Peace on Earth
Peace on earth. Goodwill to men,
Echoes like Sullivan’s Great Amen:
The chord he lost when sitting by,
His brother as he watched him die.
And so this year we’ll watch again,
Aleppo’s children wracked with pain.
Such is the lottery of life,
All they’ve ever known is strife.
Peace is the most elusive prize,
That disappears before our eyes.
Well intentioned intervention,
Seems to heighten confrontation.
In a world of movers and shakers,
How Blessed are the Peace Makers?
And how fortunate are we,
Rejoicing with our family?
So let us raise our Christmas cheers,
For all those nameless volunteers,
Unsung heroes, dressed in white,
Who labour through the war-torn night.
They are weary and ill at ease,
Driven by kindness, nobody sees.
They may not mark a Christian birth,
But we can wish them Peace on Earth.
Happy Christmas 2016
Andrew Ailes is a British foreign news veteran living in London.
John Menadue is the Founder of Pearls and Irritations and a board member. He was formerly the Editor-in-Chief. John was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.
Comments
4 responses to “ANDREW AILES. Peace on earth – the children of Aleppo.”
Andrew Ailes could sieze the day and get current stories. One source is Andrew Ashdown, a Church of England cleric who has recently returned from Syria, and no doubt has many good contacts there. He has a Facebook page, updated very frequently, and also a blog at
http://www.andrewashdown.me.uk/
Thank you indeed Robert for the link to Andrew Ashdown.
I have since read the material on the blog and found it most informative – very different to much of the reportage by the Western press; guess I should have expected that.
Thank you Andrew, well said, and a timely reminder.
As an aside, in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein it is said that: “Blessed are the peacemakers…&c”, I recall a biblical scholar years ago pointing out that in the original Aramaic, the sense was quite different to the later use of the word “Blessed”, which obscured the fact that each invocation in the Sermon was in fact an injunction to literally get up, go out and do something.
In other words, it was not enough to simply sit in one’s favourite chair and contemplate the absence of peace in the world and hope that something be done.
Peace, like Justice and any other noble endeavour requires us to actually do something – however insignificant, and if that turns out to be a small financial contribution to something like Medecin sans Frontiers or similar, then so much the better !
Read ‘Aleppo and Mosul wracked with pain’
And
‘Ill-intentioned intervention
Leads to deadly confrontation’