Lest We Forget Who?

Posted: 23-Apr-2010

Some may have missed this article from last year.

A Reflection on Anzac Day 

Rev Peter Robinson, GenR8 Ministries CEO

On the "One Day of the Year" there are plenty of events to help the national memory about loss and courage in war. There's a plot of grass outside St. Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney near where I work where the War Widow's Guild invite members of the public to place small wooden crosses in memory of the fallen around Anzac Day. 

I placed one this week for the uncle I never knew who died in a trainer aircraft during an electrical storm over Northern Ireland in 1944. He was only 22. He's buried in a church yard near where they found his remains. We have a photo of him having his RAAF wings placed on his chest just months before. His old school was shocked to lose their popular former Captain of Athletics. He volunteered to put his life on the line for a cause he believed in. 

I heard my 83 year old mother, his younger sister, utter an imprecation against "Bloody Hitler" watching a war documentary just last year, recalling our loss of Ken. My mother never says Bloody. Almost never. I'd never before heard her express this feeling against Hitler the ultimate cause of her brother's death. Lest we forget.

The increase in the numbers of young people at Anzac Day ceremonies and marches over the last generation has often been noted. The Bomaderry Anzac Day march and service that I officiated at from the mid-90's until two years ago is the biggest event every year in that town of 8,000 at the end of the South Coast Line three hours by train from Sydney, opposite the pub that was a rehabilitation hospital during WW1. About 800 turn up each year, many of them young people. They are getting an education in a major ritual of our national identity. 

As we educate and influence young people in the things that give identity and coherence to our communities and nation, it is well to remember that it can be pretty selective memory that is passed on. Uncle Ken died in a training accident - like thousands of others. This is not something we explicitly name on Anzac Day. Nor do we name the Allied atrocities that happened during the two world wars, though they happened. The murder of prisoners, rape, Dresden. War brings out both remarkable good and appalling evil in people. 

A certain theology emerges at some Anzac Day services I've witnessed, or in some forms of words that I've read and decided not to use but instead composed ones I can live with. The theology that dying for one's country has somehow sacralised the lives of all those we've lost. Some clergy have composed prayers that say that the fallen are acceptable to God because they paid the ultimate sacrifice. It sounds comforting. But it reminds me of the wisecrack that goes: "From what they say about people at funerals you'd think dying was preserved for the chosen few." We prefer to take our reality with plenty of padding to soften it.

How do we teach our youth the accurate meaning of our past, of our national stories, of why we are as we are? Schools have Anzac commemorations close to the time of Anzac Day itself. This is vital for their broader education. Groups of students from all the schools in Bomaderry, public and private, march in front of the current members of the services from HMAS Albatross followed by the diggers. It's stirring stuff. The Nowra Town Band or whoever is helping this year always does a great job.

Scripture teachers and chaplains can model and teach much about the Christian sources of our national identity. The churches of this country have contributed hugely to our heritage, just as the Australian Christian Heritage Forum seeks to highlight. Not because they want to prove who has the greatest role in shaping our culture, but because a genuine Christian influence is likely to be somehow counter-cultural, pointing beyond it to a far greater reality. 

Culture has no salvation in itself, and all culture is blighted by sin - whether mateship, heroism, helping neighbours in a time of disaster, not ratting on your mates or the tall poppy syndrome. Our hearts are not pure. God's salvation in Jesus Christ, which is still at the centre of the symbolism of Anzac Day with its crosses for the fallen and sacrificial language constantly challenges human culture and its pretensions in demanding our compliance and agreement. Culture by itself can be as deathly an expression of idolatry as any other. Especially when dressed up in patriotism.

Is that what we want our young people to fall into line behind, mindlessly chanting Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi! Oi! Oi! - my country right or wrong? Or will we help them renew our culture and national life because they bear no ultimate allegiance to it, but rather to God's kingdom and the Heavenly Jerusalem? The best hope of our nation is young people who discover the truth of those references to Jesus and his cross ignorantly used by many on Anzac Day. As the writer to the Hebrews put it: "Let us then go to Jesus outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come." (13.13.)  

This awareness is for me demonstrated in our complete collective unawareness of the meaning of the best known words of our commemoration of the fallen on Anzac Day. It is a three word phrase about not forgetting, that almost no one has any idea what it is referring to. What we can be very sure about on Anzac Day is that collectively we have completely forgotten the meaning of Lest We Forget. 

This is a stunning irony. It should be an embarrassing call back to basics, and help us draw our young people's attention to those basics as we explain and model our remembrance of the cost of war, and the real grief of the nation at so much loss. 

These words were coined from Rudyard Kipling's poem known as The Recessional, written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. It is remarkable poem, often sung as a hymn on Anzac Day. At the height of the power of the British Empire Kipling is reflecting on its impermanence. God can sweep it all away, as happened almost completely by 1997 with the hand over of Hong Kong to the Chinese government.

Kipling is quoting Deuteronomy 6.10-12, which says in part, "When the LORD your God brings you in to the land he swore to your fathers.... be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." 

Kipling like most of the British intelligentsia of his time was very familiar with the narrative of the Bible through the school system of the 19th century. In the King James Version he would have used the verse reads, "Then beware lest thou forget the LORD...." Kipling applied these words to himself and Great Britain under Queen Victoria. Do not take God's blessings for granted. God wants us to have humble servant hearts. "Lest we forget. Lest we forget."

May we teach our young people the profound significance of remembering the LORD, who delivers his people from slavery to sin, evil, death and hell by the one supreme true sacrifice that is able to give us a future and identity that will never be taken away from us, in this world or the next. Then see how our young people influence our national culture and identity in the years to come, even at the cost of laying down their own lives for the reality that truly endures.

For the words of The Recessional by Rudyard Kipling go to