We Thought We Belonged: A Remembrance Day Sermon
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal
7 November 2021
From the moment we are born, we long to belong. We hunger to be loved, to be included, to be encircled by people who care for us, who count us as one of theirs. What greater heartbreak can there be than to be excluded or left out?
Sometimes, when we don’t find what we seek at home, we go looking elsewhere. We find a group, a tribe, a community, that welcomes us in. Sometimes that community asks us to shut out others, so that we become an “us” against a “them.”
We fear for our well-being. We fear for the safety of our loved ones. We fear for our people. What begins as natural concern becomes anxiety, becomes hatred, becomes war. What makes us human beings who long to belong can turn us into beings who build fortresses to keep others out.
War tears people apart, but it also brings them together. The war effort. The alliances. The camaraderie between troops fighting together on the front lines. I think of the members of this community who served in World War II, who struggled through it and survived. All of our World War II veterans are gone now, and only a few members of our community are old enough to have actual memories of that period of history.
Rev. Charles Eddis, our last veteran, presented the Remembrance Day wreath last year, virtually on Zoom. Sadly, we lost him this past May. He was the last of an august group of members of what they called the Greatest Generation. He didn’t talk often about his wartime experiences, but I remember him saying, “It was quite a time.” He had fond memories of the sailors who served with him. Memories that would bring a wry smile to his face as he shook his head.
May Kersten, who died in August, would share memories of Canadian soldiers liberating Holland when she was a young child. The experience inspired her to come to Canada when she came of age, in search of a place to belong.
Sketch Terry, who served in British intelligence and who would never reveal the details of his assignments, spoke often of those important days in his life. It was a time of purpose that gave him a strong sense of identity.
I think of my own father, as I do every year on this day, whose life was shaped by his war experiences as a boy just barely nineteen. Most of his fellow soldiers died. But in those rare times when he spoke about it, he fondly reminisced about the wild things they did together.
I think of the late Vera Freud, who was a sixteen-year-old girl in France in 1944, as her father was deported to Auschwitz and her mother, who was not Jewish, joined the French Resistance. Vera was sent into hiding at a local college, virtually orphaned by the war. When her school was requisitioned by a division of the Third Reich, she became a courier for the local Resistance network.
“You have no idea what a generation we were,” Vera once said to me. “We had been through so much. We survived, and that taught us that we could be capable of anything. We created great music, great art, literature, we saw no limits.” Belonging, she taught me, can be found in the common bond of living through a particular moment in history.
These are but a few names of those who served. For some, that bond continued after the war. But for others there was a longing for what once was and could never be again. Indigenous, Black and other soldiers of colour have told other stories, often of finding respect and belonging while in service, only to return to injustice and inequality. The country had made promises and demanded so much of them, but when they came home, nothing had changed.
This year, we have witnessed the end of the war in Afghanistan. Canadian, US and other troops have left. It was never a war I supported. I’m glad it’s over. But I do not envy those who had to organize the exit. In these past months, we have heard accounts from soldiers who gave up years of their lives and wonder for what purpose. We have watched as many Afghans who had served as interpreters and in other roles have been left behind. The promises to provide safe passage have fallen short, and many are waiting and fearing for their lives. The bureaucratic process of granting asylum churns slowly and painfully.
I was recently listening to an interview with an Afghan interpreter who had served with US troops and now feared for his life and for the safety of his family as he waited for transport to the West. He had chosen to support the US troops because he believed it was the best way to assure a future for his children. Yet his application for asylum had been denied several times. He had thought that he had belonged, but now he was forgotten and forsaken. I’ve heard and read similar stories of Afghans who assisted Canadian troops and are still waiting to be granted refugee status here.
“We just want peace. We just want to survive,” the interpreter told his interviewer.
We just want peace. We just want to survive. We just want love and a place of belonging. This is a deep, essential desire, a desire that can also be used to manipulate and destroy us if we let ourselves be divided against each other.
On this Remembrance Day may we remember the brutal costs of war and the danger of closing ourselves in — the danger of idolizing “us” versus “them.” May we ever dedicate ourselves to opening the way to a wider and deeper understanding of what it means to belong to humanity.