Remembering
A SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
One of the roles of the religious community is to help its members make sense of the world around, and to continue to hold up the values that are central to that religious community’s identity. Additionally, it is part of the role of a religious community to protect and honour that which is likely to be trampled by other forces in the world that care little for the vulnerable and the holy. The forces of greed and expediency, for example, that knock down values such as fairness and compassion. The speed of the world, too, limits what we hear to sound bites of a few words, and the language is well chosen to either soothe or enrage us, and we sometimes – maybe often – dance to a tune called by media forces that care less for truth than for what earns them the money.
But this sort of community seeks – or should seek – to help its members to make sense of the world, not from the values of the marketplace and the media, but from those ideas and practices that lift up – dare I say – more eternal values.
And here we’ve come round again to Remembrance Day, when we have to make sense of the truth that there are men and women that we should honour for their sacrifice, for what they did and what they gave. We have to call to mind those men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice that soldiers give: their lives. Some died on the battlefield, their lives expiring, some died in smaller ways, when the terror and fear of war killed off a small piece of their hearts, when they got lost trying to find their way back home.
There’s a stunning scene in the film ‘Saving Private Ryan’ that illumines what happens to soldiers sometimes. The small band of men have been sent to the frontlines of the fighting that followed D-Day. Private Ryan’s brothers have all been killed, and the command decides that it is too great a loss for that family – and the nation, I suppose – to have another loss. Whilst travelling through hostile territory, the band of men come upon some German soldiers dug into a small rise in the land, armed with a machine gun. In the struggle to overcome them, one or two of the US soldiers are killed. They take the Germans into custody, and one of the men suggests that they enact their own justice and simply shoot them.
The captain who is leading them, played by Tom Hanks, won’t allow it. He tells them that the Germans are prisoners of war and that there is a protocol to be followed, and that the prisoners are to be treated according to that protocol. The men want blood. It’s the end of the war and they are tired and want revenge. Captain Miller tells them that he cannot do it and cannot allow it. Because they’re going to go home, he says, and they need to be able to recognise themselves when they do. They need to live in the war in such a way that they have not betrayed what they hold dear. He wants them to go home whole men. And he wants to go home whole, too, as whole as one can after such a time.
We remember them today. Those who lost their lives, who died, or who lost themselves as they tried to make it through.
I invite you to take a moment to think of the names of those who you know who are honoured today: those who died on battlefields, those who carried the scars of war, those whose lives were changed forever by what happened to them.
I want to lift up, too, the recent deaths in the current war that this country is fighting. It is so easy to forget that there is a war going on, and that there are soldiers in harm’s way. Over the 9 years that the United Kingdom has been engaged in the war in Afghanistan, 341 soldiers have died in combat or from wounds sustained in combat. It seems a small number for that length of time. Since the beginning of September of this year, 10 have died in combat, and I spent some time reading about them, looking at their faces, wondering about the holes in families, children who have lost a father, parents who mourn their son. Their names are mostly commonplace: William, Joseph, Andrew – there were three, Darren, Matthew, David, Peter. An uncommon name was a Gurka, Suraj. Killed in ones and twos from explosions and small arms fire, each was said to have died doing what he thought was right, doing the work that he loved. They left behind children and parents and wives and fiancees. They left behind friends and football matches yet unplayed. Five followed their fathers into the service – two of them serving in the same company that their fathers had served.
One – Darren Deady – was fatally wounded in Afghanistan, but survived long enough to return to England, to a hospital near his family. In their statement after he had died, his family recounted an exchange between the 22 year old and a younger brother:
His little brother once turned round to him and asked him, 'Why do you fight?'
Darren simply replied, 'To make a difference'.
The statement concluded:
There is only one thing left to say now - please don't forget him.
At 22, he Darren wasn’t the youngest. That was Andrew at age 20. And William at 39 was the oldest to die in the last few months.
