On the anniversary of D Day my mind wanders to my father. A few years before my dad died, he developed an illness that left him disabled to a degree. He was sent to Kitchener Ontario to a special clinic that tried to help him with his problem.
On the day of his release from Hospital I went to pick him up. We borrowed a wheelchair from the hospital and I took him out to the car. Well getting him from the wheelchair into the car was a task. I lifted him and we both sort of fell into the car laughing and exhausted. As we laughed I started to ask him some questions about his youth. I knew he had been on the King George the 5th battleship in the sinking of the Bismarck, but it was then that he told me as just a young boy he had been at Dunkirk, lifting the British army from the grasp of Hitler.
Remembrance day is a time we set aside to remember the men and woman of our armed services who gave their lives to preserve freedom and peace in this world for you and I. Jesus would say “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God”
Passivity is not a virtue to open the gates of the Kingdom. It is a form of death, the kind of withdrawal from existence that destroys peace anyway. Peace is something positive, not a cease-fire or avoidance of disagreement. Peace is not lapsing into silence in the face of complexities cruelties and sometimes evil of human relationships. It is never really found by those of us who “don’t want to get hurt”.
Peace is delivered to those who face rather than evade the troubles and sacrifices of building good relationships between human beings.
Who is this God who turns us always back towards each other to discover his will. What a strange and loving God to bless those who do his own work by helping people to find the right relationship with each other. Those that make peace understand something about love.
Maybe this is what Colonel John McCrae Canadian Army 1872-1918 really wanted us to remember in the third verse of his beloved poem.
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from falling hands we throw
The Torch; be yours to hold it high
If you break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies
grow in Flanders fields