HELLO!

What is your plan for Remembrance Day? What will you pause to consider? Kim was reminding me yesterday the most meaningful Remembrance for her was in Ottawa, when we lived there 2002-2005. We attended the Remembrance Day ceremony outdoors, watching the veterans, many quite elderly but with emotions etched on their faces as they marched by, they saluted, we applauded. At no other time in my life, before or after, was I dressed as warmly. And yet, there was something so moving about it that I did not notice the freezing Ottawa temperatures. I have gone to several outdoor gatherings since, but none have had the same effect.

When I think of Remembrance Day my mind goes to John 15:12-17 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends…Go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…I give you these commands so you may love one another”. Consider those words, “no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. And who are our friends? According to Jesus, our friends, like our neighbours, are to be compared to the Good Samaritan, who finds the Jew in the ditch and does not walk by. When courageous people do not walk by, that is love.

Two books I would recommend on the topic of war, politics and religion are: The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan, where she reveals Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England and Czar Nicholas II of Russia were cousins. Cousins! Further, the circumstances and issues that led the world into war in 1914, killing more than nine million combatants, seem so senseless. The other book I’d suggest is, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 by Irving Abella and Harold Troper. In this book we learn Canada did very little to take in Jews from Europe as the Nazis were taking power. But while the cause of WW1 seems confusing, the case for WW2, unless one is a pacifist, seems to meet the criteria for a Just War. What moves me is how those soldiers, who gave their lives for this cause, saved Europe from a totalitarian future and Jews from extinction as a people. The nobility of this effort remains with me. I think of those young souls, the lives they could have enjoyed, and all those who returned, traumatized, permanently scarred, emotionally and physically. I ponder their sacrifice.

Peace, Kevin