Nowadays, although this is not greatly to my credit, I skip the 4.30am Anzac Day Dawn Service in Martin Place and choose the nearby sleep-and-brekkie-friendly 10am option. It’s both entertaining and moving.
There are families with young children milling around in the park, a few bemedalled veterans, kilted Highlanders with their drums rattling and their pipes skirling, Air Cadets with rifles clicking their heels in a well-rehearsed drill, laying of wreaths, and speeches by local dignitaries. When the multicultural crowd together murmurs “Lest we forget”, I get a lump in my throat.
Still, a Dawn Service is the real thing. I often recall one that I attended when I was living in Hobart a few years ago.
On a frosty Tasmanian morning I walked with hundreds of others through the dark to the Cenotaph. It was dark, very dark, as we trudged and stumbled up the slopes of a hill overlooking the Derwent River. And it was cold, very cold. We were hugging ourselves to keep the blood flowing and blowing on stiff fingers.
There was deep silence as we listened respectfully to an elderly Baptist minister. He gave a short and eloquent address about the heroes who had died to keep Australia free. It struck just the right note and managed to make everyone, both religious and secular, happy.
There was something eccentric about his delivery, though. Every couple of paragraphs there was a pause. It only lasted long enough to remind us how cold we were, but it was slightly embarrassing. Then he would embark upon another burst before lapsing into silence. He concluded with an Amen and a reverent pause. As the sky brightened over the eastern shore, we could see him outlined against the horizon.
He added a personal note. In his quavering voice he said that this would be his last Anzac Day service. He was 85 now and had done it for 30-odd years. It was time to pass the baton on to someone else.
And then he apologised for those pauses. “It was so cold,” he said, “I had to blow on my fingers so that I could keep on reading.” Suddenly it dawned on me: the old minister was blind and had been reading his Anzac Day address in Braille with his frozen fingers.
You find heroism in the most unexpected places, sometimes far from the battlefield.
So, speaking of heroism, this year’s conjunction of Holy Week and Anzac Day presents a thought-provoking lesson. Good Friday, Easter Sunday, and Anzac Day on the following Friday form a kind of triptych illustrating what that word really means.
On Good Friday, we commemorate the redemptive death of Christ on his cross, history’s greatest act of sacrificial love. The liturgy quotes Isaiah’s heart-wrenching description: “he submitted and opened not his mouth; like a lamb led to the slaughter”. It underscores his meekness.
But in Piers Plowman, the celebrated mediaeval English poem by William Langland, Christ is also depicted as a conquering knight of arms: “This was a lord’s deed, a conqueror of kings, who with his Cross and his Passion gave prize to mankind. He has wounded the fiend, and wounded death also, and opened heaven to all who will come.”
Easter Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, celebrated the warrior’s victory over death and sin.
Martial imagery like this appealed to the mediaeval religious mind. To ours, not so much. However, even in the stubbornly secular liturgy of Anzac Day we can detect a faint but unmistakable image of the idea of noble self-sacrifice for others, of Christ’s sacrifice. Australian soldiers fell at Gallipoli to keep the rest of us free and they live on. “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,” says the Ode of Remembrance. Langland would have understood that.
This magnanimity has a distinctively Christian ring to it, despite the deliberately areligious wording of the official order of service. That’s hardly surprising. The nobility of Christ’s sacrifice is hard-wired into our culture, despite vigorous attempts to dislodge it.
The young theologian Joseph Ratzinger tried to identify the distinctive hallmarks of Christian thought in his Introduction to Christianity (“introduction” is spectacularly deceptive advertising, by the way). One of them was “the principle of ‘for’”: “Being a Christian means essentially changing over from being for oneself to being for one another,” he wrote.
Which is precisely the heroism that we celebrate both at Easter and at our Anzac Day services.