This Christmas, as we often do, our choir sang William Stopford’s version of Lully Lulla, the Coventry Carol. A survival from a medieval mystery play, the carol tells the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which we are told that King Herod ordered the slaughter of all boy children under the age of two in Bethlehem.
Some scholars believe this episode never happened. Indeed, such is the story’s horror that one would like to imagine no king, no leader of men and women could possibly be capable of such a thing. But of course we know human nature well enough to know exactly the opposite is true.
Over at Daily (W)rite, Damyanti Biswas’s consistently interesting blog, we find a cri de coeur and an empathetic declaration of humanity over the Taliban’s mass murder of children in a Pakistani school. Her words are well said.
When we began to rehearse Lully Lulla, it was all I could do to keep from weeping, so vividly did it bring to mind this latest horror. If the Biblical story itself is fable, so be it. Yet it’s emblematic: it tells the sorry story of humanity’s repeated outrages, of massacres of innocents down through the ages. After 2015 years, we don’t seem to have changed much, as a species.