by CCW | 8 November 2010 09:49
Remembrance Sunday ushers us into a week of remembrance culminating in Remembrance Day. Its significance should not be lost on any of us. And yet, how hard it is to remember! In that difficulty, though, we contemplate an important feature of our humanity, namely, the limits of our knowing and our being.
The leaves lie scattered on the wind and the rain. Who can count the leaves? Who can count the dead? Who can name them? November is the grey month of remembering. What does it mean to remember?
To remember is to realize who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others.
Remembrance Day itself is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity. The golden thread of the life of Christ in the Saints runs through the common grave of our mortality. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our social and political freedoms and life.
To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian, principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray; some would say collapse because those principles no longer seem to animate our souls and our institutions. Such is a kind of forgetting. Our November remembrances signal, perhaps, a kind of return. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror, far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.
We remind ourselves of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. We would do well to recall the ancient wisdom that “your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground;” the point is that it cries out to God.
But if, and ‘if’ is the big, little word here, if we can remember in a spirit of forgiveness so much the better. For then our remembering will be joined all the more surely to God’s forgiving remembrance of all our follies, all our sufferings, all our griefs, and all our deaths. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world.
Our remembering is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns countless cenotaphs throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Our remembrance of them connects with the remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ: “Do this in remembrance of me.” We remember them in Christ, remembering them in the eternal knowing of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “ye are my friends.” Our remembrance is shaped by the cross, by the prayer of forgiveness of the Son to the Father for us, precisely, in the awareness of our limitations and our sinfulness; “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” This heightens the necessity of our remembering and makes us ask, yet again, whether we are worthy of such sacrifices.
“I had not thought,” says T.S. Eliot, quoting Dante, “that death had undone so many.” It could be the motto for the wasteland of modernity. The great wars have unleashed a world of wars and a succession of totalitarian regimes unprecedented in the extent of their carnage and brutality; their catastrophic effects are the story of the twentieth century, an age which Isaiah Berlin describes as “the most terrible century in Western history.” To be reminded of these things is both sobering and humbling. It speaks directly to the hubris of the post-war generation that presumed to think that there really was an end to all wars. It is as if we forgot to look in the mirror.
Our remembering is also about our forgetting. That there are limits to our remembering is a feature of our finite being. The intention to remember, however, catapults our remembering into something more and greater. The desire to remember, we might say, is a kind of compulsion that speaks to the essence of what it means to be human. I worry about a culture that does not want to remember.
In the earliest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, the friend and comrade of Gilgamesh, lies dying. His death is meant to punish Gilgamesh. Their heroic deeds are seen as an affront to some of the gods, none more so than Ishtar, the goddess of love and war (so much for the idea that “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”!). Gilgamesh has spurned her request that he be her consort; in short, her boy-toy, really. He knows that it will be at the price of his humanity. There is no real possibility in the ancient cultures of friendship between the gods and humans.
There is not even friendship and concord among the gods. Some of the gods of this ancient Sumerian world are upset about the killing of Humbaba by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The nature force of the forest, whose evil lies in the pre-rational character of his being, Humbaba is something with which we cannot reason or comprehend. Beyond the fear of the unknown lies the greater fear of the unknowable. The heroes, too, have killed the Bull of Heaven, unleashed by Ishtar as a drought which threatens the city of Uruk where Gilgamesh is king.
Enkidu, as he lies dying, has a vision of the house of death, “the house whose people sit in darkness,” “the house of dust,” as he says, dark and grey, where the crowns of kings and rulers and princes have been put away for ever, and the great ones are now like servants. Death is ever the great leveler, the great equalizer. His vision includes Belit-Sheri, the recorder of the gods, who squats before Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, and “keeps the book of death.” In this early and most ancient literary work, there is the desire to remember. To set down in a book all who have died. The intention is everything and wonderful.
The death of Enkidu will launch Gilgamesh on his greatest quest, a quest for wisdom. He will be the great hero not just because of his deeds but because of his greater desire to know. He cannot forget the death of his friend Enkidu in whose death he confronts his own mortality. The epic is, as the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke notes, das Epos der Todesfurcht, the great epic of the fear of death.
Gilgamesh’s story comes to be written down. It seems, too, as if the first great hero in literature is also a writer; there is just the hint of the attribution of the invention of writing to Gilgamesh. Utterly unlikely, of course.
Friendship and death, writing and life. To set down in a book is to remember what otherwise is so easily forgotten and lost because of the frailities of human minds. There is a remembering even in the face of the fear of death.
Our remembering is something more. It is part of another and greater kind of friendship, namely, the friendship between God and man in Jesus Christ. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says.
We confront a far greater chaos in the brutal spectacles of our inhumanity towards one another only to discover, perhaps, the greater love of God which makes something out of our will to nothingness. In the grey month of November, there is a gathering into glory of all the scattered leaves of our humanity.
But who can count the leaves? Who can count the dead? “I beheld a multitude which no man could number,” St. John tells us in his Revelation. A multitude, too, which no man could name, we might add. And yet, as we are reminded in the Burial Office, again quoting from John in his Revelation, “I heard a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write, From henceforth blessed are the dead which die in the Lord: Even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labours.” Their names are written in the book of life, the book, we might say, of the Communion of Saints.
The Feast of All Saints gathers into itself all that belongs to all our remembering. And the gathering is like the gathering together “into one volume” of the scattered leaves of Sybil’s oracles, as the poet, Dante, puts it. The gathering has to do with our remembering, our remembering especially in the friendship of God for us in Jesus Christ.
To remember the sacrifices of those who gave their lives is to be reminded that there are things worth dying for. It is to remember that we are essentially spiritual creatures, creatures who bear the image of God in ourselves, and, even more, the image of Christ through our baptism, creatures who know and love and whose knowing and loving ultimately belong to our life with God in Christ. “Whose is this image and superscription?” as we heard in this morning’s Gospel. It is the question that must be asked about ourselves: ‘whose image are we?’
Remembering is the profound and necessary counter to the culture of nihilism which in its various forms asserts that there is really nothing worth dying for because there is really nothing worth living for. The intention to remember is the defining feature of our Remembrance Day observances.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.
We remember them and in so doing we honour the moral and spiritual freedoms which dignify human lives. We are reminded of our spiritual identity and life in Christ. The sacrifices that we remember are placed with the sacrifice of Christ.
Let this be written down, this (for there can be no greater remembering):
Fr. David Curry
Choral Evensong
St. George’s, Halifax
November 7th, 2010
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2010/11/08/sermon-for-remembrance-sunday-choral-evensong/
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