Remembering Anzac Day

There has been much discussion across all forms of the media about "remembering Anzac Day", or was it "remembering" the soldiers who died and were wounded, firstly at Gallipoli and then World War 1 of who died for their nation, or who paid "the ultimate sacrifice". Note the theologically loaded language here. Christians should have problems with this term. It brings us back within whispering distance of attempts to explain the significance of Jesus' death as political victim of non-resistant messianic encounter with the Roman imperial power.

But I digress. All in all last week while there was a great deal about "remembering", much of it fairly vague until the consensus about who and what we were "remembering" was brought under question. First Nations peoples wanted to "remember"  those of their nations who were killed in the occupation of this country and in the frontier wars. They were firmly ruled out of the official process.  Previously women's attempts to" remember" those who were victims of rape in war were also excluded from participation in the official public ceremonies of "remembering". So who gets "remembered" was contested, though the apparent official guardians of the scope of our "remembering", the RSL, ensured that the boundaries were suitably policed.

But what are we doing in our "remembering"? There was, to judge from letters to the editor of the Canberra Times, very little clarity, or community agreement about the significance and meaning of the public ceremonies of "remembering". And this is interesting because it makes clear that the whole controversy relates to a public process, or ritual. Individuals after all can stop on any occasion of significance to them and "remember" those of their family and friends who were killed or suffered in war without official sanction. This "remembering"at an individual or family level involves a bringing someone to mind, and grieving for their suffering, that they did not go on to live life to its full extent, in some way or another, and that for those who were known personally to us, that we have been deprived of their presence.

But controversy there was about meaning. For some it was a moment to affirm the horrors of war and say "never again". For others it was about affirming the significance of the "sacrifice" of those who were killed and acknowledging how much we "owed" them, how we should be prepared to offer ourselves to our country in gratitude. The language used was religious to its core. It made very clear that as William Cavanaugh has argued that "the holy" has migrated from the church to the nation/state.

Christians should take note of this migration and be prepared to assess the claims of the state when they come clothed with the aura of "the holy" and the language of sacrifice. After all according to the earliest Christians, Christ's death meant the end of sacrifice and its claims on human life. The primary "remembering" to which Christians are called is to the meal shared which celebrates Christ's life, death and resurrection and the end of sacrifice, a meal in which the barriers that would divide those who are "holy" from the "profane" are broken down as we recognise Jesus in the sharing of bread with the stranger.

Do not forget

Remembrance Day has more than one point of reference - it can serve as a trigger not to forget.

Richard Franklin and Peter Lewis point out the dialectic of remembering and forgetting in their reflection on the signficiance of 11 November. In  Lest we forget a cruel act of dispossession they remind us that:

... an anniversary that has been forgotten is one that has even more relevance for understanding the ironies of Australian identity.

Eleven years before the hanging of Ned Kelly and 140 years ago this year, the Victorian colonial government passed an act ''To Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria'', more commonly known as the Aborigines Protection Act 1869.

This gave government control of where Aboriginal people could live, of how they would relate to Europeans, of their labour and earnings and of the ''care, custody and education'' of all Aboriginal children. It was this act that created the conditions for Aboriginal containment and assimilation, and its legal platform enabled policies that led to the stolen generations and stolen wages.

For us it raises an interesting question - why have we so rarely included this anniversary in our remembering?

After all, the Aboriginal soldiers who fought bravely at the very same battlefront that we rightly remember each and every November 11 were cruelly affected by the echoes of the 1869 act. This allowed them to be denied some of their earnings as soldiers and prevented access to Soldier Settlement land.

Despite the sacrifice of Aboriginal soldiers in the First World War, they still had their wages ''garnished'' and, unless they had official certificates saying they weren't Aboriginal, they could not access the Soldier Settlement scheme. In some cases, they returned to see their traditional homelands provided to non-indigenous soldiers as part of the scheme.

Even today the imprint of this act remains as a stain on our national character. Our ready forgetting of this anniversary is symptomatic of our failure as a nation to come to terms with our shared history.
This failure to remember is why the business of reconciliation remains unresolved, the ''close the gap promise'' remains dormant and the national apology is just another unfulfilled promise, as Government intentions to close the gap between the first and second peoples of Australia in child mortality, longevity, health and other wellbeing measures are swallowed up in bureaucracy.

Have we forgotten that ''sorry'' is the first step towards reconciliation, not the last?

Remembering the Aborigines Protection Act 1869 is important because it recalls a time when Aboriginal people were cut off from the rest of the community and from their land and culture.

Learning to Remember - gathering for the Eucharist

Simon Barrow in his discussion of remembrance and Remembrance Day has some really useful things to day in his account of the rich connections between this theme and the practices at the heart of Christian discipleship.

At the heart of the Christian community’s faith, constitution and action is the painful paradox of a violent death remembered. When the church gathers around the communion table, whatever other disagreements it may have about this act, it remains the case that the memory of Jesus, his living and dying, is central.

The Christian belief in resurrection, the conviction that this death is woven substantially into a greater pattern of life wrought by God, does not remove or excise this memory of death. Indeed in certain respects it makes it more poignant.

In the New Testament accounts of the encounter between the early Christian disciples and the Jesus who they came to believe had not been contained or defined by death, there is a powerfully transformative image. The Risen Christ retains the marks and scars of crucifixion. He does not ‘lose’ them.

For Christians, the life-beyond-life to which Christ points, embodies and expresses is not an evasion. It does not abolish death and suffering, it transfigures it, placing it into a new context. Every tear may be wiped away in God’s future, but that which causes tears of unutterable grief has happened and, in this sense, remains potently with us. The critical issue is, what gives or shapes that particular sense? Which is the ultimate context, death or life? Believers and non-believers are bound to have a different estimate of this question.

