a moralistic sense of justification to the war’s necessity.
He served with the “blasphemous and foul-mouthed” 1/4th (City of London)
Battalion–the Royal Fusiliers.
Green served alongside this brave group of men throughout the duration of the war.
Green was awarded the Military Cross not once but twice for his bravery under fire.
It would behoove us to uncover more of these stories of such selfless souls…
those brave men and women who remain a part of the “Constant” to which mankind so
clings during the chaotic…
cookiecrumbstoliveby 