Truce

Yesterday was the winter solstice and on this year it coincided with a lunar eclipse at midnight December 21st—at least on the west coast of North America.  Whatever this portends, as we approach Christmas I thought maybe we might dedicate this post to unity.  And in the spirit of unity—a story harking back 96 years…

World War One commenced in August of 1914 and by December 23rd the war was mired down in abject horror and misery; trenches of the British stood sixty yards from trenches of the Germans.  Rats, death and hardening mud were mainly what soldiers on both sides stood to get for Christmas.

Battered troops on both sides of the equation were losing their mojo for fighting and a live-and-let-live spirit was arising out of the broken lethargy, worrying British High Command (who hung out 27 miles away from the trenches in a chateau).  Suddenly, little candle-lit Christmas trees appeared along the crest of the German trenches against the darkening sky.

The Generals were disgusted but unable to stop it as the officers at the front lines worked out a truce:  Christmas Eve and Christmas Day would be no fighting.  Soldiers on both sides buried their dead, but they also sang Christmas songs in their respective languages and shared their meager presents from on high—tobacco and some cakes.  There was a legendary soccer game with caps for goal posts.

As Christmas ended, the officers on each side fired a couple of shots into the air and the war started up again.

I learned about the Christmas truce from my aunt and uncle.  It turns out that my mom’s father had been conscripted into the German army, even though he was a Jew living in Austria-Hungary.  He was in the German trench that Christmas of 1914.

Meanwhile, my aunt’s father was a British soldier and he was hunkered down in the facing trench.

On the 26th of December 1914, when the war started up again, my aunt’s dad got a bayonet to the lung.  My own grandfather got mustard gassed and this wrecked his lungs too.

My aunt’s dad was sent to Italy to recover (I picture A Farewell To Arms) where he contracted tuberculosis.  After the war he was sent to Arizona, to a sanatorium to recover from the TB he got in Italy.  There he met a nurse who was also recovering from TB; they fell in love and my aunt Bronwen is the product of this love.

Meanwhile, my grandfather made it to New York and worked as a furrier but, with bad lungs, was told to get out of the city and so he moved to South Bend Indiana.  He died in the forties, after learning that all his ten brothers and sisters had been killed by the very Germans he had fought for.  My uncle changed his name from Herb to Rick and headed out to sunny southern California.

There he met Bronwen and when they shared the stories of their dads, they realized that both of their fathers had been on opposite sides of the Christmas truce (one of the only stories about the war that they had ever told their children).

Despite my Buby’s horror (Bronwen was not Jewish), they fell madly in love and live happily every after to this very Christmas.

I heard this story one Thanksgiving as a lovely baritone richly filled the air in the background of my aunt’s kitchen—it was her father, who had sang at the Hollywood Bowl (amongst other venerable venues)—a great career stopped by neither a bayonet to the lung nor by TB.

My aunt started to tell stories about growing up in Hollywood, and then being horrified when her dad bought a ramshackle chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley and moved the family to the then remote boonies.  When I asked what street she lived on I learned that the old farm in the middle of nowhere turned out to have been located… less than two blocks from where I live now.

Crossing paths, perceived divisions, new connections, synchronicities, widening understandings of family and fellowship… consider the rich, varied and mysterious ways in which we all live and love in a common and universal puzzle of consciousness, the trick more in awakening to it as it already is than in trying to bring it about.

Much as Rumi suggests that out beyond right and wrong there is a field, and he offers to meet us there, that field exists wherever peace rises up rather than war of any stripe—between two trenches, between spouses, between old enemies, between children on the world’s playground.

Thus in the dark, and yet light-bringing, days of this Holiday Season (at least wintry in our northern hemisphere while friends and family in the other hemisphere celebrate the pinnacle of summer) let’s wish love and good cheer to each other, and to all our collective children.

Namaste, Peace & Merry Christmas, Bruce, Andy, Nate & Will