Re-Membering Our Future

The poem “In Flanders’ Fields,” which we heard earlier, contains the line, “take up our quarrel with the foe.” I wonder sometimes who that foe is, with whom we are supposed to take up the quarrel. Apparently Dr. John McRae, the author of that poem, told his chaplain that he did not think of the foe as the German soldiers across the battlefield, but as the spirit of war itself. Who is the foe against which we are to take up the quarrel? War itself, hatred and violence, the thirst for vengeance, injustice in all its forms – these are the seeds of war against which we are to take up the quarrel. To repeat this poem is to resolve once more to hold high the torch in the struggle for peace, for forgiveness and for justice, so that those who died defending them will rest in peace, wherever they lie.