ANZAC Day procession, Brisbane, 1916. Credit: http://goo.gl/2cXMD1
The brief article reflects on the origins of the ANZAC Day 2016 and distils something of how the people of the time may have understood it.
In Brisbane in 1916 an Anzac Day Commemoration Committee was set up following a public meeting. This committee consisted of parliamentarians, leaders of mainline Churches and military representatives. The secretary was an army chaplain, Canon John Garland, who also had long experience in the public forum in advocacy and campaigning for the role of religious education in public schools.
He was asked by the committee to devise a program of remembrance that could be used across Australia and New Zealand.
Given the context of the time he had to walk a very fine line. The Christian roots of Australia were unquestioned but the scourge of religious intolerance, especially between the Catholic and Protestant Churches, was a reality. This had to be addressed and somehow skirted around if the Anzac Day commemoration was to have universal acceptance.
[It] needed to be a moderate form of Christian expression to avoid dissension between the denominations and also cater for those who had little or no faith. The success of the program was due to the fact that Christianity breathed softly through the program. http://goo.gl/cjwZPO
Incorporated into the memorial was the whole understanding of ‘blood sacrifice’ as a rite of initiation, very much embedded in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. This is reflected in the biblical readings and the hymns. The futile storming of the Gallipoli peninsula was seen as an event that, in some way, would give shape to Australia as a nation in its own right.
The Anzac Day service today is still very much regarded as ‘sacred time’, as a time to remember. The stone memorials are sacred monuments, even though what most people engage in is a form of secular liturgy.
Still there is always the need to acknowledge and separate this sacredness from the jingoism that inevitably piggybacks on these types of occasions. Because the sacredness helps us ask the question ‘why’ and see the ugliness and futility of war.