A message from the Dean - 6 November 2020
Dear Friends,
How are you? I don’t ask that question as a polite opening conversational gambit, rather as an invitation to draw breath and check reactions to a week that has carried disappointment, drama and tension. The news of another lock-down, no matter the public health necessity of it, depresses us. The ratcheting up of the terror threat adds to the atmosphere of anxiety and the knock about vileness of the American Presidential election has brought into question the security of democratic processes. All in all it’s been a grim week. We start the coming week with Remembrance Sunday: a day that carries the weight of national mourning and regret complete with its rituals of poppies, silence, familiar words, the last post and reveille. Where’s the hope?
Now it’s not for me to throw you crumbs of false comfort or illusion (although plenty of religious critics claim the churches only offer “the opiate of the people”). Clergy get rightly panned for offering silly or inadequate cliches in the face of tragedy or disaster. (Not for nothing is the so-called Religious Affairs Correspondent of the satirical magazine, “Private Eye”, called “the Reverend J C Flannel”. A harking back to music hall depictions of stage parsons as purveyors of “soft soap”).
Christian ethics at their best don’t evade reality: coming to any ethical judgement depends first of all on what is actually going on. The evidence matters. Then, looking at scripture and the tradition of Christian learning and reflection, we begin to come to “a mind” on the question or situation before us. It means reckoning with difference and not being content to be swayed by passion or the impatience that demands a slick and quick soundbite. Lies get told because they can be delivered in neat, little media-friendly packages. There’s no charity in a deceptive slogan, no truth in opinions that are evidence-free or data-light.
Well so far, so heavy! But let me try and point to where we might find some light in the darkness. Following my own advice let me begin by looking at the evidence. It’s easy to be overwhelmed this coming Remembrance Sunday by the sheer routine and predictability of what is being said and ritualised. I’ve known military veterans stay away from churches and cenotaphs precisely because horrors and suffering get bundled up in language that is manageable or worse, it masks a quiet gloat about the exceptionalism of our nation. Perhaps we can only remember properly and therefore have hope for the future when we know what happened and what we have to cultivate for a future of peace. It’s worth going in mind this Sunday to two locations. Some places on earth always reveal a wound. The Menin Gate at Ypres for example, the stark horror of Auschwitz, won’t let you forget tragedy. They are both sites of tourism and can offer a commodified “experience”. But the hope is in their power to bust our ideas of touristic experience or our “must do’s” individual “bucket lists”. Both places reveal something raw and epic Going to Ypres and the site of the third battle of the Somme (Passchendaele) in 1917 reveals a slight hill – “The Salient” – around which German forces attacked from three sides for almost the entire length of the First World War. British and Empire forces were constantly fed in and out of this very small area. It was never quiet. It was a place the British could not give up and it became an abattoir. For four years, millions of men from both sides fought relentlessly in the space of six kilometres. The ground around Ypres is deeply pock-marked. Every year piles of ordnance surface. The number of war cemeteries is overwhelming. Behind the lines you can see a sad little square where British deserters were shot at dawn. (A nearby Midlands Regiment, The Worcesters, has the record for executing the highest number of WWI deserters).
Rachel Mann, the Poet and Priest, in her book “Fierce Imaginings – The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God” (DLT 2018) wrote about the journey she had made to the WWI battlefields of France and Belgium as a homage to her Grandfather, a veteran of the Somme. On returning to the UK she said: “My way of seeing had been altered; I expected the marks of violence to be laid in ordinary places … violence is appallingly ordinary. It marks all places. It is part of the structure of what we do and we do not know how to stop it, except perhaps in the visions of the Christ or God. It happens anywhere, no matter how beautiful … it is there … We catch it out of the corners of our eye. And it taunts us. And sometimes we dare to look back into its joyless, spiteful gaze and see if we can spot something more than despair and death.” (p 136) Anyone who has seen pictures of Auschwitz and visited that terrible campus of mechanised annihilation, will be aware of the terrifying results of marrying an evil, genocidal ideology with modern industrial processes. Both these places, Ypres and Aushwitz, make us aware not simply of violence but the human capacity to invent myths and ideologies that treat human bodies as impersonal “things” to feed war machines or to be the focus of a racial hatred that demands that those lives be viciously and sadistically wiped out. Our hope is in our cry for redemption. At Aushwitz the memorial to the victims says, “O Earth cover not their blood”. Remembrance Sunday is not about forgetting but taking a clear look into our past and repenting, that our history has been the way it has, and that we sincerely desire and want better. Without the repentance, the recognition that we need to change, to turn in a new direction, there’s no escape from cycles of violence and repression. The hope lies in the turning, that we may not be endlessly self-serving and destructive. The hope also lies in the love we have for those who died as a result of war: the millions of acts of bravery, courage and endurance, the millions who became victims, bore terrible ordeals and were the bystanders, the collateral damage in conflicts waged by huge forces.
Where’s the hope? I can only point you to the cross and resurrection of Christ. We stand under the cross to hear the words of an innocent victim plead “Father forgive”. We look to the resurrected Christ to see a wounded man say “Peace. Do not be afraid”. The glorious, faithful Christ who says in the Book of Revelation “I make all things new”.
As we face more difficulty, isolation, disruption and anxiety, it’s time not for retreat into self but to work for a clear-sighted understanding of how and why things are and a willingness to align ourselves with the people who ask “why is the world like this? Need it be so?” Keep searching, keep praying, and let’s encourage one another with our friendship and service.
With my love, prayers and blessing.
Adrian