Disaster's Song

 November 22nd 1873.  A November night in the Atlantic gives us a great hymn from an awful family disaster couples with a deep faith.

 

 

Mrs Green

A year and a half ago, not many miles down the road from my Mum, an elderly lady in a Nursing Home slipped quietly away to meet her Maker.  It was a predictable event, given that she was nearly 111 years old - by any contemporary reckoning her passing was almost overdue.

 

What made Mrs Florence Green's death into news was that she was the last living First World War Veteran.  This is a technical term in that as a 17 year old she joined the newly formed Royal Air Force right at the end of the war and worked a few weeks as a waitress in the Mess but this rendered her a servicewoman and therefore an official Veteran.  By starting late and living long she became the symbolic end of the living human story of the Great War, closing the book on the war to end all wars almost 100 years after it began as the reporter rather beautifully put it.

 So there you have it.

The unpalatable human fact that every single man and woman who served in the First World War died.  On Sunday at the Cenotaph Isaac Watts version of Psalm 90 was sung . . .  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.

Some of us feel very blessed to have avoided the historically frequent shortening of life that war brings on the young.  How much more blessed the believer who realises that death itself has been subject to defeat in Jesus; that the sons of time can be the children of eternity in him. 

Name - Crofton Brown

One hundred years since the Great War began.  The amazing field of poppies by the Tower of London is quite a sight.  It is not easy to know whether it is good or not.

 

It is very beautiful.

 

Should the deaths of war be commemorated by beauty though?  Would we, for example (in reverse) commemorate the birth of a baby with the ugliness of birth leftovers?  It is hard to know if beauty helps or hinders. 

 

Memorialising is so hard because we interpret everything from our own place in history.  I have been extraordinarily blessed to live through wars only on television.  Even a cursory glance at the statistics of international terrorism indicate that at its worst it is a pale reflection of the Somme, Ypres, the Blitz, Auschwitz or Hiroshima to name but a few.  What do I know of the buzzing excitement of young recruits who often well realised that they might not come home?  How can I, who sees soldier's bodies returning in ceremonial procession from the back of transport planes at RAF bases imagine the slaughter that left tens of thousands of bodies unaccounted for?

 

This morning in Church we considered each of the men memorialised on the plaque in our Chapel building,  One of them is simply among the unknown who were never buried but never came back.  Would a ceramic poppy help?  No.  What helped was that we knew his name and that he was missed by name from the community that placed the plaque in his memory.

Likewise our value to God is not our equal part of a great number.  As the Scriptures teach, our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.  We are not valued as one of the many.  We are simply, personally valued.