Year: 2010

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”

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.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

What’s this? Can it be that we are defined and governed by money? Does everything come down to money? “Money makes the world go round, of that we all are sure,” as the chorus sings in Cabaret. Is the “cabaret of life, old chum,” simply the cash nexus as Thomas Carlyle first suggested and Karl Marx famously claimed? And if so, what does that make us?

Money, it is proverbially and scripturally said, is “the root of all evil.” Why? Because money is power. The misuse of money is the abuse of power. Money is twisted around from being a medium of exchange to becoming a form of domination and control. There is, at once, the use of money to dominate and manipulate others; but there is, as well, the fact that money comes to dominate us.

It causes us to forget who we are. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in our own world and day. Whether we are rich or poor, employed or unemployed, pensioned or unpensioned, we are constantly beseiged by images that persuade us that we are essentially economic beings, that our worth and the meaning of our lives is to be measured materially and financially. This is not only destructive of human personality and the human community but also of the forms of honest and meaningful exchange so necessary to the welfare of souls and communities. Their end, our end, “is destruction, whose god is their belly.”

Money comes to possess us because we allow it to define the way in which we live out our lives. Means become ends which they cannot be. Economic ends must always fail us for the simple reason that our lives and the worth of our lives cannot be reduced to an economic quantity. When we are defined economically, then, we are but “bellies,” as it were, mere consumers, and, no doubt, “bellyachers” too! We are seduced into thinking that everything, including God and religion, must be a consumer product, a marketable commodity. The evil of money lies precisely in making us forget who we are.

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“Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy”

The leaves are scattered on the wind and the rain. The splendor of yesterday’s golden glory lies in scattered heaps. And, yet, in the soft dying of nature’s year, when the colours of blazing reds, bright yellows and vibrant oranges have been dimmed to burnished gold, there is a gathering; a gathering into glory far greater than any spectacle of nature.

There is a gathering of the scattered leaves of our humanity, and 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, with the quality of our recollection. There is a gathering of scattered minds into unity and order, a unity and order which signals the redemption of our humanity in the truth of its diversity. The Feast of All Saints is the great autumnal festival of spiritual life, the great celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity.

All Saints recalls us to the spiritual community to which we belong. It signals the vocation of our humanity, both individually and collectively considered. We are called to holiness even in the face of our sinfulness.

The text which is central to this recollective gathering is at once provocative and paradoxical. It is The Beatitudes, the blessednesses, from The Sermon on the Mount. They have, it seems, an inexhaustible content that challenges us because of the quality of uncompromising objectivity.

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