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I’m helping Logan organise our first ever official Anzac Day service on campus. It will be awesome. We start at 1.30pm on Wednesday 25th April. Be there. We will gather on the lawn in front of the Clocktower building, and conclude with refreshments in the Link. Together we will honour all those men and women in the military who have served or still are serving our country, those who died at Gallipoli, and those who have died in all wars. Together we will express our deep longing for peace and our common commitment to finding non-violent ways of resolving conflicts. All around the planet a deep desire for peace and justice at all levels is bursting through into human consciousness. Our Peace and Conflict Studies Centre here at Otago is helping nurture and express this desire for peace. (otago.ac.nz/ncpacs ) Members of our Dunedin Abrahamic Interfaith Group (dunedininterfaith.net.nz ) are also doing our best to articulate and express the commitment to peace which lies at the heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Through our visits to schools, interfaith dialogues and our annual open Peace lecture on campus we seek to encourage peace in our hearts, peace in our communities , peace with the earth, peace in our world. Last year, along with one thousand peacemaker delegates from all around the planet I attended an international peace conference at the University of the West Indies in Kingston Jamaica. On this campus I encountered an incredible international commitment to overcoming violence and to bringing in peace and justice. Check out my report (otago.ac.nz/chaplain/otago021114.pdf. There is hope for us, and for our world

Peace be with you as you launch into the second half of semester one.

See you on Anzac Day.

- Rev. Greg Hughson

Hymn for ANZAC Day

Honour the dead, our country’s fighting brave,
honour our children left in foreign grave,
where poppies blow and sorrow seeds her flowers,
honour the crosses marked forever ours.
Weep for the places ravaged with our blood,
weep for the young bones buried in the mud,
weep for the powers of violence and greed,
weep for the deals done in the name of need.
Honour the brave whose conscience was their call,
answered no bugle, went against the wall,
suffered in prisons of contempt and shame,
branded as cowards, in our country’s name.
Weep for the waste of all that might have been,
weep for the cost that war has made obscene,
weep for the homes that ache with human pain,
weep that we ever sanction war again.
Honour the dream for which our nation bled,
held now in trust to justify the dead,
honour their vision on this solemn day:
peace known in freedom, peace the only way.