Remembrance Sunday – 13th November 2011
What did you do during our 2 minutes’ silence this morning? Were you able to use that time well?
Did you manage to reflect during those 2 minutes on those who are affected and suffer due to war? Were you able to think about what it might take to work for a better and different world where it will be possible truly to say that those who died in conflict did not die in vain; that their sacrifice has led to a tangible change of heart and we are slowly learning to turn swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks, discovering how to work towards a world without war?
Did you manage to say a prayer for peace; a prayer that wasn’t about self concern or about seeking Divine rescue for whatever troubles you? Did you manage in those precious moments of silence to place yourself in the presence of the “Eternal Beyond” and allow that transformative flow to take place where your primary concern was not yourself but the care of the other, the well being of the world, and the giving of yourself in love to the world? (That, at least, is what Jesus meant by prayer).
Wow! That is a tough call! Highly esoteric stuff! A long way from the mundane things that usually fill our silence, for after all, we don’t really do the lofty, high minded stuff, do we?
Perhaps your mind did what mine usually does. Did you drift off in the silence and wonder if you remembered to turn the iron off at home? Or maybe you suddenly panicked that you might have left your mobile phone switched on. Or, did you think about what you might have for lunch or stare at the pattern of the jacket of the person in front of you, realising that it is quite tough to train your mind for the silence?
Only you know how you spent these 2 minutes and no one is going to judge you if you failed to use the silence well and frittered it away.
But let me suggest to you that silence, time for reflection, prayer even (that scary word that makes most of us feel like terribly poor Christians because other people seem to be so good at it. Which has always bothered me, because didn’t Jesus suggest that we should hide our piety, rather than making a show of it?) And yet, all these disciplines, which amount more or less to the same thing, are so worthwhile and repay nurturing in our lives.
You see, some people will tell you that the Christian Faith is finished, that it is on its way out. Some people argue that we are overcoming the age of superstition and that all we need is rational thought and a scientific outlook. Some would say that faith is what has been holding us back as a species and the sooner we put it behind us the better. I want to suggest to you the exact opposite and that the potential for faith and developing our spirituality is only just getting going. I love the comment that Michael Ramsay used regularly to make when he was Archbishop of Canterbury and people challenged him in the 60s about church decline. He’d say, “But we are the early Christians!”
We are just getting going as people who have the capacity to cultivate that inner life that is waiting to be explored. And, silence is one of the keys. As we take time to think, reflect, meditate or pray, we might be surprised to discover an entire inner continent of possibility that has remained largely unexplored in much of our shared human history.
All sorts of things happen to us when we enter deeply into silence. The capacity for stillness is something we should take seriously in our lives, not just for these two minutes at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, or on the Sunday we set apart as Remembrance Day. In our busy, chatty lives we can so easily suffer from information overload. Walking through our streets has been likened by some to walking through the pages of a dictionary. We are bombarded day in day out by information, by appeals for our attention, by advertisers telling us that this or that object, if only we acquire it, will make us happy and fulfilled. We have cultivated an appetite of wants that is endless. Then there is the idle, whingeing gossip about the lives of unremarkable celebrities or the parlous state of our economy that journalist think we want to hear all the time.
They tell us, for example, about the terrible pension burden we have to carry in order to provide for a growing elderly population. Is that all we have to say about the generation of those who sacrificed so much for us in World War II, that they are a burden? If we only thought about it we’d be ashamed. And that is the point, isn’t it, we need to think and reflect about what matters about what the point of our life is about what we are doing here. “How will you spend your days?” That is probably the most urgent and compelling question we can ask of ourselves and it takes a bit of maturity, wisdom and silent reflection if we are going to answer that question in a way that ensures the well being of others and the planet as well as ourselves.
Victor Frankl, who survived the horrors of Auchwitz suggested that the most intolerable of all human conditions is not what we might think. He said, it is not imprisonment or the denial of freedom or hunger, bad as these are, for him the most intolerable human condition was a lack of meaning.
That is so important, especially when that thought comes from one who has seen at first hand deprivation and human barbarity of the worst kind in the holocaust and especially when so much of our human project has laid waste the planet and destroyed so many promising young lives – a lack of meaning.
So, when I say that Christianity is far from finished and that it is only just getting going, I mean that humanity is slowly evolving, not just physically, but also emotionally and spiritually too. In the silence of meditation, reflection and prayer, call it what you will, if we make space in our lives for the spiritual (and by that I do not necessarily mean the habit of church membership as it has traditionally been defined and understood); if we are truly still, huge opportunities for growth and development and grasping wisdom and understanding open up. The Christian Church ceases to be an Imperial Project, getting bums on seats and expanding the frontiers of the Christian Empire and instead it becomes the “laboratory of the soul”, an opportunity for us all to reflect on the mysterious story of creation and to connect the ground of our own being to that ground of being that shaped a Universe. In the silence, we begin to place ourselves “in the silent presence of the Eternal Beyond, the God of truth and love” and in the flow of communication that comes from that disciplined and mature use of time, silence and reflection, we begin to discern a meaning and purpose behind our own existence.
The silent space is not the place to look for personal credit (“look at me, I am holier than thou”), nor is it the space in which to look for some kind of bargain to be struck between ourselves and a generous God who can be buttered up; and nor is it even a space “for worrying about the world on our knees”.
The silent space is the place where we begin to connect ourselves to the one who said and did some of the most extraordinary things in history. In the silence we begin to make some sense of the message Jesus has left us with. It is a message about sacrifice, about a meaning that comes when we lose ourselves in love for each other and the world. That somehow, when we begin to learn to die we start to live. It is about connecting our lives to the one who said, “Love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you”, about discovering as so many have done in the battlefields of this world that, “greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”.
The power that is really worth depending on is not the counterfeit power of riches and political advantage, but the enduring power of love that holds on and ultimately wins through. This is wisdom for the world that today so desperately needs an alternative imagination and leadership that turns its back on wasteful violence and destruction as the answer to our problems. True meaning will come about for humanity when we evolve as human beings into people who are prepared to develop deeper bonds of community across the divisions of race and creed as an antidote to the plunder and avarice that lays waste habitats and communities in the name of so called progress and wealth creation.
So, as we reflect today, let’s just think a little bit about this message in the Gospel, the message of sacrificial love. Let us reflect on this message that Jesus gave (and lived) and that so many of our comrades whom we commemorate today began to understand in the heat and turmoil of war. At the moment before he was arrested, in an intimate meal with his disciples which he shared, even with the one who was about to betray him, he took bread and wine and said, “This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you”. He gave his life for his friends, for the world and, in giving he found his life, his meaning.
And, as we remember all those who have given their lives in conflict and who continue to do so even today, may their sacrifice not be in vain as we struggle as a human race groaning and travailing towards that new birth, that spiritual maturity in which we can use the silence well and be transformed into people that know what it takes to love our enemies and build a peaceful world, safe and habitable for our children’s children and all the world’s people. Amen.
