Every year on Memorial Day weekend when I was growing up, my father would hang a huge American flag on the front of our house. I have no idea where he got this flag, but it was so big that it completely covered the front of the house and blocked the front door. We had to maneuver around it to go in and out of the house for the duration of the holiday weekend. My father was a Navy veteran and had served in the Pacific in World War II. His patriotism was clear and firmly grounded in his military service as a young man of 18 – an experience that he carried with him for the rest of his life. Hanging the giant American flag was my father’s annual Memorial Day ritual and I still think about him and that flag every year when the holiday comes around.
Maybe it was because I was a child at the time, but things seemed much simpler back then, when hanging an American flag on the front of your house was understood simply as a celebration of a patriotic holiday and not a provocative political act. Lately, it feels like it’s harder to find solid ground, harder to navigate the complicated and multi-layered events that are playing out on the national and international stage. So I am grateful that at the Sunday Forum, we will be hearing from Walter Dorn, Professor of Defence Studies at the Canadian Forces College and the Royal Military College in Toronto, on the topic, “When Is War Just?” It is a question that has been taken up by Christian theologians since St. Augustine in the 4th century and a question that is as timely now as ever.
I’m grateful, too, that on Sunday afternoon, Teagan Sage has organized a listening space for us around peace in Israel/Gaza. This will be an opportunity to prayerfully consider each other’s witness around the conflict in the Middle East and to listen attentively to those with whom we may disagree.
Opportunities to listen and learn together in community are vitally important and immensely valuable in helping us to discern and clarify some of the essential issues that are confronting us. Honest and respectful conversations seem to be increasingly difficult, if not impossible, in other spaces, but the church can and should be a place where people of good will can gather to share ideas and express opinions without fear of being shouted down, cancelled, or ostracized. That is the essence of Christian community. It’s what binds us together as the Body of Christ. I’m grateful for the space that St. Bart’s provides to work through these issues together, always grounded in the gospel message of love.
