Downham Market Remembrance Service, 2011 - Sermon by the Bishop of Ely
Bishop Stephen Conway
A friend of mine took a holiday on the Island of Skyros and there thought that a young man was waving at her. She thought that a holiday romance might be blossoming and she waved back. As she moved closer in a demure fashion, she had a shock. She had been waving at a statue. The figure was of Rupert Brooke, the young poet who died on his way to the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. She kept her good name, but acquired a red face. Because he died, it is alleged, Brooke’s poetry never progressed to concentrate on the horrors of war like Wilfred Owen. Newly discovered poems of Siegfried Sassoon, who did come to be very critical of the war, illustrate that the picture is more complicated. We tend to assume that the horrors contemplated by the poets reflected how most people felt about the First World War as it was going on. It is probable, however, that most people felt that it was a necessary job to be done, in spite of the cost. I can only imagine what it has been like for the majority of people in Libya. I expect that they will say that the cost has been worth it; but the uncertainty remains.
I say that I can only imagine because it is very difficult to think ourselves into any war in which we have not been personally affected. Boys I taught were serving officers in both Gulf Wars. As a bishop in Wiltshire, I was very conscious of men going off on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from our many army bases. I led a poignant Fathers’ Day service at one camp where no fathers were present because they were all away. I worked with two veterans of peace-keeping in Bosnia. I preached on Remembrance Sunday in Wootton Bassett and attended a couple of repatriations.
All of these instances feed into the most intimate experience which was being drawn into my grandfather’s experience of the Second World War, beginning with his escape from Dunkirk and his later experience of the Normandy Landings in 1944. These conversations were always when my grandmother was in bed, because talk of the War immediately upset her as she still wept for her favourite brother who had been killed in the Siege of Malta. What startled me about Grandpa’s memories is that he spoke about never feeling so alive, never feeling closer to his friends and never being closer to death.
He was catapulted from a fairly humdrum existence into an army under fire and in retreat. He and his mates were heading for the coast but had no idea how they would get home. He had never known fear like it. He was driving in a supply convoy which was regularly being targeted by enemy fighters. But if he was afraid, he was also exhilarated. Somehow, the world seemed to be in sharper focus, life was sweet to the taste and every second counted. His senses and reflexes were never more alert, so that he could get through, swim to a boat and get home to fight another day. He never thought he would feel more alive than that.
Yet in 1946 he was de-mobbed and came home to a wife and children whom he had seen briefly twice in six years. It was awkward and overwhelming all at once. Although he could not put it into words until years afterwards, he knew then that his acute sense of being alive under fire was nothing compared to the freedom to be tender and loving again, the freedom to give up hating the enemy, the freedom to be part of the re-building of a more compassionate and fair society. He had gone through the War without much time for church parade, but on his first night home he knelt by the bed and thanked God for all that he had come home to. And, as our reading from Thessalonians reminds us, he felt at one with his mates who had died, confident that God would honour their sacrifice.
Not all of Grandpa’s comrades came home. For him, as for many, after the War death was still close in remembrance of those who had died. All those years later when he spoke late at night with me, he could still picture the body of a particular chum. The grief and waste and guilt of survival were very real. The courage and heroism and struggle for justice we celebrate today does not disguise the pity and waste of war – the waste of young lives, the waste of devastated families and bombed cities. I have visited war cemeteries in different parts of Europe and have seen forests of crosses which should have been the rich harvest of lives lived in peace.
As Christians, we are never more alive than when we live thankfully to God. As we thank God for those who have given their lives for this country and for world peace during the last hundred years or so, we can only justify the wars in which our young people are still fighting if we are prepared to embrace the good which God brings out of their suffering and sacrifice. This is the issue for our involvement in Afghanistan now: the loss of limbs and lives by allied troops has to bear fruit in a more just and compassionate country in which the gun is not the final answer and children – girls as well as boys – are educated and given a new chance for a positive future. Only if we embrace the freedom to love and build anew – not only for ourselves but for our erstwhile enemies – do we honour the dead and glorify God.
Grandpa went through the War with a few close pals from his unit. Their friendship remained special because they had been through so much together which was too terrible to describe adequately when they came home. It was special because they came home to women who had kept families together, cared for neighbours and comforted the bereaved. After the War, they lamented that much of this spirit seemed to disappear. If there is truth in this, then we need to ask ourselves why it is that people rise to the challenge of war which is evil and not to the challenge of peace which is good. Working to establish God’s peace requires just as much courage and cooperation as fighting a battle. In 1946, Grandpa was full of faith in a new society of tolerance and justice and some of his faith bore fruit. Nonetheless, Christians recognise all the sin and human failure which holds us back from trusting each other and looking beyond our selfish interests. We know that the route to real progress is to put our trust in God’s promises. Abraham was an old man without children and the future was not promising at all. But God befriended him and told him to have faith: he would be the father of many nations. There could be no more special friend than God to anyone dying on a battlefield or hit by a roadside bomb, no better friend than God to the young soldier under fire, to the soldier who tends the wounds of the enemy, or to the child who has been orphaned. The same God offers friendship to us in Jesus Christ. He has faith in us to build that future of friendship and cooperation in Downham Market and across this region and our world.
On Friday I made a visit to Marshalls in Cambridge and saw some of the wonderful engineering which delivers sophisticated mobile units to operational areas to be hospitals, kitchens and a whole range of services not only to troops but to local people. Having ridden in one, it was great to see the enduring Hercules transport, beloved of many air forces, and I gave thanks to God for all the wonderful medical personnel of the RAF using the Hercules to bring seriously wounded soldiers back to the UK for life-saving treatment. Here is the paradox of war: we fight ultimately to save life and witness in time of strife both the worst and the best of humanity. Let us commit ourselves to revealing the best in our own lives.
There is another paradox, too. We tend to think that Remembrance Day services are for older people and their memories. But I have usually calculated that through the turnout of uniformed organisations and grieving families living with the loss of brothers and sisters and parents right now, most of whom are themselves under thirty, makes Remembrance-tide more about the young than about anybody, even if the young we remember were nineteen or twenty when they died ninety-seven years ago at the beginning of the First World War. They grow not old as those who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them or the years condemn. At the Remembrance service I led at what is now Royal Wootton Bassett, I put a little Beaver Cub on my shoulders to remind us that the experience of the repatriations was overwhelmingly of the loss of the young and how much we all stand on their shoulders so that we can see the world with new clarity and fresh urgency to build as kingdom of faith and hope and love, and the greatest of these is love.
Amen.
Bishop Stephen