Selective Memory

November 5 is a British Memorial Day.  Each year it falls within a week of November 11, the day that 'remembers' the twentieth century's two World Wars.  Our church is no exception to this and we are deeply moved to ponder a sacrifice that is sufficiently recent to connect the older of us to grandparents or even parents affected by the War.

This pursuit of collective memory is not new.  Here follows a Prayer for the Daily Office of the  national Church for November 5th:

LMIGHTY God, who hast in all ages shewed thy power and mercy in the miraculous and gracious deliverance of thy Church, and in the protection of righteous and religious Kings and States, professing thy holy and eternal truth, from the wicked conspiracies and malicious practices of all the enemies thereof; We yield thee our unfeigned thanks and praise for the wonderful and mighty deliverance of our late gracious Sovereign King James, the Queen, the Prince, and all the Royal Branches, with the Nobility, Clergy, and Commons of England, then assembled in Parliament, by Popish treachery appointed as sheep to the slaughter, in a most barbarous, and savage manner, beyond the examples of former ages. From this unnatural conspiracy, not our merit, but thy mercy; not our foresight, but thy providence, delivered us: And therefore, not unto us, O Lord, not unto us; but unto thy Name be ascribed all honour and glory in all Churches of the saints, from generation to generation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

For all the depth of feeling it contains, however, it is no longer said.  1605 is a very long time ago.  It is, of course, typical of the modern church to have ditched such politically incorrect referral to popish treachery.

Except that it wasn't the modern church that removed it.  It was removed in 1859, not a time conspicuous for the British being warm toward the Roman Church or the Pope.  By then 250+ years had done their work and the collective memory had new things to memorialise in liturgy with an Empire encompassing the globe.

This coming Sunday we will share Communion.  The Apostle Paul indicated that this 'proclaims the Lord's death until he comes'.  We are never to forget the greatest victory, the greatest Saviour and the greatest Salvation of all.

A Nation's Day

As I drove through a chill November fog this morning my thoughts headed north. For not only is it cold - it is also St Andrew's Day, the national day of Scotland (which, for the time being at least, is part of the same country as I am).  I shivered.

 

I decided to think warmer thoughts.  There is another country that celebrates its national day today, and its a LOT warmer.  

 

Barbados!

 

You'll be wanting the words of the National Anthem perhaps? Here's verse 2:

 

The Lord has been the people's guide
For past three hundred years.
With Him still on the people's side
We have no doubts or fears.
Upward and onward we shall go,
Inspired, exulting, free,
And greater will our nation grow
In strength and unity.

Novemberish

The past day or two have not been heart-warming meteorologically speaking.  November has been in full swing with wind and rain and rain and rain and grey cloud and rain.  The adjectives for November say it all really.  T S Eliot called it sombre November; Robbie Burns wrote of chill November; for Ruskin it is dark; Thomas More labelled it sullen: Walter Scott calls it drear.

Once upon a time, one November day, an event of apparently little relevance happened at Lower Samsell, a place that few people had heard of then and scarcely a soul now either.  That November day was especially drear, dark or whatever other miserable adjective you can think of for one man.  He had been taking a Christian meeting in a farmhouse.  These, however, were times when the government prescribed how each person was to worship and this meeting did not fit the frame.  And so that November Sunday the speaker was arrested and incarcerated in the County gaol.

The gaol, understandably, offered few preaching opportunities.  He might have expected some clemency from the local Justice but his retort whenever asked about whether he had learned his lesson was, "If you release me today, I will preach tomorrow".  So of course he wasn’t released and it was, to all intents and purposes, 12 years that he was inside.

But you and I would never have heard of him if it were not for that dark November day.  For in that gaol, the silenced preacher discovered another ability entirely.  Honing that ability over the long enclosed years eventually gave birth to a book which from that time 450 years ago has never been out of print.  For in that gaol in Bedford, the prisoner preacher John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.  

In his great story, Bunyan’s pilgrim also enters a Novemberish place.  It is called the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the pilgrim is warned by two other men to turn back at its threshold.  But the pilgrim says, this is my way to the desired haven, and launches, sword in hand, into the Valley.  He cannot see its end but he knows that the dark, dreary place is the path to a flowering destiny.  He emerges eventually, and singing,

   

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin,

Did compass me, while I this vale was in;

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie

My path about, that worthless, silly I

Might have been catch’d, entangled, and cast down;

But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown."

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.