Remembering and Praying for Peace

 Many people in our world bear the scars of war. Immigrants coming from countries that seem to be constantly at war. Those who managed to escape without loved ones. Those who came from Europe following the World Wars looking for a better life and safe place to start a family.

A Guelph, Ontario, church holds the name of one such soldier, Colonel John McCrae, author of the famous In Flanders Fields, a solemn rondeau poem about soldiers who now lie below a row of cross-shaped markers in a far away field.

 

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row…”

 

 

According to Litcharts, “McCrae wrote the poem in 1915 as a memorial to those who died in a World War I battle…. McCrae himself treated many of the soldiers injured.”

The poem appears to have different voices, those on the field who cannot hear the birds sing for the sound of battle, and those who lie beneath the ground, having their say about someone else taking up the torch, someone else understanding that they will not rest easily even if the field is covered with beautiful poppies and crosses neatly in a row.

Remembrance Day is a solemn time to mark when soldiers went off to endure war to bring about peace. Peace was not easily secured. It cost many lives and sacrifices that followed soldiers to the end of their lives, for those who did make it home, and the trauma they carried around the rest of their lives.

Many wars have been fought because of greed and to gain land and supremacy. Make no mistake that those who started the war were not the ones who fought it.

There is still unrest in many places around the world, ones that cause people to flee for their lives, ones that rob children of parents.

While the poppy is a symbol of freedom gained, I choose to think of peace and hope that we can keep that peace. And honour those who did go to fight. Fathers, grandfathers, young men with a life seemingly before them, cut short. So today we remember those who went to fight.

A rendition of "In Flanders Fields" by Canadian  singer and songwriter Adele Simmons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu1XaTIUWR4

 

 

Carolyn Wilker, Editor, Author, Storyteller

www.carolynwilker.ca

Honouring those who served

 

It’s hard to imagine, for the youth of our time, how veterans, once young people themselves, went off to a war they didn’t conceive.

My father was a young teen when the Second World War raged in Europe and beyond. He saw young men, older than himself, in uniform, and he told us, in our parents' collected stories, how handsome they looked, yet he never told us and perhaps didn’t know of the brokenness in those young men who returned home at the end of the war.

Not long after my father turned 16, as a young man living on a farm, the war ended. And although my dad as the youngest could have been called on to serve, he was not required to do so after all. I'm grateful he was spared.

A friend of mine who looked after her father in his last years of life recalled nights of terror for an old man reliving war memories. Make no mistake, being in the war fighting was no glorious thing, not proud as watching young men and women in uniform going off to serve their country in whatever capacity they were able.

A late minister of our home church worked as a cook on a ship as a young man. He told us stories in our confirmation class of how that ship was cleaned until it shone, and of meals he cooked in that navy vessel.

And we could listen to an account from a storyteller who made famous an imagined tale of a truce on Christmas Eve—just a short one—for the soldiers to take a short break from fighting. It didn’t really happen like that.

Even those not in the midst of fighting could tell stories—people who ran for their lives, or whose home was taken over by soldiers. We heard a few of those stories in our lifetime and many of them were challenged in telling it, recounting the emotions that went along with it. Something I do not know of, but honoured their true stories nonetheless.

A war, no matter whose conflict it is, is not a glorious thing, and those who did serve their country—to keep the freedoms we know and experience—gave more than you or me and lost more than both of us. 

I cannot imagine the horrors because I did not live them, and I would prefer not to, but I do acknowledge in the wearing of my poppy this week that others did and many never returned, but perished.

A memorial exists in a Guelph downtown church of Colonel John McCrae who wrote In Flanders Fields. The McCrae family had attended that church, one I imagine that was solemn as they learned that another one of their young bright men had died. That would have happened in countless places across Canada.

In Flanders fields the poppies grow…”

Let us not forget this November 11^th the democracy and freedoms we have that were so dearly bought. Let us remember that.

 

Carolyn R. Wilker, editor, author and storyteller

https://www.carolynwilker.ca/about/