Like other American holidays -– such as Labor, Memorial and Presidents days -– Veterans' Day has lost much of its original significance for a considerable part of our population and has become the occasion for yet one more three-day weekend. There are commemorations of the honored dead and our leaders mark the day in appropriate ways. But this is not the story that will lead the news. And persons are able to speak — apparently without irony — of “celebrating” the day by taking it off from work.
The thinness of our collective memory disturbs me.
On the recent Veterans' Day, I recalled the words of O'Brien, the Party official in George Orwell's 1984. O'Brien says something like this: “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.”
In Orwell's novel, this is the cynical explanation for the Party's repeated reconfiguration of who did what and when. But there is something else going on there. The what that we remember is not nearly so important as the how and the why of that remembering. Indeed, the how and the why will always determine the what.
Let's remember, then, that our Veterans' Day was originally called Armistice Day and it derives its date from the truce that inaugurated the ceasefire in World War I. There is a sad irony here. “Armistice” means a “temporary cessation.” Yet World War I was proclaimed as “the war to end all wars.” Of course, that war didn't end wars; war never works that well. In less than a generation, not only Europe but the whole world was on fire again.
Yet that peace was, for those who lived to experience it, something profound. Recall the lines of the poet and World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on, on and
out of sight.
The relief and release that the poet experienced was surely more than personal survival. The war that had destroyed a social order that had existed since Napoleon was over. The poet, you see, had a memory of peace as the normal condition. That's why the armistice was worth remembering.
Today, we assume a quite different sort of normality. Although we speak of the world growing smaller, the fact is that in many ways the opposite is true. If you doubt it, think of the gauntlet of identity and security concerns that must be run merely to board a plane or train for a domestic trip. Then multiply that for your journey between nations. Not only did the history of the 20th century add many more millions to remember on November 11th, but the future we face is one of seemingly endless war. Past is prologue, with a vengeance.
The question that we as Christians need to answer — as the days shorten and Advent approaches — is simply this: Whose past will we remember? The answer determines the future we will live into. The greatest gift that the church has to offer the world is the past we remember. After all, our central act of worship is the act of remembering “the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread and blessed it and broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this is remembrance of me.'”
This is the memory that enables us to understand what normal looks like: the self-surrendering love of God for the life of the world. And this is the memory that shows us what the future will be: a redeemed and reconciled people together at the Lord's table.
Sassoon's poem ends with this line: “the singing will never be done.” I don't know what faith, if any, made this hope real for the poet. But I know what makes it real for us. The resurrection of the Lord Jesus is God's promise that, despite all the power of sin and death, life and love will get the final word. And when we remember that, how can we keep from singing?
-30-
— Beth Newman is professor of theology and ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. [email protected]