Remembrance Sunday 2009

The Regimental Museum of the South Wales Borderers in Brecon is a neglected treasure trove of military history. Every inch of its four rooms is filled with the artefacts of an illustrious past: weaponry, insignia, and medals. In pride of place stand the Victoria Crosses won by the regiment, including six of the seven won at Rorke’s Drift on 22 January 1879.

The faces of the men who were decorated for their valour that day stare out from small gilt frames. They are separated from the viewer by a glass case, but not only by a glass case. They are also separated by the coloured tinting of Victorian photography, strange to citizens of the digital era. They are separated by the starched formality of the uniforms that they wear and by the style in which their hair and beards are cut. When we look at Harry Hook’s portrait we see not the recognizable and roguish hero of Cy Endfield’s 1964 film Zulu, but a man from another age. He is inaccessible to us; his life is inaccessible to us. It is impossible to re-enter his world imaginatively, to sense it, understand it and sympathize with it.

Imaginative re-entry characterizes the remembrance that has been customary at this time of year since the end of the Great War. Consciously or unconsciously we have been encouraged to re-enter and re-live the horror of the Western Front. Our re-entry has been eased by the poetry of Wilfred Owen and by grainy newsreel footage of the Somme. But it has been eased above all by the presence at our war memorials of the veterans of the First World War. We have seen with our own eyes, heard with our own ears and stood shoulder to shoulder in our market squares with the men who fought at Passchendaele and Jutland. Their survival has kept their great struggle from the clutches of the museum’s dusty shelves.

Yet that era is now past. In the last twelve months the last three British survivors of the conflict that gave birth to Remebrancetide have died, and the voice of that generation has fallen silent. For those growing up now, and for those yet unborn, Harry Patch will be as Harry Hook is to us, a stranger from that distant land called the past. Imaginative re-entry into the slime and squalor of the trenches will become more and more difficult. What then will happen to remembrance? How will we remember a time with which we have no living link?

When imaginative re-entry is no longer possible solemn recollection is. Solemn recollection is the deliberate calling to mind of events that our corporate consciousness might prefer to forget. Solemn recollection is our regular reminding ourselves that, in the words of the Kohima Epitaph, our today has been won at the cost of others’ tomorrow. It is the painstaking chronicling of their sacrifice even when they can no longer prompt us. It is the acknowledgement that such sacrifice continues in the heat of Helmand and in too many other theatres of conflict. It is the perpetual recognition that war, all war, is an abomination. Solemn recollection is a national task which should claim the allegiance of people of all faiths and of no faith. The vocation of Christians within the national task is to enable this solemn recollection, providing sacred space and sacred language for the purpose. It is a vocation which those who treat our Church’s establishment in cavalier fashion would do well to remember.

Yet the Christian contribution to Remembrance Sunday should not be limited to space and language. It should not even be limited to prayer for the victims of war and ethical reflection on the morality of war. The Church’s most profound contribution is a remembrance which is neither imaginative re-entering nor solemn recollection. This is the remembrance that is celebrated daily within these walls, the remembrance that Christ commended to his friends. We may be able to enter the scene created by Leonardo da Vinci, so firmly is it imprinted on the Western heart, but we cannot imaginatively re-enter the upper room. And although the solemn recollection of the Last Supper plays a part in Eucharistic celebration such celebration does not end with recollection.

For here we remember Christ; that is, we re-member Christ. We know what it means to dismember. It is, after all, the achievement of war to dismember communities, to dismember families, to dismember men and women, God’s unique and precious creation. We too easily overlook what it means to re-member. It means to make whole again, to restore again, to bring into the present again. Here we re-member Christ. In broken bread and wine outpoured the Holy Spirit makes Christ present, as real for us as he was for the company with who he reclined around the table.

And if we are in the presence of Christ then time and space mean nothing. If we are in the presence of Christ then we are in the presence of all who are in the presence of Christ. We are in the presence of the fallen, of all the victims of the folly and sin of war. We gather with Harry Hook, hero of Rorke’s Drift, with Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy, and with Phillip Scott, killed in Sangin on Thursday last week.

Because Christ is we know that they are; because Christ is we know that love ultimately disarms violence; because Christ is we know that beyond death there is life, that beyond darkness there is light, that beyond despair there is hope. Ours is to remember them, and to remember this broken and suffering world. Amen.