As a Christian, and as a Franciscan, I am highly committed to the ideal of peace. I hate the thought of killing anything, though from time to time I find I have to, of course. You don’t clean a church without hoovering up a spider or two, and goodness known how many microbes you destroy, some harmful, but I guess some not as well, whenever you clean any work surface. Then there are the accidental killings, like what happened to the squirrel that darted straight under the wheels of my car the other day. There was nothing I could do, but I still felt really bad.
Franciscans follow the teachings of St Francis of Assisi; and Francis himself did his best to make peace between the Muslims and the Christians who were fighting in the Crusades of his time. In the year 1219 he crossed the battle lines to meet with the Sultan of Egypt, Malek al-Kamil, who was a nephew of the great Islamic leader Saladin. He didn’t succeed in brokering peace, but I greatly admire his courage and faith in trying - as indeed did the Sultan himself.
I hope that in a similar situation I might find the courage to do the same; and certainly I’m glad to honour those people in today’s world today, some of them my fellow Christians, who tirelessly work for peace, often in the most divisive and dispiriting of circumstances. Those who persist in trying to build bridges of reconciliation where communities are divided, where one group rejects or refuses rights to another, and nations are tempted into war.
But what if I saw someone being attacked, and the only way I could save them would be to attack their assailant? And what if the only way I could stop them was to kill them? Would I do that? I really can’t answer that question, since I’ve never actually been placed in that situation. But I do think that if I failed to respond, then that failure would be something I’d have to live with, a burden I’d find myself bearing for the whole of the rest of my life.
A second question, though, is “Would I be justified in acting in that way - in attacking someone I saw harming someone else?” If there’s a peaceful way of halting the attack, or if I used more force and did more damage than was necessary, then I guess the answer would be no. But what if it really was the only way? Well, even then I think the answer there has to be both yes and no. The Church has in the past been prepared to declare a war to be just - in the sense that the intention of waging that war was to defeat something evil, and that couldn’t have been done in any other way. But to say a war is just doesn’t also make it “right” or “good”; no war can ever be described as that, for every war is going to cost precious and innocent lives, and modern warfare even more so.
And, although it has to be admitted that the Bible is full of people going to war, I would always want to claim that every war offends against God. That includes even the war that defeated Hitler’s evil and murderous Third Reich, and the cruel imperialism of the Japan of Tojo and Hirohito. The 1960’s protest song “The Universal Soldier” claims that to deploy the fighting man is “not the way to put the end to war”, however much we may hope and believe it might be. And Jesus himself said, “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.”
But I also recognise that in 1939 that was the only way it could be done, the only way a tremendous evil could be countered. We felt that was the case at the time, and - looking back through the lens of history - that’s how it still feels. And when war is the only way, the fighting man - and woman - does have to be deployed.
My grandfather served in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, and saw a friend from the same village killed alongside him, something he never forgot; as an old man he still told that story. He stayed on as a regular, serving in the Straits Settlements before coming home to marry and try his hand at farming. He always felt the burden of surviving when his friend did not.
“When it’s got your number on, then it’s your turn” they used to say in the trenches; but the reality is never that simple. War is a mess; the strategic decisions taken by the generals become a mess by the time they reach where you are. The enemy may be evil, but the lad you kill perhaps had no part in that evil himself; he’s just a kid like you, far from home and doing his bit.
So today isn’t a day to glorify war in any way; but we’re here to admit to the necessity of opposing evil by whatever means prove necessary; and we’re here to mark, praise and (yes) glorify the commitment and courage and comradeship of those who, when the chips were down, did what they had to do in the defence of our freedom and our realm and our allies.
And were here to mourn the loss of so many young lives, or mostly young. In the mess of the modern war, everyone is involved, and behind that weasel phrase “collateral damage” hide the many lives damaged, wrecked, and lost just because people got caught up in something not of their doing or their choosing.
And as we mark the fallen today in our keeping silence, and in the prayers we say, and with the poppies we wear and the wreaths we lay, I trust we’ll be reminded again of what peace is worth, and what the peace we have has cost. For it’s important we should be so reminded; it’s important that we should truly value the peace, freedom and justice for which those we remember today gave their lives. These were people who went into war hoping for peace, and dreaming of peace. The blood of the fallen says to us, I think: “We have done our part, and we have paid the price, and now it’s your turn to build the world we dreamed of.”
And we truly honour the sacrifice they made, when we long for and work for a world where all are valued, where all have their place, a world in which my rights and freedoms are balanced against the rights and freedoms of my neighbour; a world in which we do our duty in peace, as they, the fallen, did in the mess of war.
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