US Mennonite Brethren

 “There is no peace on earth,” I said, “For hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I imagine American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a heavy heart Christmas Day 1863 when he wrote the poem, “Christmas Bells.” The U.S. was in the midst of the bloody Civil War, and 40,000 soldiers had lost their lives six months prior at the battle of Gettysburg. The poem reflects Longfellow’s anguish in the face of this ongoing war, as America was still months away from General Robert E. Lee's April 1865 surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant.

Longfellow’s poem reveals his deep antiwar convictions. He hears the Christmas Day bells playing the “old familiar carols,” promising peace on earth, as the angels did when Jesus Christ was born. But immediately, Longfellow despairs as he realizes there is no peace, and that hatred has again destroyed the dream of peace and brotherhood.

Longfellow clearly identifies the Union cause as synonymous with right and the Confederate cause as evil, which made his poem very unpopular in the South. When the poem was converted in 1872 to the Christmas carol, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, the offensive fourth and fifth stanzas were removed. The eliminated stanzas speak of thundering cannons drowning out the carols of peace and of households made forlorn by the violence of war.

“Christmas Bells” not only reflects Longfellow’s distress with the Civil War but also his own personal sorrows. Four years after their marriage, in 1835, his first wife died. He married his second wife, Fannie, in 1843 and the couple had five children. Eighteen years later, the same year the Civil War began, Fannie was sealing an envelope with wax when her dress caught fire. Despite her husband’s desperate attempts to save her, she died the next day. Too ill from his burns and grief, Longfellow did not attend her funeral. Profoundly sad, Longfellow published nothing for the next two years.

Longfellow’s sorrow was heightened when in November 1863 his oldest son Charles, a lieutenant in the Army of the Potomac, was severely wounded in the war. Charles knew his father disapproved, but he enlisted anyway. When Longfellow learned that his son was injured, he went to Washington, D.C., to care for him.

While Longfellow condemned the war and mourned the loss of his wife and his son’s life-threatening injuries, his trust in God’s ultimate sovereignty gave Longfellow hope. As Longfellow listened to the bells peal “loud and deep,” their constant and joyous ringing that Christmas Day expressed his belief in God and innate optimism that: “God is not dead, nor doth he sleep.” Longfellow affirmed God’s supreme authority and his own faith in the ultimate triumph of righteousness when he wrote, “The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, good will to men.”

There are times when I share Longfellow’s distress over the absence of peace and the abundance of hate in our world today. While war does not rage in my own country, other Mennonite Brethren are not so fortunate.

DR Congo is home to the second largest Mennonite Brethren national conference and so I grieve for the hundreds of thousands of Congolese who are fleeing eastern Congo to escape fighting and disease. I read with concern about the massive anti-Christian violence in India’s eastern states because this country is home to almost 94,000 Mennonite Brethren and is the largest of all national MB conferences.

The list of countries where Christians live daily with violence is much too long: In the Middle East the list includes Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine. In Africa I think of Zimbabwe, Somalia and Sudan; in South America the list would include Colombia and El Salvador. I think of Asian countries like India, Afghanistan and Vietnam and European nations like Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

What are we to think of a world so riddled with violence? Do we despair? No, we are to have faith in the angels’ message: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men in whom he is pleased” (Luke 2:14). We are to have a faith that sees with a different set of eyes.

These eyes see a baby born in a manger as the promised Messiah, an itinerate preacher executed on a Roman cross as the resurrected Son of God and a world torn with violence as a place that will someday be restored. As Longfellow wrote in his original seventh verse, also omitted from the Christmas carol: “Till, ringing, singing on its way, the world revolved from night to day, a voice, a chime, a chant sublime, of peace on earth, good will to men.”