Veterans for Peace | Memorial Day | Song: Mothers Daughters Wives.

Friends,

I worked all last weekend and then had a very busy week at my day job, so I'll admit looking forward to Memorial Day weekend as mostly a time to unwind. Still I want to take the holiday seriously.

My community will have a barbecue, and I will spend a lot of time quilting.

-Liz

Memorial Day

War Kills.

Memorial Day is the day we remember those who have been killed in war. The standard seems to be that conservatives congregations glorify the day, progressive ones ignore it, and the majority of mainline practice is to invite veterans to stand during worship. In my circles people say "it's not a religious holiday" and "I mention it in the prayers but that's it."

I'm a fan of a more complicated approach. War is complicated. Peace is complicated. We should accept the complications.

Everything we say and think and do about war is heavily dependent on the context of the particular war. Diplomacy is the best practice, but would that have freed the slaves during the civil war? World War II is remembered as "the great war" but we had many opportunities to save more people from the concentration camps, and we did not. Is Vietnam only bad because we lost? Do we really think Iraq is the only war where our leadership was dishonest about their intentions?

I'm a pacifist, and have done reading on strong pacifism. (The Powers that Be by Walther Wink is the most important book ever.) From a pacifist view point a good reaction to the Russian attack on Ukraine would have been for a few million of us to amass at the border, protecting the people behind us. At least hundreds of thousands would have been killed right away. Guess what? I didn't volunteer to do that.

So it turns out I'm a pacifist in favor of arming Ukraine.

The United States shouldn't have attacked Iran. The idea that we could bring democracy to Afghanistan with an army is a based on the dangerous myth of redemptive violence. We were right to arm Israel in the past, but now we are on the wrong side of violent, unjust war. That's probably been true for a long time. I don't know what's going on in Sudan, but I hate that when the war is in Africa we all mostly ignore it. My point is not to find the right side of each military encounter, but rather to make the point that whether war is just is highly contextual. Why are we fighting, who are we fighting, what is the goal, is our force commensurate with the attackers, these are all just war questions and are important.

But on memorial day there is another point to be made.

War kills. War maims. War destroys communities, poisons the environment. Children of war grow up without parents.

It is important, as Christians, to always notice the way that war hurts those that are the poorest the most. To notice that war kills mostly young people. To notice that those that survive struggle with the way the rules of war are different than the rules of ordinary life. People are wounded physically, mentally, and face the change of moral injury after the war is over.

Whenever we are deciding that war is worth it, for good reasons, and for bad reasons, the decision for war is a deciding that people will die. Rather than look away on Memorial day, this is a the day to look directly at this reality.

We should honor those who die in wars, because we must not lose sight of the reality that war equals death.

What is your church doing for Memorial Day? Reply to this email to let me know. ​
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It is a challenge to question war without judging soldiers. Veterans for Peace is an organization that has learned how to walk that fine line.

Judy Small was a singer song-writer in Australia who left song-writing to become a family lawyer and then a circuit Judge. In all of that work, her focus is about care for others. This song is from her Ladies and Gems album (5:15).

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