Grey November

It is snowing lightly here today, and it is very grey. I become very melancholic on days like this, and am quite happy to be so. I sat for a while this morning in quiet, as I am wont to do more often all the time.

I may not get to this on Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day, or (in the spirit of the cult of the veteran in the USA ) Veteran’s Day, so I’ll do it now. I keep Remembrance, but not in the sense of remebering the sacrifices of soldiers. I keep it to remind myself of the insanity of war, and that all who fell were not simply “soldiers” or “sailors”, etc. but were people, persons, with lives and interactions with others. Veterans, too, are not simply Veterans, some symbolic characters to use to sell the next military adventure or foreign policy disaster. No, they are people, too, often forgotten in their trauma and injuries by the very governments that seek to use them as propaganda front-men and women. Take their uniforms off, and they are simply people, put into horrific conditions, or in the position of supporting others in such conditions, by politicians and generals who are not in the way of any loss of their own. Though there are just struggles, there are no just wars.

I remember a Remembrance Day in my first year at Seminary, when some Mennonite friends of mine and I went to the cenotaph in Kitchener, Ontario, and later to the Canadian Forces Recruiting Office to lay wreathes of thorns, with statements attached about how war was not glorious or heroic, but horrific and tragic. The heroism of war comes of people put into terrible circumstances, when they must act for friends and comrades in similar circumstances, against still others in those same circumstances.

So I’ll be remembering the people whose lives were touched and are still touched by war on Sunday, reading, as I do every year, poems from the First World War, in prayerful hope that we can end war. I will also think of the truest heroes of all: those who refuse to fight anymore.