A nice view spoiled

Before leaving Malta behind on my blog this year I think that the single most shocking moment for me came when I realised the history of this beautiful bay by which we walked several times.  The bay I expected to remember when I left Malta was the one where Paul was shipwrecked but it proved difficult to set that over against the grotesque story of this bay in the Great Siege (referenced in my previous post).

On one grim day of that siege the headless crucified corpses of some Knights of St John were floated over the bay to terrorise their allies.  In retaliation, the knights, having beheaded many Ottoman prisoners, fired their heads from cannons back across the bay.

As we enter Advent, this is a good time to remember that the coming of the Light of the World has never ceased to be necessary - for however blue the sky, darkness is never far away.

No Island is an Island

Her Majesty the Queen and dozens of Commonwealth leaders have gathered in Malta - and with some relief one imagines.  Threats have been issued (of course) and security strengthened (of course) but in the whole scheme of things a small Mediterranean island looks like a good idea just now.

Yet even a modicum of historical awareness suggests otherwise for, as we were reminded during our  family holiday in Malta, this is an island whose history is bathed in blood.  In living memory it was the heroics of the Second World War when, as effectively the allied mid-Med military base the island was mercilessly, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Axis forces.

But the really bloody story of Malta is that of the Great Siege - a historical epic of mind-numbing proportions when the Knights of St John, representing Christian Europe and based in Malta, held out against an Ottoman siege by four or more times as many men through a whole summer.

Soberingly, given the cheap view of life demonstrated recently in Paris, a historian wrote thus, 'The disregard of human life among the Ottoman Turks at this time was almost incredible: to try to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with callous indifference.'

In five hundred years humanity has not learned very much, for all its apparent learning.

Jonah Lomu et al.

The especially unwelcome death of Jonah Lomu aged 40 is an awesome human moment for followers of sport.  Rugby is a fundamentally physical team sport in which, at its elite level, man mountains clash in frightening contests of strength, power and speed so that you know that to be challenged by two of them would be the downfall of anyone.

What Jonah showed when he burst into elite international rugby was that one man could on occasion make the going tough for eight others - singlehandedly.  He was simply a physical peak of human power, a man among boys when those boys were by normal standards themselves men among boys.

If anyone needs to be reminded of the power of death, Remembrance Week, Paris and Jonah in their three different ways have revealed it.  Many gallant memories are recorded, many tributes paid, in the case of the Paris attack people are sometimes demonstrating astonishing rejection of bitterness against the planners of the evil.  As so often in a large corner of Rock culture the Eagles of Death Metal Band gave an appearance of embracing death with their motifs and titles.  Until they ran from it off stage.

But real death?  There is nothing we can do.  We cannot stop it, we cannot forgive it, we cannot live with it, we cannot deny it, we cannot move on away from it, we cannot win over it, we cannot play with it, we cannot get past it.

We need(ed) help.

Friday 13th

The terrible events on Friday 13th in Paris are all the news just now.

Surprisingly little reference is being made to Friday 13th.  As it happened, earlier in the day I was talking with a receptionist who randomly commented that she hoped I had a nice day even though it was Friday 13th.  As it happened I did.  But then I wasn't in Paris.

I take it that the unwillingness to identify the events that happened with this superstitious date is because of the awkwardness of the idea of bad luck.  Sometimes I find it amazing how the awfulness of the human situation brings people so much nearer the truth.  The awesomeness of evil forbids notions of luck in this case and by wise extension could reveal the same about so much supposed chance.  

Even though the atheist cannot believe in evil but only in fate/luck:  [In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.]  something deep in the human soul will not allow this.  This Friday 13th we can see (though we'd rather be somewhere we couldn't) that humanity is not only part of a system of genetic process but part of a moral and immoral universe.

The real bad luck this Friday 13th was not to be mowed down (that was a result of evil), but to embrace an unbelief that means that those who were mowed down didn't ultimately matter.

It's Missing: 4. The Cenotaph

Last Sunday Her Majesty the Queen and a great many others laid their wreaths at the Big Empty in Whitehall.  Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty's not-so-Loyal Opposition, Republican and Pacifist, was watched by the circling media in case he blew his nose at the wrong time,  His bow was deemed lacking in bendiness and an empty gesture.

The Cenotaph is, in its own stark way, an empty gesture.  Despite the momentarily heart-warming 'THE GLORIOUS DEAD' engraved on it, it is missing the dead.  Indeed, a cenotaph is by definition an empty tomb, associated with death but without a body or from which (in other cases) a body has been removed.  In Whitehall this Cenotaph makes manageable the otherwise unmanageable, for nowhere in Westminster is there room to bury the bodies of those who have died in the wars that Britain has fought.  Instead, a column and a grand description makes the multi-million life carnage seem almost homely.

An empty tomb that cannot accommodate the number of dead is one thing.

An empty tomb where the occupant has defeated death and lives for ever more?  That's Easter.  That's a cenotaph where the missing causes our heads to be lifted up in worship instead of bowed in thoughtful regret.