Stay awake

YPRES, Belgium—Every night seven days a week—by Northern summer evening sun or chill dark December moon, to a crowd of tourists or a handful of locals—the buglers stand beneath Menin Gate at 8 p.m. to honor the war dead of Ypres.

If you know your history, and fewer and fewer of us do, you know that spreading out from this Belgian town are the world’s bloodiest battlefields, where nearly 1 million Allied and German soldiers lost their lives in World War I.

On the outskirts of town small plaques point the way along the Salient, the front lines where both sides launched poison gas attacks for the first time in history, attacks that changed the course of life in this Flemish heartland and all the world beyond. Hundreds of cemeteries here hold war dead from France, Belgium, Germany, England, Canada, America, India, Nepal, and even Africa.

Ypres remembers.

Every night seven days a week … the buglers stand beneath Menin Gate at 8 p.m. to honor the war dead of Ypres.

Menin Gate in the city’s center bears the names of 54,000 soldiers, fighters whose remains never were recovered. Local firefighters play the bugles, and on occasion the war’s descendants parade as well. The evening I attended the Last Post, Scotland’s Greengairs Thistle Flute Band donned authentic World War I uniforms to parade, then the Churcher family laid wreaths of poppies beneath the rows upon rows of names. It was a solemn moment recalling a global cataclysm.

From the North Atlantic to the Aegean the tension is building. You feel it. Europe is changing, and I believe in a generation it will be a different place. Absorbing more than a million refugees from some of the 21st century’s worst wars in the space of a few months—plus decades of mass immigration from the Muslim world heaped on rampant secularism—thrusts the continent into transformation that may bring cataclysm.

The military presence in the streets and train stations of Brussels, Paris, and other cities is something new. The idyll of the French countryside has been broken by the July attack and beheading of a Catholic priest.

“In every country of the world the people are angry,” a tour guide of the Ypres battlefields told me. “It feels a lot like the eve of World War I.”

Then as now the rulers of the world direct the way, leading us further into or out of calamity. How do those lacking their power respond? How did those of previous generations fight global wars but also heal nations and bind up wounds? In every time it’s done on the power of ideas and values, transcendent ideas that push through the threats bleeding out of a broken world. At their best they emanate from a loving God who laid down His life for His friends.

Tribulation will take place, Jesus says in Mark 13, but He is direct and plain, even urgent about what to do: Be on guard. Stay awake.

Like a night watchman, or a doorkeeper, these are common tasks for common men and women.

Despite the rumors of wars, I’ve seen many night watchmen and doorkeepers in Europe. Arab pastors guarding the good testimony of new converts to Christianity. Dutch women opening doors with plates of baklava and melon taken to refugee camps. They wait, and soon the women come, including the newly arrived Afghan widow whose husband was beheaded by the Taliban, and they are ready with wordless embraces and tissues. Or the Greek mother preparing a sunny gathering place for new refugees overwhelmed by red tape, a place where they have coffee but also receive legal aid, learn a new language, or study the Bible.

In the past these were our better instincts in the West. We assumed we would do them. Now, laden with venting and processing, exploring our inner grievances, the ways society, parents, or the ozone harmed us, we need Mark 13 to prompt us to relearn the old habits, stop spreading our anger and our issues, stop urging on leaders who play to them. (You, too, President Obama.)

Take courage. The world in 2016, as in almost every other year of recorded history, has been populated with bad leaders, calamity, and rumors of war. You stay awake.

Email mbelz@wng.org