#156: Our Most Generic Holiday

I am reprising this November 2006 piece since it becomes timely once in every year.

Since Thanksgiving came early this year, so did “Black Friday” (when stores finally begin to turn a profit after eleven months in the red). And so our free enterprise system’s official generic “holiday season” got underway a week earlier than usual.

But this year I had special reason to notice that, of all our holidays, perhaps the holiday most diluted of all meaning actually arrives a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving: November 11.

For most Americans under 50, November 11 is simply “Veterans Day” –a legal holiday largely indistinguishable from “Memorial Day” in May, and generally understood as a sort of blanket remembrance of all those who have served in war. The subtle difference endures, I suppose, that while Memorial Day honors the war dead, Veterans Day focuses especially on those still surviving.

But of course the holiday’s origin is anything but generic, as Europeans know all too well. For it was on “The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month” of 1918 that the “War to End all Wars” finally ended after the signing of an Armistice. Hence the original holiday for November 11 was “Armistice day.”

For me, Armistice Day 2006 held a doubly nostalgic significance.

First, it was the first time since my junior year in college that I spent the holiday in France, where that war had largely been fought. In fact, my year there (1968) happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Armistice itself.

The lady from whom I rented my Paris room in 1968 was a war widow, and accordingly she received an invitation to attend the Armistice Day solemn high Mass and Te Deum at Notre Dame Cathedral in the presence of “Monsieur le Président de la République,” Charles de Gaulle. But she had family plans in Caen, so she offered me the invitation and I gladly accepted.

Notre Dame de Paris

 With some difficulty, I found the side entrance to which my invitation entitled me, waded through the mob to squeeze myself into a spot just next to the cathedral’s great sanctuary, and then climbed a wooden barrier propped against the wall that enabled me to stand a good 4 feet above the crowd.

It so happened my perch placed me in direct line with the prie-dieu reserved for the president. And so it was, after great fanfare and a solemn military procession, that on “The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month” of the 50th year following the signing of the Armistice, I found myself attending Mass at Notre Dame directly before the gaze of Charles de Gaulle. In a year when rioting students nearly toppled his government, he did not seem pleased to see me there.

But this year, for Armistice Day 2006, I was not at Notre Dame. Not even in Paris. I was in Chartres—and Chartres was the source of my second nostalgia.

You see, when I arrived as a student, the program I was enrolled in sent us all on a one-week field trip, which began by transporting us directly from Orly Airport to Chartres. The result: the Chartres cathedral, long considered the most beautiful of all gothic cathedrals, was the very first building I entered in France!

Sitting awe-struck near the rear, knowing full well that medieval Chartres was a modest town of 20,000 people – the same size as my own hometown—I wondered: What sort of people, what sort of culture, what sort of faith could ever have produced this marvel?

Chartres Cathedral, Armistice Day 2010

Now in 2006 I found myself seated once more beneath the famous deep blues and reds of Chartres’ glorious stained glass, but this time for the solemn chanting of the Te Deum in honor of those who died to make the peace of 11 November 1918.

Michel Pansard, Bishop of Chartres, presided over the service, and preached the homily. He wasted no time pointing out that the gospel just read was the gospel for the Mass of the day, for the feast of St. Martin—and he pointed out that Maréchal Foche, leader of the allied forces dictating the armistice terms, had chosen St. Martin's day deliberately. For St. Martin, long established as one the most beloved saints in France, began his 4th century adult life as a Roman soldier. Only later did he convert to Christianity, become a priest and then Bishop of Tours renowned for his simplicity and his devotion to all who suffer (he is, in fact, not only the patron saint of soldiers but also the patron against poverty).

Bishop Michel Pansard at Chartres, Armistice Day 2010

Bishop Pansard used St. Martin’s conversion as the focal point of his homily. Those who died in 1914-1918 died hoping to build a lasting peace, he said, and that left but one choice for Christians who wish to honor their memory and sacrifice. “We must become Artisans of Peace and Justice,” he said, “to construct the future they hoped for.”

That challenge, as St. Martin's example shows, means devoting ourselves to the suffering, to those Jesus called “the least of these”—that is, all who suffer anywhere. In the face of their cries, the bishop said, “it cannot pass that we who have eyes do not see them, that we who have ears do not hear them.”

Peace, he observed, is not the mere absence of war. It is a thing built on virtue. In France, of course, the chief civic virtues are “Liberté, Egalité, Fratenité.” And the bishop linked those patriotic ideas to Gospel values, pointing out that liberty and equality cannot work if fraternity is lacking.

We cannot ask, like Cain after killing his own brother, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”—since Jesus has already answered the question for us. For us, all war is fratricide.

Fraternity is, of course, the opposite of fratricide—so if war is fratricide, then fraternity requires a dedication to peace. But fraternity cannot be legislated. It must be inspired.

What does it take, he asked, to become “artisans of peace and justice?” It is not an easy task, nor is it a passive thing. Above all, it requires a commitment to the common good, a good that goes beyond the good and the interests of individuals or groups or classes. This means thinking of the greatest good for all, whatever the sacrifices. It also requires a dedication to dialog that never shrinks from using civil discourse as the main instrument of peace—a dialog that never yields, no matter how grave the conflict, to the despair that leads peoples to take up arms.
For me, this Armistice Day gave renewed proof that my faith—our faith—speaks loud and clear to our age as it groans for peace amid the sad memory of those dead in war.

And while many Americans passed the generic “Veterans Day” in passive idleness, I found renewed inspiration in retrieving the original tradition of honoring the millions who fell right up until “The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month” in that horrendous, anything BUT generic "war to end all wars."

As I listened to Michel Pansard share the wisdom of our faith, I thought: our country could use this holiday. Our country, torn for forty years between isolationism and reckless interventions (like Iraq and Vietnam), could use the lesson I was hearing. We need not choose between a “going-it-alone” or “staying the course” of invasion and occupation. There is a third way: we can choose instead to join other peoples as “artisans of peace and justice.”

But I also thought: “Veterans Day” as we observe it will not teach us this lesson—and I regretted our national amnesia about the “Armistice” of 1918.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006