In February of 1945, during the final months of World War II, a decorated Soviet commander serving in East Prussia was arrested by Red Army intelligence officers. Letters to his friend had been intercepted containing criticisms of Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. He found himself swept up with untold multitudes into the secretive Gulag system, where he would shuttle through their murky network of labor camps for the next eight years. His name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and he was 27 years old at the time of his arrest.
In this arrest—which he called “an unassimilable spiritual earthquake”—his perception of enemy and friend was wrenched disfigured. He listened to the celebrations of the German surrender on the streets from his mirthless cell. It was enough, he wrote in his account The Gulag Archipelago, to cause one to “slip into insanity.”
Is anything more tantalizing than peace? Is anything more tormentingly elusive? Nevertheless, Advent arrives perennially with songs and sacred texts brimming with sentiments of “peace on earth and goodwill to men!” (Luke 2:14) The angel choir sang these lyrics to shepherds stationed above the hamlet of Bethlehem, yet the glad tidings they hastened to herald soon beckoned atrocities of a jealous despot and days of weeping without comfort.
The abolitionist poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow took up the phrase in his poignant poem, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” writing on Christmas of 1863 while the tolling bells of Civil War deaths were temporarily spelled by “old, familiar carols”:
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, goodwill to men!
The bloodiest war of our nation’s history raged on. His wife of 18 years had only just died. His son had only just returned home from the front seriously wounded. And Longfellow was doing his own battle with these wild and sweet words.
Continue reading “Advent IV | Prince of Peace”
Matthew Podszus 