Grief and Hope
9 November 2008
“So abominable was the stench of the thousands of dead of both sides on the Gallipoli peninsula that an eight-hour armistice was agreed on 24 May 1915 while bodies were collected for burial. Staff Officers of the two armies talked as they watched the macabre operation. A Turkish Captain said to a British officer: ‘At this spectacle even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep.’ The truce over, the two armies returned to the business of killing each other.”
“The business of killing each other” has occupied too much of human history. We are met here this morning in this act of piety and national remembrance, in penitence and contrition to make some atonement, insofar as it lies in our power, for man’s failings on such a persistent, tragic and epic scale. We are also come to pray for the Fallen, that vast number of human individuals, of individual human souls, who were caught up in the unimaginable horror and died in battle and war; that flawed human enterprise that has called forth conspicuous examples of bestial wickedness and depravity, but also shown acts of super-human virtue, courage and grace. “The story of war cannot be told too often if it causes us to cherish those whom it destroyed.”
And, by and large, that courage and audacious valour was shown by the young. On the first Sunday of the academic year in 1914 Darwell Stone may have faced a congregation in this newly-built chapel many of whom would be dead within a few years, if not a few weeks, and are now commemorated on the walls of their college chapels. Some 15,000 members of the University fought in that War, of whom some 2,700 were killed, some 18% a higher proportion than all Allied military deaths, which stood at 12% of those who fought. Some colleges were particularly hard hit: Corpus Christi College saw 350 of its members fight in the War of whom a quarter perished. Harold Macmillan, later Prime Minister and Chancellor of this University, a Balliol man and a server at this House may have been present in this Chapel on that day. He was wounded three times during the War and he did not return to complete his degree. “I could not face it,” he said, “To me it was a city of ghosts.” On the equivalent Sunday in 1939 it fell to Freddy Hood to preach to a similar congregation while Tom Parker sang the High Mass. And now members of the present generation come to remember and to commemorate their predecessors in the societies into which they have entered. In discussions of the liturgy of the Church we hear much, perhaps too much, about the hermeneutics of continuity, but it is this kind of continuity, the continuity of remembrance and commemoration, the continuity of the memory of a society and of a community and of a nation that speaks most tellingly of humanity’s nature and destiny, of what it is to be fully human and engaged with humanity.
This remembrance of the past brought into the present, this anamnesis, is at the heart of this act of piety in which we are engaged this morning. Every time the Holy Mass is celebrated we are remembering. We are obeying the command of Christ, “Do this in memory of me.” But no Mass is only a memory, something far distant and remote from present realities. This is not a memorial fashioned in unyielding stone upon which are incised Christ’s words: this is not a memorial which represents something over and done with: this is a memorial that re-presents, that brings into the present, that makes present through sacramental signs the one perfect sacrifice of the Cross, present in the Sacrament of the altar.
We speak naturally and instinctively of the sacrifice of the Fallen and their sacrifice was real and bloody and it is to take nothing whatever away from the giving up their lives that others might live, to assert, as we are bound to assert, that the only perfect, entirely disinterested sacrifice, the one spotlessly innocent sacrifice is that suffered by Our Lord stretched out on the wood of the Cross. In that immaculate self-giving he gave a total and unqualified offering of himself in perfect love as the Divine Victim for us and for our salvation. There lies the reason that we are able to do this that we do this morning, plead the sacrifice of Christ’s perfect self-immolation for all those whom we remember, for all the Fallen. This is our duty and service to honour their duty and service. This is our duty and privilege, to do for them the best that humankind can do and offer by pleading on their behalf the one true sacrifice; the sacrifice that alone is effectual because he who offers it is divine. We plead it because they were living souls and not the impersonal stuff of history. We plead it because they are our brethren united with us in baptism with Christ. We plead it because they are our benefactors, men and women into whose labours we have entered, who lived and suffered for the cause that is our cause too and to whose labours we owe the privileges that we possess today and which too many of them in their life times did not possess; and not least because we believe, as the Church has taught, that the greater benefit will accrue to the souls of those for whom we make our solemn petitions in the presence of the holy and the awe-ful sacrifice.
In the pleading of the sacrifice, we are not blind to the reality that our hands are not free from tarnish. It would be a perverse reading of history, either then or now with the inestimable benefit of hindsight, not to see that the we and our allies, in both World Wars, in other earlier conflicts and in subsequent conflicts, and in present conflicts made blunders, including moral blunders, while we were and are attempting to fight for a set of principles and political ideals which included freedom and justice. That is why we come to this Requiem Mass as to every Mass in penitence and contrition. Our remembrance of the past at the altar acts also as a warning as we bring Christ’s lacerating sacrifice to mind, and realise that our salvation and redemption were assured by an act of love overcoming the most cruel of deaths at the hands of people like you and me. Our contemplation of the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first century make us starkly aware that “Evil stalked the earth in this era, moving men’s minds, ruling their actions, and begetting the lies, greed, deceit and cruelty that are the stuff of history in our own time.” And it should need little imagination to realise that “Hitler’s career and its frightening success in one of the world’s most advanced and cultured industrial societies, reminds us of the fragility of modern civilisation and the terrifying ease with which it can be destroyed.” As the poet has it:
“I have seen
death’s clever enormous voice
which hides in a fragility
of poppies”
But what the Christian religion provides for us amidst the uncertainties of a fallen world is the certainty of our salvation and the redemption of the world effected by Christ’s death on the cross, and the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead to eternal life in Christ. “Christ is risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.” That redemption through suffering, that consolatory prayer caught in words of the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg:
“Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list’ning faces.
If Wilfred Owen distils the pity of war, Siegfried Sassoon its futility, Rosenberg invites us to direct our gaze beyond both, to a realm where suffering is transfigured into understanding and we can hear the more clearly and directly the words of S. Paul’s consolation “you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” We grieve, certainly, for the Fallen but we do not and cannot grieve as others do and fall into a pit of desolation and annihilation because we have Christ’s own promise of a joyful resurrection. “With the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God … the dead in Christ will rise … then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord.”
The lives of the Fallen which ended brutally and abruptly in this world are, like our own lives, the promise and first stage of lives that are eternal. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the vantage point from which the waste and tragic loss endemic to human existence can be seen in perspective. For all of us there is a place set apart for which the accidents and the providences of this present life are a preparation. There is not least a place for the Fallen in battle, for those whose names are incised in cold, unflinching stone on the war memorials of our country: grief and emotion tempered in the ordered regularity of the graves in war cemeteries: the soldier, the sailor, the airman, the bombed, the gassed, the bayoneted, the tortured, the countless victims. Countless but not nameless. Every victim a name, every name an individual, every individual loved, every loved one a soul, every soul infinitely precious to God.
And so for each human soul we come to do the best that we can do in a world scarred and wounded, broken and distorted. We celebrate the Christian ritual for the dead in a Solemn Requiem. Ours, however, are not “hasty orisons” pattered out in the turmoil of battle, in the fear and confusion of fire and blood. From the carnage, chaos and ruin of death the Church offers the ordered liturgy of the dead. From the fragmentation and disintegration of human life that conflict brings, the Church offers the complete and perfect sacrifice to transcend the failure of war. From the defeat of human aspirations that war represents the Church pleads the victory of Christ in the immaculate sacrifice, the sacrifice that transcends all others: all those before, all those yet to come. So it is that for the souls of each and every one of the fallen, we pray the ancient prayer of Holy Church: Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem: dona eis requiem sempiternam.
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library