On a Note of Triumph

This week, Norman Corwin died. Who is Corwin?  The writer of the greatest radio broadcast in history, listened to by over 60 million Americans after the defeat of Adolf Hitler in World War Two.  The program was aired on May 8, 1945.  Its title “On a Note of Triumph.”  The show, which rallied the country, was almost never written.  Corwin, tired and discouraged after years of writing for the war effort didn’t know how to inspire a country still entangled in a war in the Pacific and nursing wounds from the European conflict.  What could be said of a war not yet finished?

He visited museums, read about war atrocities, wandering through the city looking for his muse.  Nothing came to Corwin.  After reading “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman, he stopped on the phrase, “Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day.”  Corwin pondered the questions.  Why were we fighting?  What did victory mean?  At what cost?  For what future?  These became the framework of his broadcast.

In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul speaks of the atrocities of sin, the difficulty of defeating it, the triumph of the believer’s debt forgiven, the wounds and incompleteness of transforming a Christian’s character, and a war effort in which total victory and glory lie yet in the future with Christ’s return.  He considers “sharp questions.”  He comes to this in Romans 8: “If God is for us, who can stand against us?”  He then delivers a message, on a note of triumph:

³⁷ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(To listen to Corwin’s program: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/33233)