In human experience it is death which has the last word, because we have no capacity to experience anything beyond its boundary. If we are to remain open to the possibility of divine life, of love which is finally accountable neither to our death dealing nor even to our gloriously garish attempts at living, this openness will occur not as a hypothesis but as an action in which what has been broken is gathered and re-offered for the life of the world.

This is what Eucharistic remembrance and thanksgiving is all about. Its essence is not a ritual or a doctrine but a communal invitation to a new way of living in the face of death. It is a meal of hope, of the sharing and multiplication of life. It heals our memories. But it only makes sense if the wounds we remember – in order not to avoid them, but to understand their real depth – belong to the Living One, and to the Body (the community of human suffering and joy) to which we are united in baptism (the granting of a new identity), prayer (the petition of the sovereignty of love) and action for justice and peace (the sacrament, the genuine foretaste, of a new world coming).

All of this is involved in specifically Christian remembering. And it is of absolutely crucial importance for acting Christianly in the arena of war and peace – where justifying and joining in with war can be the chief expression that, when all is said and done, what we believe in most is the sovereignty of death.

Likewise, peace (wrongly conceived) may be yet another means of avoiding the confrontation with deathly fear which comes from being simply ‘anti-war’, rather than being incorporated into any genuine alternative to the society that goes on remembering and (therefore) reacting in a warlike way.

So the issue is not, in the first instance, whether you are an advocate of pacifism or ‘just war’ thinking, it is about remembering death in the context of the search for life and the gift of life. This is what Christians are called upon to do, not out of 'political correctness' (as some are suggesting), but in recognition of the central facts of their faith in Christ crucified and risen.

Not to make space for the agonistic and the conflictual in our public, as well as private, remembrance, is bad for our health. It also falls dangerously short of what is involved in Eucharistic memory. All too often it is emotion, not reason; vested interests, not truthfulness, which are most powerfully at play in the ritual and symbolism of official remembering – a point which Christians should never forget, given how the image of the Cross has been used to buttress conquest and crusading in our own, deeply flawed history ...

 ... the churches need to re-think their own approach to Remembrance. What they have sanctioned in civic ceremonies and within their own walls has often failed to reflect the dynamic of the Gospel towards peace, love of enemies, forgiveness, and the disavowal of violence.

War may produce favourable results in some circumstances, but history shows that it is not a solution, it is a tragedy, and often a sheer waste. The best way to honour those who have died as a result of war (as we must do) - is to recognise its horror not in order to 'run away', but in order to have the true courage to seek alternatives and to engage in costly peacebuilding - to re-member a dis-membered world. (Transforming Remembrance into Hope)

Remembering well

Remembrance Day in Australia has been just about lost to public view given the focus on Anzac Day.

The War Memorial Web site has a helpful account of the history of Remembrance Day and suggests that we take a minutes silence at 11am on 11 November to " remember those who died or suffered for Australia's cause in all wars and armed conflicts."

This raises a good question about remembering. Christians are called to remember and to re-member Jesus, as we do in coming to share a meal together, who refused to use violence to bring in God's kingdom. How should Christians remember war? This is an important issue for Christians in Australia given the emergence of Anzac Day as the manifestation of a form of civil religion.

Ekklesia in the UK have just produced a very useful report Reimagining Remembrance Day that though it adresses the specific issues related to Remembrance Day in the UK provides some useful theological insights that are relevant to the task of how christians might remember Anzac Day.

Some of the issues that churches could address include:

• A greater equality in remembrance to incorporate all those affected by war, including those on both sides and civilians, conscientious objectors, and those executed for ‘cowardice’
• The language used in remembrance should be more truthful. Words like ‘glorious’ should no longer be used. There should also be an acknowledgement that some did “die in vain” and an end to automatic references about all soldiers giving “their lives for the freedom we enjoy today”.
• Churches should resist the misappropriation of religious language in remembrance. Where it is used it should be qualified carefully, particularly with regard to words like “sacrifice”, which should not be used to condone violence.
• Following other examples from around the world a far greater commitment should be made to peace
• Churches that have bishops and chaplains to the armed forces, should also provide them for the “unarmed forces”, those who work as peacemakers and peacebuilders without weapons
• Remembrance should encompass groups who are often excluded. The environmental impact of war, including ecological damage and millions of animals slaughtered should also be more widely acknowledged

• There should be an end to ‘selective remembrance’ where the more shameful aspects of war are forgotten Ekklesia


Churches who seriously took up this agenda would find themselves in conflict with the RSL in short order. This might be no bad thing as there are serious issues of theological integrity at stake here for the churches. It would also make clear that we have reached an end of the Christendom settlement and any automatic alignment of church and nation.

Looking forward - looking back in Timor Leste

Talking with friends from Timor Leste recently who are old enough to remember the Indonesian occupation and the violence surrounding the vote for independence I was struck by both their passion to build a new nation (looking forward) and a passion that those who committed atrocities should face justice and a public accountting for their activities. This is a view not shared by the current political leadership wo are urging everyone to simply look forward.

For a detailed look at the public record on the case of the Suai church massacre, where a militia leader was arrested and then released under political pressure from Indonesia into Indonesian custody see
http://www.laohamutuk.org/index.html

September 2009:
Maternus Bere's crimes, indictment, arrest and illegal release, reactions from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Fongtil, Indonesian activists, the President of the Court of Appeal and others and photos of protest at Indonesian Embassy in Dili. Also no confidence motion, local and international media on this case. Mos iha lian Tetum. Also media articles about the case and background information on the Suai Church Massacre from CAVR and Geoffrey Robinson.