Today is a day of remembrance – a day when a significant portion of the Western World remembers the signing of the Armistice, which led to the end of what we call now the First World War. Sadly, peace did not last long; another Great War was to follow in what has since been described as “the most war-torn and destructive century in human history”.
Remembrance Day – a day of memory. And yet, memories are such strange things – so necessary for self-understanding, so very flexible and sometimes quite fickle.
“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that” writes Virginia Woolf in her novel Orlando. “Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no [one] need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”[1]
Depending on where we stand and what our life experience has been, the seamstress can take us in so many directions. On this Remembrance Day, our first thoughts might fly towards those who made what has been termed ‘the supreme sacrifice’. Rolls of Honour, such as those found in our church entry porch, monuments standing in cities and small towns throughout our country, all call us to remember young men and women who put their lives on the line in the name of a grand expectation; and whose individual deaths broke hearts and destroyed hope for so many families. Bobbing and dipping memories will take some of us along the paths of strengthening patriotism, the shared cause, the tight comradeship found amongst those who fought side by side in the trenches; we might regard the courage and cowardice of those dark days. Some of us will bring to mind those who fought bravely and well; some of us will weep for the horrendous loss of what could have been; some will bring to mind the abuse and suffering of people considered ‘collateral damage’ or of the maligned conscientious objectors. We each bring memories, sometimes contradictory, but none the less providing us with raw material with which we might come to understand ourselves better.
For memories are not just about dwelling in the past. They have the potential to restore – or to destroy – the future. “They [can provide us with] links with the future, [as] our way of learning the lessons from the past in order to guide us in our living in the present. Memories [can be] the source of our hopes and vision of a better world for our children and our children’s children.”[2] But, it’s not guaranteed they will lead us in positive directions. It’s possible for our dipping and flaunting recollections to drive us – and thus the world – towards hatred, revenge, and more war.
Is it possible to take these disconnected fragments of our lives to enable positive transformation – or must we leave them tossed about in the gales of life?
Some of you may have read in the newspaper last week about Nicholas Day’s research on memories from infancy. He suggests “the average earliest ‘fragmented and lonely’ memory, ...goes back to around age 3....What interests Day in particular is what makes the first memories stick and he believes it’s actually more to do with parents than the maturity of neural pathways. Children with the earliest memories have parents who talk a lot to them about past events. They narrate these events, ask questions about them, often answer those questions and generally talk about them in general conversation. This reinforces the memories.... It’s not surprising then that Day regards Maori as having, at age 2, the earliest memory of any culture because of the elaborate way the past is shared orally.”[3]
We have a similar heritage in Judaeo-Christian community, where memories and stories have been shared orally through faith generations. As Christians we believe that remembering, (i.e. “re-membering) not only helps us to live in the present and orientates us towards the future, it is also the opposite of dis-membering. Re-membering is ‘a putting together again’; it’s about healing and reconciling. As we come together as a people of faith, we draw on this ability to take our brokenness and to re-member ourselves again as a people of hope and transformation. Both biblical stories we heard this morning, re-call us into this process of re-membering. In both the story of Ruth and the Markan gospel account of the poor widow, we are [re-minded] [of] God’s concern for the dis-membered in our society – for the poor, the dis-abled, the outsider – for the ones overlooked by the powerful. Here, once more, we are invited to be re-membered into a community where generosity, compassion and survival are celebrated; where hopeful stories reconstitute a broken people into those who walk the way of God’s transforming kin-dom.[4]
That’s what the Choir will be assisting us in doing tonight as they present, for Remembrance Day, the beautiful and challenging Mass for Peace – the Armed Man – composed by Karl Jenkins. To understand what lies behind this Mass, we must take ourselves first to Britain’s oldest national museum, The Royal Amouries’, which grew out of the arsenal of the medieval monarchs of England housed in the Tower of London. [The museum’s] main purpose [is to] display the hardware of war – and through this, [to encourage] an understanding of what war really is, and what it means and does to the people involved in it. ... We were looking for an appropriate way for the Royal Armouries to commemorate the millennium” writes Guy Wilson, Master of The Armouries. The theme, of the 15th century song “L’homme armé” - that ‘the armed man must be feared’ “seemed painfully relevant to the 20th century and so the idea was born to commission a modern ‘Armed Man Mass’. The framework of a Christian musical and liturgical form, seemed the best way both to look back and reflect on the most war-torn and destructive century in human history, and to look ahead with hope and commit ourselves to a new and more peaceful millennium. And so the idea developed to combine within the basic mass form a variety of poetry and prose and a wide range of musical styles reflecting the multi-cultural global society in which we live” [5] – re-membering a broken people into hope.
This Mass for Peace has certainly done that. Commencing his composition as the tragedy of Kosovo unfolded, and calling on re-membering texts as diverse as poetry from Hiroshima, gems from English Literature and worship resources from Muslim, Jewish and Christian sources, Jenkins demands the listener face the menace and horrors of war before considering their choices for the future. After being re-minded: “The Armed Man must be feared”; “Better is peace than always war”, listeners are asked to consider, “Do we want the new millennium to be like the last? Or do we join with Tennyson when he tells us to “Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace”?
When we come to the Litany of Remembrance at the end of the service this morning, we bring with us our many memories – fluttering and flickering, taking shape around this Table of Remembrance which calls us to be members of the Body of Christ. And so we will re-member the broken bodies and the spilled blood, recalling the pain of the past – and also our strong commitment to live fully and faithfully within the present so that God’s vision of justice, peace and hope – God’s Shalom - might be a reality in our personal lives, in the life of our community and for the life of the world. “Ring out the thousand wars of old and ring in the thousand years of peace – Ring in the Christ that is to be”[6].
[1] Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Feedbooks.com p.46
[2] Clare McBeath, “This is a Day of Remembrance” Timeless Prayers for Peace, compiled Geoffrey Duncan, 2003, p.93
[3] Ian Munro, “Sharing makes a memory stronger” Otago Daily Times: Weekend Magazine Saturday 3 November 2012, p.46
[4] Clare McBeath p.94-95
[5] Guy Wilson, Master of The Amouries, “The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace: The history of the commission
[6] Lord Alfred Tennyson, “In Memoriam”
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