Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of VE day. Today my daily reading took me to that famous passage in Isaiah: \u201cThey shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday I heard a RAF veteran talking about his time flying in Lancaster Bombers. One of the things that he said was that 50% of those flying in the Lancasters never returned. I have not been able to verify this statistic, but I have no reason to doubt it. My father served in the RAF during the war as part of the crew on a Lancaster. He was in the right 50% – the 50% who returned. As the reports of the celebrations were broadcast on the radio yesterday, I thought of him and wondered what he would have made of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I doubt whether he would have joined the celebrations \u2013 I can never remember him doing so when he was alive. I never saw his service medals. I don\u2019t know whether he even collected them, but I do know that he never kept them. He did not like the big military parades on Remembrance Day, seeing them as preparation for war rather than living and preparing for peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In all of this I am not saying that he did not remember \u2013 he did. His remembrance, however, was not confined to particular days of commemoration and celebration, but a life of political activism. He saw the war as a fight against tyranny and injustice, and that the way to avoid another war was for people to campaign for freedom and justice during the peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although he was not a believer, he worked in an attempt to make the words of Isaiah be more than just hope for the future, but a present reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like father like son I find commemorations like yesterday\u2019s difficult, but I do work and pray for that day when \u201cswords shall be beat into ploughshares and nations will not train for war anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of VE day. Today my daily reading took me to that famous passage in Isaiah: \u201cThey shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":436,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbridgebaptistchurch.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}