Still Thinking- Anzac Day

 I am the first male in my family for four generations who has not gone to war.  My great-grandfather was in the British army in South Africa.  He fought in the Boer War and I have his service medals listing the battles in which he fought.  My grandfather enlisted in 1941 at the age of 39 to fight in World War II.  He spent eighteen months in Bougainville.  As a child I asked him what it was like to be in the war in New Guinea.  All I remember him sayings was that it was very boring and that he didn’t have dry pair of socks for eighteen months.  His brothers had all at some point in their lives been in the army.

My father joined the Navy in 1950 and served in the Korean War on the Tribal Class Destroyer HMAS Arunta.  For two years he was stationed in Japan and I was four years old when he returned to live permanently in Australia.  During that time my mother, sister and I lived with my father’s parents.  My father had been away for so long that I called my grandfather Dad and continued calling him Dad until his death.  My father’s brother was also in the navy for several years.

The closest I came to enlistment was in 1972 when I was twenty years of age and there was National Conscription to support the Vietnam War. I recall the day the lottery of birthdays was announced on the radio.  I was working as a cadet land survey in Queensland and I listened as the birth dates of those where called up were read out.  They began in January and picking the dates from a lottery machine moved toward my birthday, April 10.  As it got closer I could feel myself holding my breath.  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to fight in Vietnam.  It wasn’t that I was so politically aware of the situation, I suspect for me it was more personal.  I had no desire to subject myself to the military way of life.  I had had a brief time in my school’s Army Cadet Corp and that was disastrous.  The lottery passed my birthday and I breathed a sigh of relief

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Since then I have reflected on my understanding as a Christian minister on war. I am not a pacifist; I do believe there is a time for resisting violence with violence.  However, I suspect that violence is used far too often when wisdom demands diplomacy and peaceful strategies.  It is also imperative that we take seriously Jesus’ command to” love your enemy.” I think he means by that to love them before you get to the stage of violence.  If we loved our enemies around the world now, maybe we would not have to go to war later.  And of course at the most practical level war cause irreparable damage on human and non-human levels.  That’s why we say, “Lest we Forget.”  The reason I remember and celebrate Anzac Day is so that I will not forget the cost of war. It is a way to respect those who have died and support those who have lost loved ones and to imagine a world without violence.

Christopher