Anti-War Anthems: "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"

Okay, I'm projecting here, a little: the lyrics of this song don't actually mention war, in Vietnam or elsewhere. But the Peter Paul & Mary album this song is taken from was released the same week that two of the group's members were among those beaten and gassed by police in the suppression of anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. This song, a product of its era, is a spiritual affirmation profoundly and simply challenging the mindset that allows war to happen.

"Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Nothing more than earth and water
Smiles of Spring from barren daughter
Who at last in perfect motion
Turning 'round embrace the ocean
Gracious calf of mankind suffering;
Sacrifice of old is ending.

In the instant of remaking
Just the giving of the taking
In the instant of the living
Just the taking of the giving

Moments of the soft persuasion
Chiming bells, the first occasion
Tell the rest a smile awaken
Till the last reminder shaken
From whatever rue'd and sorrow;
Now, the time is now — tomorrow."
— Lyrics by Peter Yarrow

By my reading this song is a fairly profound challenge to revisit an often-ignored yet simple tenet of the Christian Bible: that the message of Jesus and his ultimate sacrifice in the New Testament is a repudiation of the religion of the Old Testament. By his self-sacrifice, Jesus says that the sacrifice and blood-letting and brutality that God seems to demand according to the Bible's early books is no longer necessary: a new age of peace and love brings mankind to a new relationship with the world and with God.

Cynics might well argue that Jesus made his call for such a religion of love in a barbaric world on the cusp of two thousand years more of barbarism and violence, and, to be honest, those cynics aren't wrong. Not being a Christian, I'm not going to undertake a defense of how the Christian church or the faith's believers reconcile what looks to me like a call for a revolution in human consciousness with what has actually been the history of that church or indeed the Christian world. It's hard to find "soft persuasion" or "the taking of the giving" in the Spanish inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the genocide against Native Americans, the Pope's failure to protect Italian Jews in the Second World War, or the hateful rantings of today's American fundamentalist Christians, to touch the tip of an iceberg. As I say I'm no Christian theologian.

But nevertheless, a little spiritual optimism goes a long way. The promise of a new age is foundational to all sorts of religious — and political — movements. The late Mary Travers opened up the liner notes to "Moments of a Soft Persuasion"'s album, Late Again, with a poem invoking the ever-ignored Cassandra: "Cassandra late,/The Prophets' meager wares/Are strewn about a weary world/A time when death requires sainthood undeserved./We are a world of mortal men/And man's great greatness is his hope."

And so this song is a softly persuasive polemic calling for, well, a soft persuasion over the clash of arms or the flash of a knife.

Anyway, I love this song.