Remembrance Sunday – The Thin Line
Daily I am reminded that war, persecution, and violence are an unfortunate part of the fabric of our human existence. Every generation of men and women in my family have known of, experienced, or been affected by war. The next generations, here I think of my son who leads a NATO team on deployment of landmine detectors, my grandchildren and great grandchildren know and will know of war.
When I asked my grandfather, my father, or when I sat by the beds of dying veterans, sometimes listening to last their confessions, none wanted to talk about the fighting. I heard only deep pain, sorrow, and regret.
My grandfather was sent into WW1 at the age of 18. He was wounded on the battlefield where many his age died. And because it was thought all were death, he lay in the mud for three days until it was safe for the paramedics to recover the bodies. By the time he was rescued gangrene had set in. There was no anesthesia, so they laced him with alcohol and cut of his arm. While recovering in England he had to have two more operations to contain the gangrene again without anesthesia. He returned home to a hero’s welcome, at the local train station in Duncan, friends and family gathered to welcome him back with cheer and applause. But my grandmother said he only want to escape. Huddled in the buggy ride home he said: I’m not the boy who left.
Reconciling faith with war has no simple answers. We have a complex and complicated relationship with war, violence, justice, peace, and sacrifice. Throughout history within our own Christian tradition, we find contradictory believes and values often taking us in very different directions ranging from total pacifism, theological resistance, to holy war.
Biblical prophets throughout the ages have called for justice and the end of war:
Leviticus 19:18 “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people but love your neighbour as yourself.”
Micah 4:3-4 “prophecies that God shall judge between the peoples and arbitrate between the nations and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid.”
Matthew 5:43-48 Love your Enemies, pray for your enemies
John 15: 9-17 “ Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In gospel of John placed during the last supper before entering Jerusalem. Interestingly the Lectionary cycle places this reading on the Last Sunday of Easter just before Pentecost, as Jesus’ parting words in the upper room
The central message is Love – Love characterises the Father’s relation with the Son and the Son’s relation with the disciples. the language of command also appears. The command is simple: ‘Love one another, as I have loved you’. Jesus offers himself as the model of love. He gave his life for his friends. John is probably not thinking of sacrificial or substitutionary atonement here, but rather of love, willing to go so far as to suffer danger and death to express love. Perhaps it is in the background. The focus is clearly love.
Modern theologians have reflected on our relationship with war and faith. I quote two Bonhoeffer and Merton:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor of the Confessing Church in Germany during WW11, left Germany when Hitler hunted him down but returned in July 1939:
“I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christen life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”—Letter to Reinhold Niebuhr, explaining his decision to return to Nazi Germany from New York
Later account by his close friend Felix Gilbert (a refugee living in New York who met with Bonhoeffer during June 1939):
“What he said to me was somewhat more general: if he remained away from Germany, he would not be able to play a role in the rebuilding of the country after the war. The difference is slight but, I think, throws some light on what seemed to me to be a very essential and very moving element in Dietrich’s attitude. There was no personal ambition in his wish to have a role in Germany after the war. Dietrich was not a political person in the sense of being concerned with the introduction or the reestablishment of particular institutions, or with the construction of social utopias. He had very close ties to his family, his friends, and colleagues...he saw them behind the institutions, and his overwhelming urge was to help save for them the possibility of meaningful life. Would he be heard if he separated his fate from theirs?”
Bonhoeffer wrote the following about love: “The love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross and into fellowship with the Crucified. The more we are driven along this road, the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred. For then it is not the disciple's own love, but the love of Jesus Christ alone, who for the sake of his enemies went to the cross and prayed for them as he hung there.”
Thomas Merton, Jesuit priest, in his book Faith and Violence writes: “When a system can, without resort to overt force, compel people to live in conditions of abjection, helplessness, wretchedness . . . it is plainly violent. To make people live on a subhuman level against their will, to constrain them in such a way that they have no hope of escaping their condition, is an unjust exercise of force. Those who in some way or other concur in the oppression—and perhaps profit by it—are exercising violence even though they may be preaching pacifism. And their supposedly peaceful laws, which maintain this spurious kind of order, are in fact instruments of violence and oppression….
Growth, survival and even salvation may depend on the ability to sacrifice what is fictitious and unauthentic in the construction of one’s moral, religious or national identity. One must then enter upon a different creative task of reconstruction and renewal. This task can be carried out only in the climate of faith, of hope and of love: these three must be present in some form, even if they amount only to a natural belief in the validity and significance of human choice, a decision to invest human life with some shadow of meaning, a willingness to treat other people as other selves. “
Dr. Serena Patterson, psychologist, member of Comox United Church, has struggle with her own tension between faith and violence. She speaks to us now about honorable path in soldiering, and the thin line:
“I never expected to speak on Remembrance Sunday. I’ve never taken basic training, never held a gun, never even slept outdoors involuntarily. My mom, who would not allow toy guns in the house, taught us that when Jesus said, “Blessed are the peace makers,” he meant teachers and parents.
My childhood heroes were the civil rights workers. I thought my pacifism was a virtue.
But life surprises us. I moved to the Comox Valley, opened a practice, and started listening to veterans. For 30 years through their memories, their jumpy hyper-arousal, and their inability or unwillingness to stand down from guarding my safety, I have learned something.
My veteran teachers have been soldiers, sailors, linemen, cooks, technicians, supply clerks, transport drivers, pilots, social workers, spouses. They’ve shared their fear, confusion, anger, disgust, grief, love, disappointment, and the pain of broken bodies and broken relationships.
They went where they were sent, to missions that they didn’t choose. 1940’s Europe, the Cold War, Viet Nam, Cyprus, Haiti, the borders of Israel, Somalia, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Afghanistan. They protected their comrades-in-arms, walked between people of evil intent and people who stood to be harmed, and tried to make the world safe, even through that paradoxical strategy of bringing guns into a tense situation.
It's called peacekeeping, but entering conflict zones isn’t clean, or pretty. Our side doesn’t always win, and sometimes, in modern wars, good people ask themselves if they are even in the right place or on the right side. And none of that matters. We don’t get to appreciate our soldiers only when they win. We honour them, and thank them, for what they are willing to give in trying.
I asked one of my favorites one day, what he thought about on Remembrance Day.
He said, “I think about the soldier.”
“The Canadian soldier?” I asked.
“no,” he said, “every soldier, every country. Because they are all trying to hold on to their themselves, to have honour, in horrible situations. And that is the hardest thing in the world.”
So, what is this quality, this military honour that I’ve learned about through their stories? Here’s what I think:
It’s the courage to walk each day into a world that you know in your bones is not safe,
It’s the knowledge that peace is all the more beautiful for its fragility,
It’s following the desire to do what is right, even when that is hard.
It’s the struggle to stay focused in battle zones, to not get paralyzed by grief, or give in to raw impulses of anger.
It’s the deep love for life, that says, “protect this.”
It’s the hope of making it home, and the knowledge that not everyone does.
May our military members always be called only to missions that make sense.
May they always hold their honour, and come home still knowing themselves in the mirror. May they find peace with what they have seen and done, or not done, in places where I go only in my imagination.
May our love and our prayers always follow them.
May they walk with God.”