Remembrance Sunday
Merton College, Oxford
Evensong, 14 November 2004
Readings: Dan. 6; Mt. 13: 1-9, 18-23
Near the centre of the old part of the City of Riga, the capital of Latvia, next to the imposing Gothic Cathedral, stands a modern building somewhat at odds with its surroundings – The Museum of Occupation. Entry is free, and on the two occasions I’ve been round it, I’ve come away both historically stimulated and emotionally harrowed. The Latvian people are proud of their ancient culture and language, but they were only allowed to become a separate nation in 1918, after the Russian Revolution. That short springtime of freedom was dashed in 1940 with the invasion by the Soviets, followed by a counter invasion by Nazi Germany shortly afterwards, followed by another more decisive takeover by the Soviets in 1945 – which was to last until Perestroika in 1989. The “occupation” of which the museum tells every visitor began in 1940, and ended only 15 years ago. All this means that their version of World War Two is a little different from the one I grew up with. So when it comes to the Yalta Conference, when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin decided on the post-war lines of influence in Europe, the Latvians, along with the Estonians and the Lithuanians, really believed that the 1940 boundaries, which respected their independence, would be restored. But it was not to be. The West, we are often told, was tired of war, Stalin wanted to grab back as much of the former Russian Empire as he could manage (but without Baltic Germans to help, as in former times), so the long night of Soviet domination began, with its legacy of russification and deportations, and the imposition of an alien social culture – along with fine historic Hanseatic Churches that still all smell of the damp of active neglect to this day.
We – the British – do not come out of that museum smelling of roses, however understandable the compromises of 1945 may have appeared then, and even seem to some of us to be now. What I saw in those displays and photographs – down to tiny packing cases taken by children to Siberian labour camps – is a lasting testimony to a people’s capacity to endure, surrounded by the prayers of faithful Lutheran pastors, many of whom were to emerge actively promoting the independence movement in the 1980s, including the young Archbishop, Janis Vanags.
I tell that story, not just because it is still fresh after over a year, but because it provides a helpful backdrop for Remembrance Sunday. It is right that we should see ourselves as others see us. It is right, too, that we accept – even if we do not always agree with – the way history is sometimes re-written, like the deconstruction of English identity, and even the character of Anglicanism, that is fashionable in some circles at the moment. But also to have to face up to the sheer fact that a modern war, such as the one still being fought in Iraq, is far more thoroughly debated in public before, during and after the conflict, and far more fully reported as it is going on, than would have been possible of the D-Day landings sixty years ago. Such factors may hold politicians back unduly, or else unleash them more easily, but this is how things are, and there is little that we can do to change it. The passage of time since the Second World War has seen, too, a decline in traditional deference. The recent dramatisation on television of the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940 is a case in point. There was a great deal of praise for the way the narrative was presented, down to the smallest detail, but one thing was wrong: the expressions on the faces of the actors playing the parts of soldiers and sailors when given orders by superiors constantly reflected a questioning spirit more akin to our own time than would have been appropriate then.
So what are we to make of Remembrance Sunday, with its mixture of heroic events, which are constantly open to re-interpretation by others, in a different cultural climate, and with a war going on in Iraq which many of us, right across the political spectrum, strongly question. Part of the answer is to take a longer view, and accept that while the technology with which we can try to obliterate each other may change by the decade, there remains the fact that human beings are still – and always - capable of heights of moral goodness and depths of moral evil. As the German proverb puts it, ‘a great war leaves a country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.’ And one could leave things there, with a sophisticated shoulder-shrug, accompanied by no more than a peremptory public commemoration of the local fallen.
That may be sufficient for a cautious generation, which is reluctant to offend anyone, and bloodless to the last in terms of much commitment to anything, save perhaps a vague and worthy-sounding sense of the common good. But it does little justice to the dangerous world we live in, and the potentially dangerous people we continue to be. Remembrance Sunday, as the name implies, is about the memory – rekindling it, refocusing it, and opening it out, in order to reveal hidden things that may look a little different as the years pass. It is, therefore, more than a kind of therapeutic spring-clean. The memories of events from a much earlier stage in peoples’ lives are usually far clearer to us than what we did the day before yesterday. But for those of us not in that position – yet! – there is another way: to revisit those central, tragic events, in one way or another, and to check them off against contemporary experience. As part of that generation born just after the Second World War, I went to school with other children of those who fought, and returned home. There was the Polish boy in my class at the local primary school whose father escaped Nazi occupation and flew in the R.A.F; there was the Ukranian refugee, who ran a small holding not far from where we lived, and who grew the best strawberries in the area; and there was the ex-prisoner of war hairdresser from what became East Germany, who somehow found a wife among the sea of refugees from Pomerania, and who became a farm worker. Our village, it would seem, was a living example of picking up the pieces, and trying slowly to form a new community by grappling with the local, human results of the tragedy – helped along, in our case, by my mother, a former member of the Danish Resistance.
If there is a Christian way of approaching Remembrance Sunday, it is to face up to the violence of it all, and the possible reconciliation that any war can bring in its course. Memory is a subtle part of the brain that we will probably never fully understand, but which we will still sufficiently appreciate in at least some of its mechanisms and disciplines. The main memory of war must be about its meaninglessness. That is why it is vital that the ‘memory’ is transmitted from one generation to another, with its accompanying reinterpretations. During the D-Day commemorations in Portsmouth at the beginning of June this year, I went for a walk among the crowd, and was surprised to see a lower average age than I had expected: ‘I’ve just met some very brave old men’, said the young French television crew with tears in their eyes.
To re-kindle and to hand on are only the start of the process. Like Daniel in the lions’ den, from tonight’s first reading, there must also be a penitential flavour that points to real danger; and like Jesus in the second lesson telling the tale of the sower and the seed, there must also be a real recognition of risk – that life is not pre-programmed, that it can be messy, as well as, in modern secular terms, frankly unfair. Remembrance Sunday unlocks the worst that we can do to each other. But there is no point in entering into its spirit, if we ourselves are not also prepared to be changed into more faithful, more forgiving, and more humble people.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
