Short days ago

November takes us on a strange journey from All Soul’s Day to Advent, with Remembrance Day in between.

I’ve been thinking about the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Like everyone else my age, I remember memorizing it in school and reeling it off with my class, all standing chock-a-block in assembly together with solemn looks pasted on our faces and hidden pride at remembering the words, or maybe fear we might forget. A complicated set of emotions for Grade Three.

What strikes me now is that we didn’t think of the poem as a ghost story. With Halloween only just behind us (yes, and a pillowcase stash of candy still stuffed under my bed), I somehow failed to make the connection between the spooky stories of a week and a half before and this poetic call to action from the fallen soldiers at Flanders.

Take up our quarrel with the foe . . . we shall not sleep . . . 

I’m not sure why we were only afraid of forgetting the words.

The real horrors

There are ghost stories in the Bible, too, but my Sunday School seemed to skip over them as well. When I discovered the story of the ghost of Samuel speaking to King Saul, I told my dad it felt like something from my book of Greek myths. He told me it was close and that the people who wrote down each set of stories weren’t far too apart.

Saul wanted to hear Samuel tell him what would happen in the upcoming battle, and, of course, Samuel’s prophecy was, as usual, difficult to hear. “The Lord has done what he predicted through me.” God had turned away and the Philistines would win. If only Saul had listened in the first place.

Of course, the real horror in any war comes not from the imagined voices of the dead but the terrible actions of the living. It is in the fear that is created and perpetuated. The hope that is destroyed. The gardens, homes and schools reduced to rubble. If we linger, listening for poetic ghosts to speak, we miss the silence of these real horrors.

But it is in the silence that we hear the need of the world and our own desperate need, and that silence carries us through November and through into Advent, the season of waiting for the Light.

Thornton Wilder wrote: “Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair.’

I think I want to offer him an editorial suggestion here. What if we change projection to project? Then hope and despair are not only extensions or creations of our imagination but the results of intentional effort that we might direct. We might make hope our work. We might choose not to lean over despair’s dark chasms and listen for ghostly echoes, but to build hope instead. We can imagine and aim for better days ahead and strain to see not darkness but dawn. May that project of hope be the torch we pass to others and the candles we learn to light.