Living in Remembrance
by David Runcorn
Thoughts on Remembrance Day originally offered at St John’s College Nottingham
I will stand at the War Memorial once again. I will repeat the words - ‘We will remember them’. I will wear the poppy – ‘lest we forget.’
But I will be wondering again what the task of remembering actually involves.
What does it take? What does it ask of us not to forget?
And why do we need so much reminding anyway?
There are times in this life when to be able to forget might seem to be more merciful. Many of the nastiest regional conflicts around the world are precisely because people can’t or won’t forget and are trapped in cycles of revenge and toxic bitterness.
I remember the old parishioner I used to visit who had been imprisoned in the war and saw and endured violence that he was unable to forget. The memory still cast a shadow across his face.
I knew Stan, a war veteran in North Devon who joined the reunions on the fortieth anniversary of the decisive battles of the war. In the weeks after their return he was one of four in that re-union group who took their own lives. Remembering was simply too much to bear.
Memory alone is not saving. It may just as easily overwhelm and break us. ‘Fifty years and I’ve never left this place,’ wept a survivor on her return to Auschwitz.
And what of victims of childhood abuse - hardly able, years later, to move on and rebuild their lives.
Remembrance and Bible
Remembering and living in remembrance is one of the central themes in the Bible and with that the importance of history.
Forgetfulness was the root of all evil, the Rabbis taught.
So one of the most insistent challenges in the Bible is to ‘remember’. And this is never more stressed than in times of uncertainty and change. ‘Remember me’, says God, ‘remember Torah’, ‘remember your story’, ‘teach your children to remember’. (eg Is 46.9; Deut 24.9; Neh 1.8; Ps 42.4,6)
This certainly comes as a health warning to the culture in the habit of junking what anything that looks or feels ‘old’ and compulsively pursuing anything ‘new’, ‘fresh’ an exciting.
Renewal is always first of all a work of remembrance.
Nor is remembrance about looking back in the past.
It is about living with what makes us who we are today.
In that sense we never leave the past behind. The Jewish Passover liturgy, recalling the Exodus from Egypt, speaks of making ourselves present as if we are there as it happens. Not just recalling it but in living relationship with it.
Living in remembrance.
Time clots
I struggle with some of the old hymns at the war memorial – ‘time like an ever flowing stream’. Victorian theology of God’s transcendent sovereign ordering of life so easily feels remote and impersonal. Time does not flow smoothing like a stream through the human story. The novelist Pat Barker notes how it clots and coagulates around hurts and wounds. So to keep each other company, to live in community, requires all sorts of unofficial detours. We learn to skirt round unspoken things. We avoid touching on sensitive issues. There are no go areas …..
To remember is far more than having a good memory.
To re-member something is to re-connect it and bring it back into relationship. In fact the opposite of remembering is not to forget – it is to dis-member - to sever, to separate, to break apart.
So re-membrance is at the heart of a gospel of healing and restoring.
It makes us present to life as it really is. For there can be no healing unless we are present to the wound.
‘Blessed are those who mourn’, says Jesus (Matt 5) Those willing to be present to the pain. You can’t remember without being in touch with what is separated. Blessed are those who are willing to re-member and be re-membered.
The Christian Church is fellowship of blessed mourners who somehow make peace. A people through which what is broken is re-connected.
Room to re-member
I was once involved in running a series of retreat days with a Bishop for all his clergy. These were days for support and renewal in times of demanding and uncertain change. We offered the three downstairs rooms of his house to reflect on one of three themes.
One room was about endings - loss, grief, lament and letting go.
The second room was a place to reflect on the present journey through change - the transitional place between leaving and arriving.
The third room was the place to contemplate arriving, new life, new beginnings or resurrection (it caused much amusement that the ‘resurrection’ room was actually the Bishop’s study).
In each room were pictures, symbols, candles and some printed prayers.
For a large part of the day people were left to spend time in whatever room they chose.
The room most occupied on those days was always the first room – loss, letting go, endings and grieving. Some felt guilty about this. Surely they ought to be in the resurrection room – full of new life and vision! But they also spoke of the comfort and healing of being able to draw near and honour the places of loss and of bereavement that were part of ministry and personal pilgrimage, but that they often found nowhere to name and listen to.
Only when they had spent the time that was needed in that first room could they ready to embrace the journey into new beginnings. This is the significance and transforming power of remembrance.
All renewal is a work of remembrance. It is life out of death.
God re-members us
And where is our hope in this? Our gospel to a harrowed, forgetful and painfully clotted world? It lies in this alone – that God, in Christ, re-members us. ‘Jesus re-member me in your Kingdom’ said the dying thief on the cross.
And what else is there to pray?
(Not that God actually forgets …. or does he? Can I imagine him watching me one morning in the tiny corner of the cosmos that is my room as I am trying to pray. And he up there somewhere he is thinking. ‘Oh no – I’ve forgotten his name. He spoke to me last week …what was it about. I promised to do something. Anyone got the file? No? Just have to do a general blessing. It will come to me in a minute. It’s a bit of a heavy week’.)
The communion service, like Passover, is far more than retelling a past story and symbolically participating. This is where we are remembered.
All of life is here.
We hold out to Christ our emptiness, our hunger, our need – and our trust. The image is of trembling child holding out broken bits of something shattered, a lost wholeness ….
And we receive in Christ, life re-membered.
Original whole food.
A foretaste of what will one day be complete.
For in Christ ‘all things hold together’.
He holds us in remembrance - this is all his work - whatever it takes, at whatever cost – ‘though we are many we are one body’ ….
But move carefully and be gentle with each other, we are fragments, not yet set whole ….
So whatever you come with today – wherever life and faith finds you … whatever the story you find yourself part of …. Christ remembers you.
And it is our vocation to live in remembrance of Him.
Singing for the dawn
Bishop Leonard Wilson was bishop of Singapore at the time of the Second World War and he was imprisoned in appalling conditions and tortured. There in that prison, facing violence and death, he sang the same hymn at the start of each day:
Christ whose glory fills the skies
Christ the true the only light.
Son of righteousness arise
Triumph o’er the shades of night.
Day spring from on high, be near
Daystar in my life, draw near.
There in hell, he remembered Christ and sang for his own soul and the soul of the world – a blessed mourner in the midst of a world forgetting its most basic humanity let alone the living God. (and fellow prisoners and even some captors came to faith through this saintly man)
It’s all mutual - this unfathomable, costly, hopeful work of remembering - even out of hell itself - for ‘in Him all things hold together’. And Christ’s remembering of us renews our future.
Finish then this soul of mine –
pierce the gloom of sin and grief
Fill me radiancy divine
Scatter all my unbelief
More and more thyself display
Shining to the perfect day
Jesus re-member me when you come into your Kingdom. Amen.
David Runcorn http://web.mac.com/davidruncorn
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum