Unanswered Questions, Unquestioned Answers
Twenty-fifth after Pentecost - Year A
November 6, 2005
Remembrance Day
Let us pray: O God, open our ears, our hearts, our minds, that we may come into your presence and hear your word for us, through these words I speak and through the ways in which those around us lead us to new visions of your work in our world. Amen.
Remembrance day was always a special day in our family as I was growing up. In my early years, before I was six, I can remember attending a service at the small cenotaph in the village where we lived, and we always watched on television the ceremony from the national cenotaph in Ottawa. There was no history of war veterans in my family, for reasons I don’t know and really never asked, except for vague stories about distant cousins, one of whom was killed in an accidental plane crash before he ever arrived in Europe. I’m not sure what attracted first my parents and then me to the yearly commemoration. I think it was a sense of duty, as well as an attraction to the ritual. It also guaranteed that I spent at least one day per year reflecting on the madness of war.
Oftentimes the national remembrance day service was preceded or succeeded by special programming on television. These programs usually included interviews with veterans, giving them an opportunity to reflect on their experience in the wars. There were often tales told of great adventure - remember that these veterans were often only teenagers when they volunteered and ended up someplace in Europe. Except for the spectre of giving up your life, something that often seems impossible to people of such a young age, the opportunity to see the world and be on your own for the first time in your life, would be an adventure of unimaginable proportions. However those tales of adventure were very much tempered by the other stories told in those remembrance day specials, recounted by teary eyed veterans, as they told of friends cut down in the prime of their life, or the incredible horror of coming upon a friend, with shrapnel wounds, fighting for life, and the acts of bravery taken by those veterans to get help for their friends and comrades. Believe me when I say that the tragedy of those stories far outweighed any thought of adventure that was experienced.
Every time I heard those stories I would wonder what it would have been like and offer a silent prayer of thanksgiving that I did not have to make the same kind of choices that those young men and yes, some women, had made. And I would pray to God for answers to the question about why it had to happen at all. As much as I was humbled by the sacrifice of those who believed in the cause to the point of giving up the most precious gift we have - the gift of life, I could not and still cannot but think that there has to be a different way. I cannot but think that war of any kind is an affront to God, and the gift of life with which God has graced us.
Well, that’s how it was for me until my first year of ministry. Yes, I was guaranteed to reflect on those unanswerable questions at least once a year, but even though the stories told in television specials and elsewhere were poignant and very real, they did not touch me at a personal level. Of course I didn’t know that until I George Bush Senior decided to defend the invasion of Kuwait by declaring war on Iraq. Canadians joined in. Do you remember? That was when CBC radio began broadcasting throughout the night. I was living a thirty minute drive from a Canadian Air Force base that sent fighter pilots to participate in the Gulf War. Well, as we all may remember, the war ended quickly, mercifully with no Canadian casualties and few coalition casualties altogether, but still the experience was new. No longer was remembrance day about two wars fought before I was born. No, Canada had participated in a way in my life time. Not only that, but when Remembrance Day 1991 came around, I was asked to speak at the service, a service attended by large numbers of members of the Canadian Armed Forces, friends and perhaps even veterans of the Gulf War from the Cold Lake Air Force Base. Suddenly, Remembrance Day was very much more real to me. What would I say, what could I say?
I don’t remember exactly. I expect I said something about my unanswered questions about the need for war, the need to put the youngest and often most able of citizens at the front line, and probably what I said a few moments ago that war is an affront to God who created us. But there I was having to say that in front of the same people who had volunteered to put their lives on the line. I know that some of those people volunteered thinking that they would never have to actually fight in a war. Most of them were younger than me, and even though we had spent some of our years living in a culture dominated by a Cold War, they, like me were probably living under the illusion that Canada was a peaceable nation and was unlikely to find itself involved in a war time effort. It might have been a shock to them that the possibility even existed that they would be called into action against an enemy. I also wondered how many of them had been attracted to the Canadian Armed Forces because it meant they might be involved in peacekeeping. I’ve never been so proud to be a Canadian as when I heard two high ranking members of the Canadian Armed forces speaking in a radio interview in the mid-80's about what it means to be a peacekeeper. I said to myself at the time, "That’s what it should be about. I could even see myself be part of the Armed Forces, it that’s what it means."