Year: 2021

They desire a better country

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.

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The Grey Month of our Remembering

“Golden October declin[es] into sombre November”, T.S. Eliot suggests in ‘Murder in the Cathedral’. Yet the Beatitudes of the Gospel of All Saints’ Day open us out to a profound form of thinking about the radical nature of human freedom and human nature. It is central to the Christian idea of the Communion of Saints which embraces the whole of humanity in the vision of its unity and perfection, a vision which is universal. “The great multitude whom no one could number” are those “who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb”, an image of redemption that challenges and counters the various dystopias of our times.

The point is fairly simple: we are not defined simply by the things that happen to us in the ups and downs of human life, let alone the fickleness and chaos of human experience and the human heart. This is nothing new, of course, but how we think and face them is another matter. That is where the Beatitudes come so strongly to the fore. It is not just that they turn the world upon its head, which they do, but that they speak to the more radical idea of the perfection and redemption of our desires. In that sense, it is about a sense of homecoming, a sense of belonging that recalls us to who we are. The Greek word for truth is aletheia which literally means an unforgetting, in short, a remembering, albeit one which happens in and through the awareness of our forgetting. We forget who we are in the sight of God and that carries over into our forgetting of the nature of our companionship and communion with one another.

All Saints in both its sacred and secular forms is about a kind of homecoming of the spirit in which we rediscover the necessity and the significance of our commitments to one another. It is really all about the realization that we are part of a community that is far greater than we are. It is really all about the realization that we are more though not less than our bodies and worldly experiences. To recall who we are in the sight of God is to grasp the principle of freedom and purpose in our lives as agents, but only within the greater agency of God.

For that is the point about All Saints and All Souls. We are part of a community far greater than ourselves, a company no one could number, as John the Divine puts it in his marvelous vision of what we seek and to which we belong. Learning to act out of the vision of the Communion of Saints means being attentive to the primacy of the ethical, to the idea of the Good and the struggle to let that live and move in us. One of the great lessons of the Beatitudes has to do with the strength of inwardness that they highlight over and against outward things, the things that belong to circumstance, the things that happen to us. The Beatitudes highlight the fact that these spiritual qualities of soul are what define us rather than the events of our world and day.

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