Working and praying for peace

Yesterday, I found myself on my knees in the square near City Hall trying hard to see through my tears as I wrote the names of 60 or more Palestinians who have died in Gaza. The oldest was 63 and the youngest was an infant, and as a dozen others and I inked the names of the dead on a long roll of linen, the bombardment of recent weeks suddenly became real.

As I worked, a beautiful woman stood to the side and read out the names and ages of the victims. She became more and more emotional as she shouted out the names and ages of the children, until finally she began to sob, "May these angels find their loved ones beyond the gates of heaven, and may God be merciful to them all! There is no justice in this world for them!" Unable to continue, she handed her lists to a man near her, and took a break, only to continue 20 minutes later. 

When my knees started hurting too much from the concrete I was kneeling on, I gave my list to another person and went to stand beside the woman as she continued to read the names. After another page, she turned to me and we hugged each other long and hard. "My children are safe," she said, and I said, "Mine too. What you are doing is so important -- I'm glad that someone is acknowledging these innocent civilians and their children who have lost their lives." We lamented together as mothers, and after a few moments, she continued.

The thing is... war happens all over the globe all the time. It just doesn't often get our attention the way Gaza has in the past month. Before Gaza was Ukraine, remember? -- and we barely hear about that ongoing conflict anymore. Before Ukraine was Myanmar... and it continues, too. Syria. Congo. The list of ongoing conflicts is unending, and what can an average Jill like me who lives in a peaceful country (so far) do about any of it?

I can stand in solidarity with the communities here who are connected to places where war is being waged. Support aid groups. Demand that world leaders lead the world to cease fires now. And work and pray for peace in whatever imaginative ways we can, as the young adults who organized yesterday's event in Churchill Square did. It wasn't a big event, but it was impactful for those who wandered over, wondering what it was all about, who found themselves on their knees, as I did. We wrote the names and ages of 3,000 people on the linen scrolls, and that might be a fourth of the people who have died or are missing in Gaza up to now.

November 12 (tomorrow) at 1 pm, there is a gathering planned at Violet Henry King Plaza (the Legislature) in support of a cease fire in Palestine.

And in the evening is this year's ecumenical Prayer for Peace, 7 pm at St. Luke's Anglican Church (8424 95 Avenue). 

Just in case you want to join me at either event. 

War is real. Peace can be, too.

Sunday reflection: a prayer of lamentation

The news is not good in the so-called Holy Land. In fact, it ranks among the unholiest of places on the planet because of the things that have been happening to people there in the past eight days, and long before that.

With so much history of conflict and oppression of different peoples over many centuries, I find it hard to know how to pray for the people caught in the midst of chaos and injustice and terrorism from all sides. 

But then I remembered a line about "putting your mouth in the dust to wait for hope," and found something like that in the 3rd chapter of the book of Lamentations. Hope is hard to find, but if you're so inclined, please pray with me for the people in this latest conflict, and for all those oppressed by violence of any kind:

46 All our enemies
    have opened their mouths against us;
47 panic and pitfall have come upon us,
    devastation and destruction.
48 My eyes flow with rivers of tears
    because of the destruction of my people.

49 My eyes will flow without ceasing,
    without respite,
50 until the Lord from heaven
    looks down and sees.
51 My eyes cause me grief
    at the fate of all the young women in my city.

52 Those who were my enemies without cause
    have hunted me like a bird;
53 they flung me alive into a pit
    and hurled stones on me;
54 water closed over my head;
    I said, ‘I am lost.’

55 I called on your name, O Lord,
    from the depths of the pit;
56 you heard my plea, ‘Do not close your ear
    to my cry for help, but give me relief!’
57 You came near when I called on you;
    you said, ‘Do not fear!’

Creator God, 

be with all those who need you the most right now, 

and open the gates of heaven 

for all those whose souls suddenly need a home. 

We pray, we cry, we lament. 

Be with 

the people who live in the land 

where your child, 

Jesus, 

came to live with all of humanity, 

to show us what your loving compassion looks like.

Let loving compassion return

to the hearts of all,

we beg you.

We beg you.

We pray, we cry, we lament.

We turn our mouths to the dust,

until you give us reason to hope.

+Amen.

The horrors of war on the France/Belgium Border

The only part of this summer's vacation that I haven't moodled about is the time we spent at Vimy Ridge in France and Ypres (Ieper) in Belgium. We chose to visit them because we wanted our girls to get a sense of war and its effects, so we left Paris a day early, and Belgium a day late.

Vimy Ridge is the site of an important WWI battlefield where Canadian troops succeeded in defeating the German forces along a seven kilometer front. A white marble monument now stands at Hill 145, the highest point of the area. Canadian troops spent months preparing for an attack which took place on April 9, 1917 by digging underground tunnels through which they reached and overran the German front. Though the assault was a success, 3,598 Canadians were killed, and over 7,000 were wounded. The names of 11, 285 Canadians who lost their lives in France and have no known graves are engraved on the sides of the Vimy monument.

While the monument itself is an amazing and inspiring thing, war is not. At Vimy we were able to walk down into the tunnels under the trenches, and I shivered to think about all those young men who waited in silence in the dark for many hours, knowing that at 5:30 am on April 9th, they would be expected to run up the tunnels to the German front and bayonet anyone they found alive after a two day shelling, and possibly be killed themselves. 

At the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, there were many displays and videos telling the stories of soldiers and officers as well as ordinary citizens who became refugees during the worst days of the First World War. There were rather graphic displays of war wound x-rays and artistic representations of what it feels like to be injured in battle, with figures composed only of skeletal spinal cords with broken, disconnected jaw bones and naked eye balls moving around.

After a couple of hours in the museum's gloomy atmosphere, where so much destruction and loss was made evident, one of my daughters said she'd had enough. I wondered at the war video games our youth play and whether they'd be so popular if the kids had any sense of the reality of war. Pictures of the beautiful buildings in Ypres' town square ablaze and reduced to rubble made me wonder how we can bear to sit still as the same kinds of things happen in Palestine, Syria, Central Africa, and other war torn places around the world. When will human beings learn that militaristic power and fear don't bring about the kind of necessary change that compassion can?

Canada Bereft

The great wars fought in Europe have forever marred the landscape and the collective consciousness of those who live where the battles raged and those who lost loved ones to conflict. Monuments like Vimy Ridge and the Meningate in Ypres where The Last Post is played every night almost run the risk of romanticizing and glorifying large-scale human conflicts. But the In Flanders Fields Museum did an amazing job of showing the human cost of war, and the many war cemeteries carved into the farmland in Northern France and the Flanders region of Belgium are constant reminders that war is not glorious, but horrible, as are the very human stories and statistics from present day war torn regions.

A field of unknown soldiers

We owe it to future generations to ensure that they get the message that war and military might are not to be glorified, but abhorred.