Reflections for King’s-Edgehill School Cadet Church Parade, 2017
KES Cadet Church Parade – Friday, May 19th, 2017
Reflections: “Fear in a Handful of Dust”
1.
T.S. Eliot’s classic poem The Waste Land written in 1922 begins with a section entitled The Burial of the Dead. It includes a particularly poignant image of the disorders and confusions that have largely defined the last one hundred years, from 1917 to 2017. It is, we might say, the long and disturbing twentieth century, a time of broken images in a broken and disordered world.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
2.
From 1917 to 2017 we contemplate a relentless litany of death and destruction almost beyond calculation and certainly without precedent: the devastations of the First World War and the Second World War, the horrendous parade of deaths under the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, & Mao, the bombing of Dresden and the obliteration of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by democratic regimes, the slaughter in Rwanda, the Srebenica massacre, the ravages of civil war in Syria, the famine in the Sudan, and so on and so on. It is hardly a complete list of the horrors of a century and certainly not a pretty picture. It is the picture of our humanity in destructive disarray.
3.
“How long” was the refrain “pinched from Psalm 6” and shouted out by hundreds of people in the closing song ’40’ at U2 concerts. “How long (to sing this song).” As Bono reflects, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling at the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long…hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious, hell-bent adolescence has been discarded?