My grandfather fought and was wounded in World War II. He
landed at Dieppe with the North Shore Regiment. I happen to come from a family
where my father, grandfather, and pretty much someone from every generation as
you go back was a soldier. I even started my illustrious adult life heading
down that path.
On the other hand, my grandfather was a teacher, my father
was a doctor, I am a minister and a writer, and if you go back through each
generation of Anningsons you will find a lot of similar professions weaving
their way through our ranks.
Remembrance Day is always a curious mix to me – there is the
fact that we are remembering specific events, there is the fact that we are
thankful for soldiers who decide to risk their lives to protect their culture,
family, and country both now and then, there is the idea that we wish we really
could beat those swords into ploughshares and forget about war, there is the
reality of those among us who have seen too much and done too much to ever
forget.
Life is filled with these sort of tensions the way we
balance remembering and honouring, the way we balance war and peace. The
tensions are what make us human while at the same time making it easier to
fight on Facebook.
Remembrance Day is a civic holiday – it has nothing to do
with church and religion (it also has nothing to do with shopping and
decorating, people have to let that go) but at the same time, it has everything
to do with faith.
In our own Islamic-Judeo-Christian tradition we are a people
of the story. History and its unfolding are what bring us closer to God and
help us understand God’s will. Remember your ancestor Abraham is the type of
thing you will read all over the place if you pick up the Bible. Do not forget
what God did at… name a place, Bethlehem, the Red Sea, in the Land of Canaan,
when the Babylonians came…
From a religious point of view we define ourselves from
where we came from. We are the people who follow Jesus who lived 2000 years
ago. He was a Jew and knew God because of what God had done for the people of
Israel for 2000 years before us.
It is not just church that sees the world this way. To be
Canadian is to remember Cabot discovering things, Samuel de Champlain settling
here, the depression and cooperative movement, and how our troops were the
scariest thing the Germans ever saw. Kilts and Bagpipes will bring fear to
anyone on a battlefield. These are all things that define us as Canadian – and
come from our history.
So how do we be respectful to the idea of Remembrance Day
while still holding everything else in our minds? That is a question that
church is very adept at answering – we do it all the time. The past is the
past; we remember it for the people who made the best decisions possible in the
time. We also remember those decisions hoping that we can make better ones now.
We do not always do it – witness the Iraq war which almost
no one sees as a good idea any more… But for what it is worth, a lot of people
went into it with the right motivations, especially those on the ground who lost
their lives. Same is true in Afghanistan – where over history everyone has
learned it is a really bad idea to fight a ground war and we probably should
have talked to the Russians before we went in… but the soldiers we remember on
November 11th, they were the ones who were trying to make a
difference and make the world better for Canadians and Afghanis alike.
To be faithful is to live out the ideals that God values –
to try and make the world a better place – to try and promote love and hope. In
the end that is what we remember – that is what my grandfather fought for.
