Benjamin, Winston and Harry

"that you not be judged"

Matthew 7:1

I'm thinking about dead people today. 

Well, not all of them. 

Specifically, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin and King Henry V of England.

photo credit: englishmonarchs.co.uk

photo credit: biography.com

photo credit: biography.com

I love it when different trains of thought come together at the depot and get me pondering something deeper.  And that's what happened today. 

First:  I'm reading a magazine article about Winston Churchill.  He died before I was born, so I never had a chance to really come to my own conclusion about the man.  History has done the job for me.  My reading for history classes when I was in school, and a few additional things like this article form the sum total of evidence on which I have based my opinion of him ~ an opinion that is very favorable.  He was a hero during World War II; courageous, bold, and with an intuition that kept him ~ unlike Neville Chamberlain ~ from being fooled about Hitler's intentions.

But this article is teaching me things I never knew ~ somewhat negative things.  For instance, the idea that the same characteristics that made him successful also worked against him.  Which I think is true for most of us.  Boldness is an invaluable quality, but there's a time for it.  Being bold when it isn't necessary is sometimes just being overbearing.  Being cautious and untrustworthy about Hitler is a good thing.  Being always untrustworthy is a bad thing.  So there were times when Churchill wasn't a hero, necessarily.  Which is okay.  That just clarifies that he's human, of which I had a hunch anyway.

Then this morning, during school, Amazing Boy and I had reason to discuss both Benjamin Franklin and Henry V.

Franklin, as you might guess, we discussed while he was studying U.S. History.  His textbook informed him that Franklin was a Deist, and my boy expressed disappointment to find that out.  I didn't even know my son knew what Deism was, much less had a negative opinion of it.  So we talked a little about it, and while I'm hardly an expert on the belief, I clarified for him that being a Deist doesn't mean believing that God created the world and then turned His back on it.  I think a better way to put it is that Deists believed that God created the world, but doesn't intervene in it.  This is particularly true of Deists in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Franklin and his ilk lived in a time when there was resistance to organized religion, and the belief that God created man, and gave man the ability to reason ~ what else was needed? 

We discussed Henry V in the less obvious subject of Poetry.  Today's selection was the St Crispin's Day Speech from Shakespeare's Henry V.  It was a speech that Henry gave to his men before the Battle of Agincourt, during the Hundred Years' War.  He and his men were badly outnumbered by the French, but won the battle, after Henry's inspiring speech.

So rather than my just reading the poem to my boy, I found an online clip of Kenneth Branagh's 1985 film, to allow him to hear the poem read more dramatically than I could pull off.  But after it was done, my son expressed puzzlement at the idea of the men being almost eager to go into battle.  We talked about that fact that neither he nor I could imagine the mindset of someone who is headed into war, but also about the fact that this was an event that took place hundreds of years ago and frankly, people thought differently then.

That was the common denominator in my mind today.  These men ~ Churchill, Franklin and King Henry V ~ were each a product of the time in which they lived.  It seems easy to criticize how they thought, or what they did, but it's also very presumptuous.   I can't possibly understand completely who they were.  And it reminds me again about the danger of judging others. 

And I wonder if perhaps the reason that God told us not to judge others is that He knew that we would always be wrong... 

~ "in lowliness of mind

  let each esteem others better than himself" ~

Philippians 2:3

~