by CCW | 14 November 2010 15:00
They are, perhaps, familiar words. They adorn many an empty tomb, a cenotaph, around which we gather on Remembrance Day just past. But what do we remember and how?
Remembrance Day 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 our common vocation to holiness. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our political and social freedoms .
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. 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. 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 and all our griefs. We will be remembering them in the greater sacrifice of Christ for the whole world, a remembering that enters in to all we do in our liturgy.
What we are remembering are the sacrifices for the rational freedoms of our political and social life, to be sure. But what underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns thousands of cenotaphs throughout the world. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
We connect our remembrance of them with the remembrance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. We remember them in Christ, remembering them in the eternal knowing of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Our remembrance is shaped by the cross, by the prayer of forgiveness of the Son to the Father for us all and, precisely, in the awareness of our limitations and our sinfulness. It 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 regards 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.
To remember the sacrifices of those who gave their lives and, more importantly, to remember the sacrifice of Christ to which theirs is joined, 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 in God in Christ.
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. There can be no greater remembering.
Fr. David Curry
AMD, November 14th, 2010
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