Wednesday 16 November 2011

Remembrance Sunday 2011

Homily for Remembrance Sunday 13 November 2011

We gather at this Mass to remember the dead of the two World Wars. In some countries in Europe they speak of Armistice Day, as we do sometimes, or of Victory Day or Heroes Day – only in this country I think have we always spoken of Remembrance Sunday, and of course each year at this time the British Legion holds its Festival of Remembrance. I’m reading at the moment a book about Athens in the fifth century BC, the time of Socrates, and I was fascinated to discover that in Athens they actually had a law against remembering bad things, so I don’t think the ancient Greeks would have approved of all this remembering that we do every November. Or would they? It all depends, doesn’t it, what we are doing all this remembering for. The Greeks at that time were against going on about all the terrible things that had happened in recent wars, because they were trying to stamp out the desire in people for revenge, for vendettas- don’t keep going on about the wrongs of the past, they said, let’s try and move on! They knew the power over us that memory has.
I want to share with you some thoughts about the power of memory, a subject that our Holy Father is very interested in and has written much about. Perhaps he became so fascinated because his hero, St Augustine, also wrote a lot about memory, which he describes in his “Confessions” as “the fields and roomy chambers of memory, where are countless treasures and images, imported into it by all manner of things by the senses”. (Bk X, viii) For Augustine memory and its power over us was all part of the problem of evil, he saw the evil that we do as individuals coming about because of our minds getting into a sort of rut, so that bad behaviour becomes a force of habit- and even eventually a compulsive force of habit that we cannot control, “consuetudo”, which “derives its strength entirely from the working of the human memory” (Peter Brown: Augustine of Hippo p149). We all experience the truth of this in our own lives.
This dark side of memory is what those Greeks wanted to ensure didn’t poison their chances of promoting a new way of living. And the Holy Father would agree. The Pope says “The Past is present through memory. Memory gives it its dangerous power in the present and causes the poison of yesterday to become the poisoning of today”. (Principles of Catholic Theology p211) He tells us that we need to find a way of looking at the past that will be what he calls a “purification of memory, that will serve to heal”. Where there has been hatred, we must put love, and in a wonderful phrase Pope Benedict says “love is made possible by a changed memory”. That is what we have to try and do, change our memory: remember the bad things- yes, without trivialising them -certainly, without pretending they didn’t happen or didn’t hurt us- but remember them if not in a good light with a positive spin as we might say then at least in some sort of neutral way, with some sort of detachment. That famous follower of St Francis, St Francis of Paola, such a great preacher in southern Italy in the 15th century, says in one of his homilies “memory of evil is an injustice, it is a sentinel who protects sins, it is the alienation of love, a nail that pierces the soul, a wickedness that never sleeps, a daily death”. Forgetting the past is not something that we can ever actually achieve, it is quite beyond us, and rightly so, because our past has made us who we are today, but the secret is, I suppose, not to let the past become a burden – what unreal, shallow people would we be if we only lived and behaved as if we had no past, only somehow creatures of the present? We cannot imagine it. So we cannot forget – but we can forgive, or try to, and then that hard and hateful past can lose its sting, lose its power over us that will otherwise poison every thought we have and reduce our lives to a “daily death”.
And so Pope Benedict speaks of the importance of the “selection of memory”, which he calls “the foundation of hope”- remembering the good things, there must have been some surely, and using these good memories to counterbalance the bad. We need hope in our lives as much as we need love, and how will we ever begin to hope, until we have freed ourselves from remembering the bad things as somehow inevitable, either as what always happens to me, because nothing I ever do comes right, I never have any luck etcetera, or because in some especially damaging way I have come to believe that bad things are all that should come to me, all some worthless person like me deserves. No, we have a past, and it contains many bad and harmful episodes for each one of us, that is sure, but we must get hold of the antidote to that poison, and the antidote is a mixture of hope and love.
And so we remember those two terrible conflicts of the last century today, and we remember also the conflicts that continue to wreck our world, we think of the bloody upheavals, far from over, all across North Africa and the Middle East. We remember them in order to pray and to work for peace. Leaders of every religion, and humanists and atheists too, have recently met at Assisi at Pope Benedict’s request, to renew their commitment to peace, to moving on from the hostile stances of the past, to being witnesses for another way of living with each other and our differences, a world in which the dignity of every human being is respected, for as the Pope said “War is a wound to human dignity”. The Archbishop of Canterbury was there and quoted a Welsh poet, Waldo Williams: “What is it to forgive? To find a way through the thorns to stand alongside our old enemy”. To remember those thorns but to get through them somehow, to come out the other side!
What is the Mass after all, but the supreme example of all this? Every Mass is a remembering isn’t it, when we return to Calvary, where we relive the injustice of Our Lord’s death on the cross, and where all of that evil, all the evil there ever has been or ever will be, is transmuted into the Good, the good of the human race, and the good of you and me. “Do this in memory of me” the priest says in persona Christi, and we must go out from Mass living that memory, making that memory real, doing that memory, in our daily lives. Dear Jesus, help us to be your memory, a force for hope and for reconciliation, in our wartorn world, for you have said “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God”. Amen.

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