Interview with LCC chaplain

Padre Harold Ristau on 100 Huntley Street with host Moira Brown.

BURLINGTON, Ontario – In November 2012, Rev. Dr. Harold Ristau appeared as a guest on Canadian television program 100 Huntley Street to talk about his book At peace with war: A chaplain’s meditations from Afghanistan. That interview was recently made available to watch online.

Padre Ristau is a Lutheran chaplain with the Canadian Forces, and his book is based on a journal he kept over two deployments to Afghanistan. Upon returning from Afghanistan, Padre Ristau had published selections from the journal online. There, as Padre Ristau explains in an earlier article for The Canadian Lutheran, people with loved ones who had served in war kept commenting “how comforting these honest Christian reflections were to them, and how they helped them better understand the post-war emotional and spiritual struggles of friends and family returning from a theatre of war.”

“I didn’t want to forget what I learned [in Afghanistan],” explains Padre Ristau in the interview with 100 Huntley Street. “Perhaps there’s stuff I wouldn’t want to remember in the future, that I didn’t want to remember while I was going through it,” he acknowledges, but recording it all has a purpose. Through the book readers will see that “in the midst of all that darkness, God is there.” “It’s not just a description of this meaningless dark place,” he continues, “but how God’s at work.”

Watch the interview below. For more information on Lutheran Church–Canada’s (LCC) chaplains in the Canadian Forces, visit LCC’s website.