We are bid to remember them. As ever, the reason for remembering is to ensure that what they gave isn’t for naught. We remember so that what they gave will have meaning. As MacLeish suggests, the young dead soldiers say to us across the years:
Our deaths are not ours: they are yours, they will mean what you make them.
Yet those few deaths at such a distance can be forgotten, lost in the ongoing shuffle of our lives, and especially when the war they wage on our behalf has come under such scrutiny, and is surrounded by so many questions. And more often than not, it’s easier to just allow that war be a vague rumble under the level of our conscious noticing.
But this day, celebrated in this place, asks us to remember. And to remember means two things. It means firstly that we feel the grief of the loss.
In all honesty, I don’t want to know about those deaths, to see those young faces, to see the father who is nearly 40 whose children will find their way without him. But I know I am served by opening my heart each time, and saying a word of prayer or remembrance. One of the tribes of American Indians talk about the need for us to cultivate a ‘moist heart’, and I find that practice is worth paying attention to. Remembering the dead, and especially those who have died on our behalf, is a step in that practice. A moist heart is one which is has been watered by tears, which is open to sorrow, a heart which feels. Too often we become numbed by all that is around us: the tasks and duties, projects and plans, or perhaps we find other ways, the hypnosis of the television or the computer, the comforting blur of a few drinks. To be authentically alive is to cultivate that moist heart, and to feel the sorrows that live in this world along with us.
As important, though, it means that we don’t allow it to become all of our remembrance.
My friend Davidson Loehr has written movingly about his experiences in Vietnam. A soldier, but assigned to take pictures of the war rather than to engage it with weapons, he had the opportunity to see some of what occurred through, if you will, a different lens. He writes:
I became part of that Death through a mistake and a coincidence. It's a simple story but a useful metaphor. I learned one day – it was 1967 in Vietnam – that one of our artillery batteries had missed its target by about three miles: someone transposed a couple of map coordinates. Instead, our artillery shells had hit a hamlet, a small village. It wasn't dramatic news: wars have as many mistakes as civilian operations, though with more blood. I had forgotten all about it until, two months later, we drove through that hamlet on the way to another combat operation. Several houses had been destroyed, a few trees shredded. Then we drove past a thatched roof home that had taken a pretty direct hit. Out in the yard were a mother and her two young children. Her daughter was blind, her son had lost most of his left arm. The three of them were playing: laughing, dancing and playing, oblivious to our convoy of killing machines. Here was a small, local triumph of life over death. The life that came through them was more powerful than the death that came through us. The woman and her children were embodiments of life's exuberance and hope. We – our soldiers, our artillery, our Army, our country – had become Death, destroyer of worlds. Yet this young mother and her two children laughed, danced and played as though our killing and maiming could not, in the long run, win.
This is the precious heart of our lives that must not be lost in the midst of remembering the terror and horror and loss and grief of war. It is engaged – when it is done right and well – in service of what is common and dear, of the eucharist of the ordinary, as John O’Donohue suggests. It is engaged so that we can enjoy a cup of tea in the sunshine of our gardens in the summer and to make possible the freedom to speak our minds, and the right to come together to worship as we wish. And it is for this – the possibility of laughter and dancing and play, of life’s irrepressible force – that those lives were given, were taken, were lost.
If we pay attention – and sometimes we do – we know that we ought not lose a moment of this gift of breath and life that we enjoy.
We know – if we pay attention, and we sometimes do – that each day comes to us as a gift, and we don’t know when it shall be taken from us.
We know – if we pay attention and sometimes we do – that lives have been paid for us to be, to live as we do.
We know – if we pay attention and sometimes we do – that it is then given to us to live with depth and honesty, and to live with gusto, and appreciation.
This is a truth of our lives that we will only do it in bits and pieces, but for this day, and in these days to come, may it be with a greater sense of what our lives mean and remembering the sacrifices given.
We remember. And we live.
Amen.