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Good morning. I’ve been preparing a special service in our cathedral here in Oxford to mark the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. At 11 in the evening, on the 4th August 1914 this country declared war on Germany. There’ll be vigils in churches and cathedrals up and down the land, and during the service candles will gradually be extinguished, recalling Sir Edward Grey’s fearful remark on the eve of war: ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’. It is almost impossible now for us to recall the excitement and foreboding of the golden summer of 1914, though something of the terrible suffering of so many of the young men who went to fight has come down to us in searing poetry, photography and painting.

A hundred years is a long time, longer than most human lives. The First World War did not resolve the issues that led to it, and some of those conflicts smoulder on in the Balkans and elsewhere. But today most of Europe, for all its economic problems, is a haven of prosperity and peace. When Germany won the World Cup so spectacularly last week many of us Brits had long got over the shame of our own woeful performance by supporting them. We saw Angela Merkel ecstatic with joy almost as one of our own. We are friends with those who were once our foes.

Today it is the Middle East that is a cauldron of national, ethnic and ideological conflict. Sunni and Shi-ite, Arab and Jew, Hezbollah, Hamas, Isis. We look aghast at the strident calls to arms, the anxiety of millions, the bombing and the torture, the loss of homes and livelihoods, the indifference to human pain. What can ever come out of this?

For the moment aggression is all and there is everything to play for. There are too many people who are excited by war for the violence to end any time soon. Nobody is ready to sign up to the Western dream of stable borders and apple-pie democracy. But there are times to look for a longer perspective and to call on a different kind of hope. The sufferings Europe endured in the 2oth century could be seen as a purification, a burning away toxic fantasies of race, blood and nation. What we have now is far from perfect, but it is more modest, more humble.

We cannot know what the Middle East will be like in a hundred years time. But there is no reason not to pray that out of the current suffering and violence a good future will be born. It is unimaginable now. But we once part of a time when all the lamps went out. One of the themes of the vigil service is that the light shines most intensely in deepest darkness. In Syria, Libya, Gaza, Iraq today there are few grounds for optimism, but there are still grounds for hope.

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