Gethsemane

Poor Rudyard Kipling...such a man of his age, worked his way through the system to allow his son to be sent to the front line in the First World War. "My son Jack" was then killed and Kipling lived with that sorrow for the rest of his life.

Would the all-powerful. all-beautiful Source of Life - the Creator of planets and stars; of creatures and Nature and beauty - do the same to an innocent child? Surely not.

God, to my mind, is Life. On Good Friday, it makes no sense at all to think the Life would destroy one of the most beautiful examples of Life - Life Itself in its purest form - to placate Itself for the sins of children.

Perhaps, at risk of being a heretic, if we spent more time on the message of Life of which Jesus spoke, and less on the horror of a Roman crucifixion, the world would be more filled with light and less with the darkness of war and destruction.

Poor Rudyard's Gethsemane speaks so clearly of the repetition of Gethsemane. If we want it to end, don't we need to look higher and stop thinking that there is any merit in suffering? :

The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass - we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.

The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.

It didn't pass - it didn't pass -
It didn't pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!