Sunday 17th November 2024
As the days shorten, as light dims and leaves fall, the church’s calendar reflects our environment. The sisters at Solas Bhride, the spirituality centre dedicated to Bridget in Kildare, that I had the pleasure to visit recently speak of nature’s lectionary. The confluence between themes in the church’s liturgy and events in the natural world is always particularly powerful. The autumn of the year presents us with the beautiful melancholic spectacle of death and decay. In the church’s year, this season, which takes us from the celebration of All Saints through to advent, is sometimes referred to as remembrance tide as we give particular attention to those past.
Today specifically is now identified as Safeguarding Sunday prompted by Christian Charities who have for some years aimed to draw attention to church’s work on safeguarding coinciding with safeguarding adults week initiated by the Ann Craft Trust responsible for pioneering work in the 1980s and 90s.
The observance certainly seems appropriate today given the publication of the Makin review into the churches handling of abuse perpetrated by John Smyth and the subsequent resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury but I’ve not seen any articulation of whether and why safeguarding Sunday might be particularly appropriate for this remembrance season. I’ll share some of my own thinking on this.
Firstly though, in the lead up to remembrance I found myself recalling an image that appeared in our papers during those days of rioting that followed the tragic death of 3 young girls in Southport and subsequent misinformation that circulated on social media that encouraged hated of, and violent protest against, immigration. The image was of a far-right protester wearing a poppy pin badge razing his shirt to show off a swastika tattoo. It prompted me to reflect on this season of remembrance and its meaning and significance.
The Church of England webpages say - All Saints’ Day celebrates those men and women in whose lives the Church as a whole has seen the grace of God powerfully at work. It is an opportunity to give thanks for that grace, and for the wonderful ends to which it shapes a human life; it is a time to be encouraged by the example of the saints and to recall that sanctity may grow in the ordinary circumstances, as well as the extraordinary crises, of human living. All souls, the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed celebrates the saints in a more local and intimate key. It allows us to remember with thanksgiving before God those whom we have known more directly: those who gave us life, or who nurtured us in faith.
Often churches combine their observance of all saints and all souls but for me that’s always very unsatisfactory because you lose the distinctive quality of each and end up with something that reflects neither. Traditionally all saints was described as the church victorious and all souls the church penitential.
Whilst there are distinct tones to the celebrations of all saints and all souls, remembrance Sunday requires a balance, a creative tension, between honouring those lost and lamenting of our collective failures to live in peace. It is a commemoration that can be manipulated. For example, during the second world war the Nazi regime turned it to towards hero worship of those that died in battle – a form of celebration of national martyrdom. What and how we remember and how we look to the future are hugely significant and of course shouldn’t be static.
With much debate about statues and memorials in recent years we have come to appreciate more clearly that our understanding of history is always, has always been, selective. Changing interpretations and emphasise are often very contentious but it seems to me that those debates, informed by scholarship, are essential because without them we are dealing simply in mythology. The same is true of our remembrance commemorations I think.
Why might anyone proudly sporting a swastika tattoo choose to wear a poppy? I guess that perhaps what they see in our past is an island that stood alone and they imagine that that was what we fought for. Since they resent whatever dignity is afforded to migrants and refugees I expect that they would overlook the contribution of servicemen and women from the commonwealth.
In his poem ‘At the Cenotaph; Siegfried Sasson imagined the Prince of Darkness praying:
'Make them forget, O Lord, what this Memorial
Means; their discredited ideas revive;
Breed new belief that War is purgatorial
Proof of the pride and power of being alive”
Satan’s imagined prayer is surely a warning to us. We honour those past but that must not remove the sense of penance over the sores of conflict that continue to fester and disfigure our world. We must not in glorifying the dead glorify conflict.
Some of you may have seen me marching with Southover Bonfire Society on 5th. I have to admit that I always find myself somewhat conflicted as whether I should actively be involved in our bonfire celebrations with all the muddle of symbolism and the traces of anti-Catholic prejudice that they contain. One of the reasons I do so is that Southover carries the shot at dawn poppy remembering the 306 British and Commonwealth serviceman executed during WWI many of whom we now understand would simply have been incapacitated by the trauma they had endured. It is exactly the kind of commemoration that protects against mythologising.
Turning to more recent events and the response to Maikin report. The same challenges present themselves of appropriately recognising and indeed honouring those who have suffered abuse, lamenting those failings and committing ourselves again to better. On the Church of England website I found this week - “We highlight the comment in the review from a deceased cleric who was aware in the 1980s, along with others, of the extent of the abuse: ‘I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public’ he said.
“We are appalled that any clergy person could believe that covering up abuse was justified in the name of the Gospel, which is about proclaiming Good News to the poor and healing the broken hearted. It was wrong for a seemingly privileged group from an elite background to decide that the needs of victims should be set aside, and that Smyth’s abuse should not therefore be brought to light.
“Every member of the Church is responsible for a culture in which victims are heard, responded to well, and put first: there is never a place for covering up abuse.
This is a season where we reflect on the past, its losses and also our failures and we look ahead with hope and determination. We need not hide or disguise the losses or the failures because Christ is our King who loves us all and calls us all to the ways of love and we trust that we are caught up in Christ’s eternal victory just as we trust that the earth will spring green again.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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