remembering soldiers, pursuing peace

as a christian with deep sympathies for peace theology, i find it difficult to know exactly how to think about memorial day. by "peace theology" i mean a theology which sees non-violence and reconciliation as central to the message of Jesus and the New Testament. on the one hand, i have a strong desire to take seriously -and to honor- the sacrifices of those soldiers who gave their lives fighting for this country. and it is not only that i feel a sense of obligation to honor these soldiers. rather, i geniunely find their stories and their sacrifices to be profoundly moving. there is somethng about the virtue of courage, about the willingness to sacrifice or even die for others, that i find almost singularly awe-inspiring. no doubt i run the risk of romanticising what is horrible, and no doubt i have no real conception of how horrible and unromantic war actually is. neveretheless, when i imagine a soldier who willingly risks his or her life in battle, i feel that i am in the presence of something deep and beautiful. on the other hand, insofar as i am a person committed to a theology of peace, i see war -including the acts committed by the soldiers who are remembered at memorial day- as antithetical to the way of Jesus, which is the way of hope and salvation. not only this, but many of those soldiers who made sacrifices, even sacrificing their lives, were also people who harmed and destroyed, who killed and maimed.

there are, then, at least two points of tension here. the first tension is about a death in war. is such a death noble and powerful and valuable? or is it a kind of mistake -an offering made to a false god of war? if it is the later, then it is an act that may ultimately be redeemed, but it is not itself a force for redemption; it will only be redeemed in spite of itself. the second tension is about how to construe the soldiers themselves. do i think of them as heroes -people who understood the deepest things in human life? or as well-meaning but mislead, and perhaps even as villains? these two contstruals don't seem to sit well together. i'm not sure how to put them together, and i'm not sure i want to give up either of them.

whatever the right way to think about all of this is, i suspect that it will involve what a friend said to me yesterday: 'at the heart of the gospel is the experience of suffering. at the heart of what Jesus taught us is how to suffer.'

when st. francis received his first vision, he was on his way to battle as a soldier. he abandoned his career in the military, and fell in love with Lady Poverty. and once, after preaching to his sisters the birds, he blessed them, and they flew away in four directions, thus making the sign of the cross.