by CCW | 10 November 2021 16:00
The sacred remembering of All Saints and All Souls carries over into the secular observances of Remembrance Day. Students of the School have already been a part of the national programme of The Eleven Days of Remembrance. In Chapel this week, readings from John’s Gospel and from the Letter to the Hebrews bid us reflect more deeply upon the nature of our commitments and sacrifices for one another.
“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.” A powerful phrase, it adorns a thousand cenotaphs across the world. “They desire a better country” complements it. It is the motto for the Order of Canada, just one example of the obvious, namely, the way in which Scripture informs culture and shapes the secular imaginary. It suggests the sense of the incompleteness of our humanity in itself and the need for an openness to what perfects and completes our humanity.
Friendship is a most powerful concept and idea and it may seem paradoxical to invoke the concept of friendship in the context of Remembrance Day. Yet it belongs very much to the experience of war in the way of being together and supporting one another. One of the deep pains and sorrows of war veterans is the loss of comrades, those with whom they fought and who died while they survived. They remember their friends with a special intensity and sometimes with a sense of guilt. They survived while others didn’t.
Friendship is a long standing theme in the literary and philosophical traditions. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is the friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu that contributes to the making of Gilgamesh as a hero, changing him from being a bad king, exploiting his people for his own interest, by making him aware of others. Enkidu is created to be his equal, his second self, a friend. The profound significance of this most ancient story is that through friendship we learn about the other in terms of respect, not dominance. And in that epic, Gilgamesh is profoundly moved by the death of his friend, Enkidu. It launches him upon the greatest journey, the quest for wisdom, for understanding and meaning. He confronts his own mortality in the death of Enkidu.
It marks the beginning of a long tradition about the power and nature of friendship as essential to what it means to be human. In the Jewish Scriptures, there is the tremendous story of the friendship of David and Jonathan. In the Iliad, there is the friendship of Achilleus and Patroclus, and so on. Philosophically, there is the idea of our friendship with the Good in our intellectual strivings captured in the ethical treatises of Plato and Aristotle, of Cicero and Aelred of Rievaulx, to name but a few. Aelred in the early 12th century goes so far as to articulate the radical idea that “God is friendship”, an remarkable adaptation of the idea that “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”, abiding in friendship and love. The reading from John’s Gospel is actually about our incorporation into the divine love which shapes our human loves, our friendship with one another through the divine friendship.
These ideas are picked up in the All Saints’ theme of the Communion of Saints, of our being part of a community which is greater than us, a spiritual and intellectual fellowship.
The Letter to the Hebrews speaks about those who have gone before us in faith. Faith in what? In something more and better. A sense of longing and a desire for “a better country, that is, an heavenly”. Something of that sensibility underlies the various motivations that led people to go off to far away places in the great, disturbing, and defining conflicts of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the effects of which remain with us in the confusions and uncertainties of the twenty-first century. They were willing to die for what they thought were the things worth living for.
Friendship in its truth is not about using one another for our own advantage but about a commitment to the truth and good of one another. Friends have your back. Friends seek what is best for you. Friends correct and encourage one another. In that sense it is not accidental that friendship is an essential aspect of our remembering. We are remembering that we are part of a much larger company of persons who sought a better country and whose sacrifice has in some way or another defined our world. To remember their sacrifice is to be recalled to the nature of the communities, cultures, and world in which we live. It is not about glorifying war; it is about honouring friendship and sacrifice.
Students and faculty sit in Chapel in pews where many have sat before them who then got up and went off to war. Some did not come back. On Remembrance Day we endeavour to remember them by name. In a way, they are complete strangers to us, but in another way they are part of us, part of the community of learning of which we are all a part. To honour their sacrifice is to remember that we too are part of something which is greater than ourselves. As Nichola Goddard, the first female combatant in Canada who lost her life in Afghanistan, reminds us, “it is humbling to know that you are part of something greater than yourself.”
Perhaps reflecting upon friendship and sacrifice will help to make us better people. At the very least, it should challenge how we think and act towards and with one another. Remembering in that sense belongs to our quest for truth. The Greek word is aletheia, which means, literally, an unforgetting. Remembering is an essential part of the truth of our humanity.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English & ToK teacher,
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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