What should Remembrance do in us?

img_1562Remembering is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. That is why dementia is such a distressing condition; it robs us of our ability to remember, and as such seems to rob us of our very selves. I am constantly fascinated that the programme which allows people to reconstruct their family history is not called ‘Who do you think you were?’ but ‘Who do you think you are?’ The remembering of the past constitutes a key part of the present when it comes to our identity. David Runcorn expresses this with customary insight:

To remember is not to recall a memory (though that is part of it of course). To re-member is to re-connect with what has, for whatever reason, been dis-membered.

To re-member is not to look back into the past but to bring into the present all that has brought us to this point, and shaped who we are, for good or ill. We are to live in remembrance. Those who do not re-member are not present either. There can be no healing until we are present to the wounds, to the fractures of our story and history. Bids for new futures, attempts at renewal that do not flow from careful remembrance may look pious and visionary, but they are actually escape bids.

If remembrance is central to human being, it is also central to Christian belief. The two central events of both Jewish and Christian practice centre on remembering—the Jewish on remembering the deliverance from Egypt in the Passover, and the Christian in the remembering of Jesus’ own remembering of this, overlaid with his own death and resurrection as a new expression of it. In both acts of remembrance, the events are told in the present tense, and not the past. In Passover, the youngest child has to ask ‘Why is this night special?’ not ‘Why was this night special?’ And when we share the bread and wine we remembering by recounting Jesus’ words ‘This is my body…my blood.’ In both cases, our remembering brings the past into the present and shapes the reality that we inhabit.


In a wonderfully poetic and evocative reflectionAdrian Hilton expresses what this means on Remembrance Sunday:

As millions of us make the pilgrimage to file past 888,246 ceramic poppies, a part of us is still dying on Passchendaele ridge, and if not there, in Flanders fields or the Somme, where the lives of our bravest and best were snuffed out by snipers and trampled into the mud. Thousands of them still sleep there, encased in unmarked tombs of distant affection.

Wives became weeping widows, inconsolable in the void of grief. We are their children, or their children’s children and their children’s children’s children. They live forever in our DNA.

But what sort of effect should this kind of remembrance have in us—how should it shape the reality we inhabit? Should it make us protest at the rush to war that has marked Western decision-making for many years? Should it make us long for justice when it is now fourteen years since the Iraq war was declared illegal by the UN Secretary General? And the person who led us down this route is now making millions advising other regimes on how to work in a similar way?

Or perhaps we should be concerned at our country’s continued status as a world leader in arms manufacture? Very recently we were the fifth largest global exporter, after Russia, the US, China and France, and we are home to the third-largest arms manufacturer in BAE SystemsOscar Arias Sanchez, former President of Costa Rica, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, commented:

When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness. We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. Our international regulations allow almost three-quarters of all global arms sales to pour into the developing world with no binding international guidelines whatsoever. Our regulations do not hold countries accountable for what is done with the weapons they sell, even when the probable use of such weapons is obvious

Alan Storkey offers the challenge from the perspective of Christian theology:

We’ll rightly be remembering the war dead and injured this weekend. Now is the time for Christians to address why wars happen and how they can end. The arms companies need wars and get them by persuading enough people that arming the world keeps us safe, and so war follows war. It is the biggest failed experiment in modern world history. In ten or twenty years time, going on as we are, a third world war is likely through mistrust and competitive arming. But it could be stopped now. Then it will be riven with tension and may be too late. But, no weapons, no wars. Thus far all disarmament negotiations have been in the hands of the military and defence people and they sabotaged it in the thirties, fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties and even at the end of the Cold War. A measured international Christian will among two billion people for multilateral world disarmament can do it. Swords into ploughshares is military and economic sense saving trillions, sparing death, destruction and poverty, and cutting total world CO2 by some 5%. It is the blessing to the nations we can help bring to pass. It puts the Lamb on the throne.

Unless remembrance forges in us a commitment to work for peace and against the continued influence of the arms industry, the sea of red we saw around the Tower of London four years ago, remember the start of the ‘Great War’ 100 year earlier as we remember its end, will not have done its work.

poppy_installation_4_august_copyright_rleahairhrp__32__-_low_res-

(First published on November 11th 2014)


Follow me on Twitter @psephizoLike my page on Facebook.


Much of my work is done on a freelance basis. If you have valued this post, would you consider donating £1.20 a month to support the production of this blog?


DON'T MISS OUT!
Signup to get email updates of new posts
We promise not to spam you. Unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

If you enjoyed this, do share it on social media (Facebook or Twitter) using the buttons on the left. Follow me on Twitter @psephizo. Like my page on Facebook.


Much of my work is done on a freelance basis. If you have valued this post, you can make a single or repeat donation through PayPal:

For other ways to support this ministry, visit my Support page.


Comments policy: Do engage with the subject. Please don't turn this into a private discussion board. Do challenge others in the debate; please don't attack them personally. I no longer allow anonymous comments; if there are very good reasons, you may publish under a pseudonym; otherwise please include your full name, both first and surnames.

7 thoughts on “What should Remembrance do in us?”

  1. Hang on — if wars are caused by the arms industry, how come the world existed in a state of near-constant war for thousands of years before the arms industry even existed? How come that, far from the war-torn wasteland the quotations seem to try to portray, the world today is probably more peaceful than it has ever been?

    Wars are inevitable because humanity is flawed and fallen. If there were no weapons, we would simply wage war with our bare hands or beat each other to death with rocks.

    Reply
    • Fewer arms might not mean fewer wars, but it would probably mean less damage, especially the terrible collateral damage and civilian deaths we see now. I think it’s the same principle as reducing access to guns in the U.S.- People would still kill people, but it would cut out most of the shocking mass killings.

      Reply
      • That’s certainly possible. I just worry that people like the quoted Alan Storkey are falling into the heresy of thinking that the eschaton can be made immanent.

        But you have the same problem with disarmament really as there is with reducing access to guns in the USA: there are so many weapons already out there that you can’t possibly get rid of them all, and if you try, then you just increase the proportion of them that are in the hands of the exact people you don’t want to be the only ones with access to weapons — because by definition, the only people who will hand in their weapons are the law-abiding, and the others will keep theirs.

        Reply
        • I agree about the theology in the quote – it didn’t seem quite right to me. Yes it’s very difficult to see how access to weapons could be stopped in practice, though I think we could reduce the numbers of available if we really tried, even if we can’t get rid of all the ones already out there.

          Reply
  2. Alan Storkey may have an over-realised eschatology but it seems to me that most Christians have an under-realised eschatology on this one. We rightly try to end poverty even though Jesus said that will never happen in this age and yet we do so little to counter the prevailing narrative of arming ourselves and others to the teeth.

    Reply
  3. The contrast of remember and dismember is based on a false etymology. “Remember” is not “re-member”, but derives via French from late Latin rememorare, and nothing at all to do with members. It is precisely about memory.

    Reply

Leave a comment