A nice view spoiled

Before leaving Malta behind on my blog this year I think that the single most shocking moment for me came when I realised the history of this beautiful bay by which we walked several times.  The bay I expected to remember when I left Malta was the one where Paul was shipwrecked but it proved difficult to set that over against the grotesque story of this bay in the Great Siege (referenced in my previous post).

On one grim day of that siege the headless crucified corpses of some Knights of St John were floated over the bay to terrorise their allies.  In retaliation, the knights, having beheaded many Ottoman prisoners, fired their heads from cannons back across the bay.

As we enter Advent, this is a good time to remember that the coming of the Light of the World has never ceased to be necessary - for however blue the sky, darkness is never far away.

No Island is an Island

Her Majesty the Queen and dozens of Commonwealth leaders have gathered in Malta - and with some relief one imagines.  Threats have been issued (of course) and security strengthened (of course) but in the whole scheme of things a small Mediterranean island looks like a good idea just now.

Yet even a modicum of historical awareness suggests otherwise for, as we were reminded during our  family holiday in Malta, this is an island whose history is bathed in blood.  In living memory it was the heroics of the Second World War when, as effectively the allied mid-Med military base the island was mercilessly, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Axis forces.

But the really bloody story of Malta is that of the Great Siege - a historical epic of mind-numbing proportions when the Knights of St John, representing Christian Europe and based in Malta, held out against an Ottoman siege by four or more times as many men through a whole summer.

Soberingly, given the cheap view of life demonstrated recently in Paris, a historian wrote thus, 'The disregard of human life among the Ottoman Turks at this time was almost incredible: to try to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with callous indifference.'

In five hundred years humanity has not learned very much, for all its apparent learning.

Holocaust

I was struck by the crafted words of a journalist reporting on today's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz:  Those who survived Auschwitz lived through one of the 20th Century's worst acts of hatred and inhumanity.

 

In a world where hype so often hides the truth here is the truth: one of one century's worst.

 

In fact the importance of marking today in our thoughts is not because it was unthinkably bad but because the inhumanity of the Nazis toward the Jews and others is repeatable.  The industrial, secret and targeted scale of it sets it apart, but only in degree.  I witnessed the fears that surround this still in one of my earlier blogs.

Protection for Frankfurt's Synagogue - today

We call it inhumanity because we do not want to think of it as human.  But it is absolutely human.  What other created species sets about its own in such a way?  Certainly none with any moderately developed intelligence.

I like the optimism in the word inhumanity.  I like it but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.  Humanity's best hope lies, I think, in the Man from Heaven.