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| Syrian Refugee Family - Lebanon |
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| From Whence Shall my Help Come? |
On the Lebanese side of the border
with Syria, this very morning, a mother is nursing a newborn in a grimy tent
huddled alongside hundreds of other grimy tents in the dust bowl that is a UN
refugee camp. She watches her baby boy feed hungrily, notices that his cheeks
are growing fatter even as her own body is dwindling, victim of refugee rations
and the loss of appetite that comes with living in constant worry and fear. And
she can't help but wonder if bringing this child into a world of war and
madness isn't itself madness, and if someday soon, this baby boy will be
nothing more to the warlords than cannon fodder.
But she is
just one casualty among the thousands rendered helpless and lost by the civil
war in Syria. For all wars have at least these 10 things in common:
1.
principles of justice, honour and fairness are
set aside when men resort to arms to settle their differences. The first victim
of war is truth,
2.
food is stolen from the mouths of children to
pay for guns and bullets,
3.
patriotism becomes the highest ideal and
soldiers are lauded as the saviours of the nation,
4.
nothing is sacred any longer except an
unconditional dedication to the cause of the conflict,
5.
dissenters to the military option are branded as
traitors; prophetic voices must be silenced,
6.
good men turn into haters, trained to see the
opponent as demonic and worthy of death,
7.
combat soldiers come home wounded, disappointed
and, often, ill with an illness they pass on to their families and friends,
their neighbours and the nation they thought they were defending,
8.
compassion for the vulnerable is set aside;
power has bigger fish to fry than the needs of the poor,
9.
atrocities are disguised in euphemism: rendition,
collateral damage, ordinance, just war,
10. neighbour
is turned against neighbour as every expressed opinion is met with suspicion,
And in every
war that ever was, women have sat in dirty places that are not their home and
have looked down at nursing sons and wondered; for what madness have I given
birth, for what unholy future am I nourishing this man child? Prophetic voices
have been ridiculed, sidelined or thrown into wells where no one will hear
their witness. It's in the nature of the beast we call war.
As
Mennonites, we are well-placed to speak up for all the men and women raising
children in refugee camps. We too have been refugees. Our spiritual heritage has taught us what an
abomination it is to take another person's life, even in battle. We have no
Jeremiah among us, but we have our prophetic voices: John Howard Yoder, Rudy
Wiebe, David Schroeder, Menno Simons who declared to us that true evangelical
faith finds its Christ-like form in the feeding of the hungry and the clothing
of the naked.
The body of
Christ has many parts; we have been assigned a role as that arm of Christ that
looks out for the weak and the vulnerable, that speaks to power, urging them to
make choices that don't resort to weapons of murder and destruction, that
proclaims that history teaches us that there is no just
war.
In parts of
our Mennonite community these days, flags are flying at the fronts of churches,
the rhetoric of winners and losers is gradually replacing the humble
admonitions of the Sermon on the Mount, the creation model is giving way to the
economic, patriotic model.
We too have
begun to find our prophets’ messages uncomfortable . . . and have been tempted
to throw them and their rantings down the well.
For the sake
of the mother and child in the Lebanese refugee camp if for no bigger reason,
we dare not be silent in times like these.
