At the going down of the sun

This week many clergy will be involved in two remembrance services (or possibly more). Friday the 11th November (at 11am) is the increasingly popular 'literal' time of remembrance, the time of the armistice coming into effect at the end of the 'Great War' in 1918: the 'war to end all wars.'

Sunday is Remembrance Sunday, when similar acts of remembrance, parades, silences, services, wreath layings take place in towns, again at 11am.

I detect a considerable degree of ambivalence amongst clergy (and others) to remembrance. The wearing of white poppies flurried whilst I was at theological college. There is a heartfelt reluctance to engage with any romanticized image of war. It's all about peace, isn't it?

Where am I on it all? My short career as a regular serviceman was in the cold war. We trained for the end of the world, running about in suits and masks and pretending to plot the wind-blown course of mushroom clouds. We travelled about the world not being shot at, looking under our cars for Irish not Afghan bombs. It leaves you conscious of what has gone before, and what your successors (in a VERY different world) are doing now. I joined the armed forces, in part, through a fear of nuclear armageddon, and the thought-through response that maintaining detente would prevent that war. Others marched against nuclear weapons - fair enough. No-one knew that economic and political frailty in the east would close that stand-off down, and allow the world to boil up into what it is now.

The political context of participation in war is complex. I think that's a polite way of saying that it often stinks. Whether it's Blackadder's 'moving General Haig's drinks cabinet 6 inches closer to Berlin,' or regime change dressed up in UN Article 51 'anticipatory self defence' as in Iraq (and others?), the global political motivations for entering war can be rather murky.

But the personal experiences and sacrifices that individual men and women in these conflicts make are undoubtedly deeply moving and powerful testimony to much that is fine and noble in humanity. The irony of wasteful, destructive war and the broken beauty of humanity are a rich, intertwined theme in remembrance. Who really cares about European politics in the early 20th century? But we read Wilfred Owen and can be affected by distant memories of mechanical horror.

In a century, who will care about the 'War on Terror' or 'Al Qaeda' or the rest of it? But will they remember limbless young people rebuilding lives and coffins driven slowly through Wiltshire? Maybe.

So I will wear my poppy on my choir dress on the seafront at Bute as we say Binyon's Words and the Kohima epitaph. My fellow British Legion members will parade, some crying.

And we will remember them.

Remembrance

A slightly late post on remembrance.

November 1981 is the first year that I can remember taking part in a Remembrance Sunday parade of some nature. We obviously didn't do much in the Church of the Holy Family in Dunblane, or maybe I didn't notice if something was done. 1981, newly uniformed as a member of the ATC, shiny black shoes with slippery soles, a new short haircut and a parade over the cobbles of Stirling's old town.

I remember the cold, the pain in the ears, the marching, the bugles, some talking at various bits.

The years passed, more Remembrance Sundays, ATC, RAF, a war or two (without much personal involvement). Lots of marching, carrying flags, lots of hearing 'They shall not grow old...' Then civilian life.

Now I am back into processing, rather than marching, but participating in the acts of remembrance in their religious context. I have mixed feelings about my own military service: mainly because I left it early, at my own volition, to pursue other life directions. Was that the right thing to do? At 18 years old I signed up to serve until I was 38! A change of heart at 22 and a move to the Admiralty - at the time it seemed like a cataclysmic change of direction, with hindsight a subtle change of emphasis within the departments of the Ministry of Defence. But I have regrets about having left my military career so early. Was it honourable to have done so?

So when I stand and listen to Binyon's Words and the last post, as I watch the old soldiers march past with their berets and memories, I am unsure whether I am one of them or not. I still know my service number off by heart (that never goes). I have no medals. I studied the ethics of war with fascination, how they have evolved over the centuries. I imagine the hardships of the trenches and the motivation that makes young men and women stand up and take part in such things.

The world has come quite full circle in the regard for those who serve - we quite non-critically laud those who are killed or wounded in the conflicts of today (fought in an asymmetric concept under an 'anticipatory' self-defence within Article 51 of the United Nations charter). And it is right to empathise with the pain and suffering that war brings to all. A media war may gloss over the political context, but the human cost remains visible and real. Just as a human dying on the cross is visible and real.

We will remember them.