Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

It’s springtime! The sun is shining, there are buds on the trees, I’ve cut my grass for the first time, daffodils are flower; flowers celebrate new spring-life. In contrast last week we saw flowers around a grave as a coffin was lowered into the earth; flowers for a good life and a sad death.

News about war continues day by day, month by month, year by year. My mind goes back to protest and anti-war songs that I grew up with. The songs from sixty, seventy years ago still resonate today.

One of the simplest and most profound is Pete Seeger’s 1955 song ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Where have all the flowers gone?
Young girls have picked them everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

Flowers are picked by young girls. Successive verses describe how the young girls go to and marry young men; the young men become soldiers; the young men are killed and are taken to graveyards; the graveyards are places where flowers grow. It’s a purposeless futile circle.

Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, everyone.
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

This morning, I was reading the story of Eli. Israel isn’t following the true God. The country is in a bad way morally and spiritually. Eli the priest is a good man but ineffective; his sons are priests, but ‘wicked men who have no regard for the Lord’.  They fight against the Philistines. There’s heavy defeat, initially four thousand are killed, then another thirty thousand. Eli’s sons are killed; Eli dies; Eli’s daughter-in-law has a baby but dies in childbirth.

The baby’s called ‘Icobod’ which means ‘no glory’, because the dying mother says, ‘the glory has gone out of Israel’.

There is no glory in war… When will they every learn? When will we ever learn?