Remembrance

Remembrance Sunday

“Do this in remembrance of me.”
There are lots of little deaths along our individual roads to death. And eventually the weight of them simply becomes too much and, sometimes with relief, we slip through death to a deathless life.

The commonest human experience is the little death of parting: of children leaving parents until, we hope in the fullness of years, they leave us.

The parting of friends and lovers, although it leaves us later more deeply alive, at the time feels like death.

And all the movings on: the leaving of a home, a church, where we have been happy; the forsaking of patterns that have sustained us; the passing of childhood; the loss of youth; the realisations that dreams will never be fulfilled: a thousand little wounds of death, intimations of mortality.

A Solemn Requiem reminds us of the Christian understanding of the nature of things. That it is only through death that we can enter more profoundly into life.

TS Eliot’s Magi are haunted by these little deaths which leave them longing for the death of death. His poem, The Journey of the Magi ends:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

What makes all these little deaths so enriching to our ongoing life? Why, in the words of our Lord, must we lose our life if we are to save it?

Well part of the answer is bound up in memory.

Memory is a strange thing. It creates the substance of our being. There can be no ‘What I Am’ without the memory of ‘What I have been.’

It is the foundation of all our relationships. Shared history. Shared memories. How often in our conversations with friends do we start a sentence with ‘Do you remember?’

We always remember, but less frequently do we speak of, the little deaths in our own lives and those of our friends. But they are implicit to the depth of our relationships.

It is only wounded healers that can heal. It is only those who have suffered little deaths who bring comfort.

In Oscar Wilde’s children’s parable, The Selfish Giant, the Christchild welcomes the reformed Giant through the gates of death and into paradise by holding out his little scarred hands: ‘the wounds of love’, he says. There is memory in the Godhead.

So memory plays a vital part in making our little deaths an opportunity for life and growth.

The short-term memory is the most vital and sometimes the most fragile. Sentences begun but unended with ‘what was I saying?’

And music has no beauty without the memory of what was. (In case our memories should fail. Mozart often reminds us of what was…) The resolution of the chord or the conclusion of the book is meaningless without the retention in your memory of what has gone before.

I was looking through some old family photos while trying to unpack yesterday. And there is a 17 year old me, in braided jacket with a school prefect’s badge. But how is that me? I’m a stranger to myself. Every cell in my body has changed many times since then and half my brain cells have already died - and the other two are feeling distinctly queasy.

The Bible and the Church have always placed a strong emphasis on the integration of our memory - commonly owned history - into the present reality. Indeed, there can be no present reality without a sense of what was. The postmodern assertion that yesterday is another country, is a denial of the Christian view of personhood and Heilsgeschichte - Salvation History.

These vestments, the liturgy, the art and symbols of recent and long past centuries, the blood red poppies - these all give greater reality to the now.

I remember going to a service in Los Angeles to hear a famous housechurch founder, John Wimber, preach. There were a couple of thousand people on folding chairs in a converted warehouse - an orderly Stansted airport on a busy day. There were no Christian symbols in the building. No vestments but designer jumpers. The lively songs had all been written in the previous months. There was no liturgy but warm and friendly west-coast-speak. Theologically there was nothing outrageous. But the whole thing was somehow insubstantial. It was not rooted in remembrance. A change of social climate and it would evaporate like the morning dew.

Why has Remembrance Day become arguably of greater significance over recent years than, say, in the 60s and 70s? Many of us now have no direct memories of great wars, yet the act of remembrance - the liturgy of the Cenotaph, the poppies, the veterans, the engraved walls, the war poems - all these give substance to the reality of the war dead, and a poignancy to the new wars and the war dead who trickle through our TVs day by day.

I was at the Menin Gate in Ypres last month and joined with hundreds of others for the nightly ceremony of prayers and Last Post. There are hundreds every night. (http://au.geocities.com/fortysecondbattalion/level2/memorial/01-menin.htm ) By usage, and because for most of us they are removed from any personal experience of war, these ceremonies enshrine a reality that we dare not forget. They help to give expression to our inner longings for peace and a better society; for an end to violence and hatred. They are a shared history which helps to shape the present.

And of course none of us have direct and experiential memories of the man Christ Jesus; who lived and died and rose again these two millennia past - 50 generations ago. Yet our remembrancing deeply affects our present and future.

Catherine Pickstock at Cambridge wrote a startling but difficult book five years ago entitled After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. (Gordon Dulieu wrote a very good appraisal of it in a recent edition of our magazine Salve.) The book is an attack on the floating, postmodern self, detached from history and memory. It is based on a detailed reading of Phaedrus and the medieval Roman Rite of the Mass. Pickstock wrote:

The worshipper’s forward journey is precisely its journey towards memory: the occasion of our meeting God is our memory of him. (p.231)

And nowhere is that more clearly seen than in these Holy Mysteries: these daily little deaths that incorporate us with the One Great Death.

’Do this in remembrance of me.’

Here is Catherine Pickstock again:

Thus, as regards the Eucharist which realizes the maximum possibility of mystery, sacrality, and signification, human rationality becomes less an attempt to make logically consistent, and more a recognition of an intimation of secret intelligibility, or luminous invitation, stimulating a contact of desire, will, and memory.

At the Mass, every Sunday is Remembrance Sunday.

So, a deep understanding, a deep sense of who we are; what we are doing on this war-riven planet; why our relationships have any value; how the suffering and death of God in Christ nearly two thousand years ago affects us today; the conviction that the Risen Lord is with us now, and that we will be with him and all those who have gone before, forever, and our own little daily deaths…

…these are all bound up in the profound utterance of our Lord which we and the church universal repeat in every hour, of every day, of every century:

’Do this in remembrance of me’