“Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”
The significance of this time of remembrance should not be lost on any of us. That it gets harder and harder to remember each year because there are fewer and fewer veterans only heightens the necessity of our remembering.
We may name those who gave their lives, to be sure, but we can’t really say that we know them in any kind of personal way. Few can really remember anyone who died in the First World War. Our remembering has less to do with our personal knowledge and more to do with what they died for. Only so can we enter into the meaning of their sacrifice.
Remembrance Day is really a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ Day is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all those who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation in the Communion of Saints. The intention of Remembrance Day is to remember all who died for the sake of our political freedoms and life. We remember them to God for without that there is no real remembrance.
To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our civil remembrances are not religious. They are and profoundly so. Rather it is to remind us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember is to honour what they fought and died for in faraway places and in scenes of absolute horror. We meet at empty tombs – cenotaphs – because their bodies are not here. That alone should remind us 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. Nowhere are we reminded more strongly of the great cost of “render[ing] unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” than on Remembrance Day. But, mercifully, Paul reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven;” that is, if we render “unto God the things that are God’s.”
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 and beyond, 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.
What we are remembering is the sacrifice which thousands of thousands made for the rational freedoms of our political and social life. What underlies that remembrance is something profoundly spiritual. It is, perhaps, best captured in the scriptural phrase which adorns a thousand 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. Our remembrance is shaped by the cross, by the prayer of forgiveness of the Son to the Father for us and in the awareness of our sins and failings. To do so heightens the necessity of our remembering and to ask ourselves, yet again, as ever we must, whether we are worthy of their sacrifice.
Vaclav Havel, an intellectual, poet and playwright, who at the end of the cold war found himself at the head of Czechoslovakia and, subsequently, President of the Czech Republic, noted that “we live in a contaminated moral environment” because, as he put it, “we learned not to believe in anything.” He wasn’t just talking about conditions in Eastern Europe. His was a voice calling for a renewed “awareness of the transcendental,” for an awareness of God without which we end up “ignor[ing] one another, car[ing] only for ourselves.” Without that awareness of God “concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, and forgiveness” become empty and shallow; they lose “their depth and dimension.” His words speak to us about what is fundamental to our humanity.
Only through the genuine integrity of the spiritual traditions of our humanity can we learn to be respectful towards one another. Is this not the proper challenge of the Church: to recover what belongs to the spiritual integrity of our traditions and teachings through which we can legitimately respect and engage one another and the seething world of suffering humanity? There has to be a constant renewing of ourselves upon the foundations of the Faith in the ways in which they have been delivered to us. Havel quotes a Czech poet, Vladimir Holan: “without genuine transcendence, no construction shall ever reach completion.”
Our remembrance is no remembrance without our awareness of God. It humbles us before God and catapults us into the mercy of God. Because of the connection to the sacrifice of Christ we are reminded that there are things worth dying for. It is to remember that we are essentially spiritual creatures, creatures whose knowing and loving ultimately belong to our life in God, to his eternal knowing and loving of us. It is the great and necessary counter to the culture of death: the culture of narcissism and nihilism; the culture of consumerism and economic determinism; things which are not worth dying for because they are not worth living for. Instead, we are reminded of the moral and spiritual freedoms which properly dignify human lives. Their sacrifice reminds us of our spiritual nature, and, ultimately, of our spiritual identity in Christ.
“Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church,
Sunday, November 11th, 2012
9:00am