November 2005

Remembering and Re-membering

J D Burns and W C Adams were born in the same week and probably knew each other all their lives.

Their fathers were Christian ministers; both boys grew up in homes where their fathers worked from a book-lined study. Inevitably the boys came to Scotch for their secondary education. It is perhaps not surprising that both boys did well with words. When they were 17 years old, Bill Adams was dux of English and History while Jim Burns, although Editor of Collegian, with a more sporting commitment, also became Vice-Captain of the School.

In November 1912, Bill took ill and had to go to hospital for surgery. It was an appendix operation. Things went wrong. On November 30 he died. We can only imagine the shock and emotion that flowed through the School. In an effort to reconcile himself to the loss of his friend, 17-year-old Jim Burns wrote a poem‘In Memoriam’.

The poem is an amazingly lucid expression of his grief and loss, as well as a highly informed theological expression of issues with which Christian faith must deal in every generation. On Friday, at our Remembrance Day Assembly the boys of Year 7 placed well over 500 crosses in the lawns of the Quadrangle. One of them bore the inscription ‘J D Burns, Died 18 September 1915, Age 20’. How are we to make sense of such deaths?

Christians have been helped by the way the apostle Paul makes sense of the death of Jesus in his Letter to the Colossians. In Chapter 1, he says Jesus’ death was about God reconciling himself to a world at war. It was as if the world had become wilfully detached from God, and was raging against itself and its maker. In the death of Christ, God was making peace possible. The cost was the sacrificial and voluntary death of his own Son. It was the death of death in the death of Christ. This theological understanding of the death of Jesus was formative for Jim Burns and his schoolmate, Bill Adams. How does remembering all this help us?

Last week Francis Chan (Year 9) and Lachlan Smith (Year 12) each carried off prizes of $250 in the Russell and Mary Foreman Essay Competition for their answers to the question ‘What can we learn from Australia’s past that will help her future?’ This is a challenge to remember, reflect and pre-member; to construct a future based on the past. There are important choices here: what constitutes a significant ‘part’ or ‘member’ of the past?

Four highly-credentialed young Australian authors of a recent book Imagining Australia: Ideas for our Future, regard values as that key issue. ‘Values’ is the subject of their first chapter. In full agreement with the primacy of values,Archbishop Peter Jensen has nevertheless critiqued the book in the first of his Boyer lectures. He notes the presumption that a secular state will mean a secular community, and observes the authors do not trace any of their values to Jesus. Jensen asserts that ‘many of our forbears looked to Jesus as their inspiration when they created Australia’. Saliently he asks, Does Jesus have a future in Australia?

In working for Australia’s future it is clearly important for Christians to identify the distinctive contribution of Jesus. Here we mean the ‘parts’ of Jesus’ story, relationships, ideas, teachings, traditions, etc., the ‘members’ – which when reconfigured will shape our future. What we are looking for here is Jesus’ contribution in Australia. This is filtered to us through people. No group is more worthy of study in this regard than those who have made sacrifices for the freedoms we treasure. We say ‘we will remember them’ but how well do we know them?

Yours sincerely,

Graham Bradbeer

In Memoriam

William C Adam, Died 30 October 1912

We say Farewell, and blinded,only see

He seeth dawn, and understandeth all.