Re-Presenting the Past to Shape Our Future
Reflections on Remembrance Day 2018
Propers for Peace from the BCP 1979 (TEC)
11 November 2018
Holy Trinity Cathedral
New Westminster BC
When I was a boy, at least once if not twice a year, my father would pack up my mother, my sister and me to drive from Colorado to upstate New York to visit my Leggett grandparents. My father loved the freedom of long-distance driving, so the trip was always a joy for him. My mother could knit or nap in the front passenger seat, so she kept busy. My sister could read her favourite books, so she was content. But I was too young to drive, not fond of napping and could not read in a moving vehicle without becoming carsick.
My father invented a game for me. How many different license plates could I collect along the way? It was not enough just to record where the license plate was from. My dad expected me to ponder any motto on the plate. New Hampshire was always one of my favourites: “Live Free or Die!” But on one trip I came upon a rare plate to see on the highways of the United States: a car with license plates from Québec.
No one in my family spoke French and it wasn’t until I went to university that I learned to read, write and speak French --- after a fashion. So I had no idea what the motto meant: “Je me souviens.” I tried various pronunciations, but it remained a mystery to me. Google Translate was still many decades in the future, so I had to be content to remain in ignorance of this strange motto from a foreign land.
Skip forward twenty-five years. I’ve graduated from university with a degree in modern languages and secondary education. I’ve completed my seminary education, served in various ministry settings, almost completed a doctoral degree and find myself in Canada. “Je me souviens” now has meaning for me --- “I remember”.
Our neighbours to the east remember who they are. There is great strength in knowing who we are and how we have come to be where we are in the great mystery of time. There is also great danger in forgetting that we remember our past in order to shape a better future, not only for us but for all who share ‘fragile earth, our island home’. I value my own identity as the descendant of Welsh settlers of the island of Britain who then dealt with the invasion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French peoples by creating a hybrid culture, a kind of British Métis if you like. I cannot and will not forget my grandfather who fought in the First World War, my three uncles veterans of the Second World War, my father a veteran of Korea, my cousins who served in the British armed forces and my brother-in-law who cared for the wounded and injured of Iraq and Afghanistan. But I dare not forget why I remember.
Within the Christian tradition there are few more important words than ‘remember’. Every Sunday, as we celebrate the eucharist, you hear me twice quote Jesus’ words on that last night, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The word that the writers of the gospels use is anamnesis. ‘Anamnesis’ literally means ‘not forgetting’, the opposite of ‘amnesia’. Even more importantly, the word ‘anamnesis’ means to ‘unleash the power of the past into the present in order to shape the future’. To remember, as Christians, is not a trip down some nostalgic road so that we can romanticize about the past, to wish things were the way they used to be.
We remember that last night because we want to unleash the power of Jesus’ self-giving to empower us to work towards the future God envisions for all of creation. We remember the many generations of those disciples of Jesus who came before us because we want their stories to shape our own so that ‘we and all God’s children may be free’. We remember the sacrifices of those who fought and died in armed conflicts as well as the sacrifices of their families who tried to carry on at home because we do not want their sacrifices to be in vain, to be simply one more tally in humanity’s failure to discover more life-giving and life-sustaining ways to manage conflict.
My grandfather Broom was a gentle man who served first as a cavalryman and then as a machine-gunner in the First World War. In that war he lost faith in many things and wanted nothing more than to come home to love his family and to tend his garden. During the Second World War he sent his only son off to India while he remained in England as a member of the Home Guard and an Air Raid Warden. I remember going into his garden shed and finding his old helmet. I put it on and marched proudly out into the back garden only to see something in my grandfather’s eyes I had never seen before --- anger, not at me but at the memories; fear, not of me but for me; sorrow, not at me but for me. He gently removed the helmet, put it back in the shed and I never put it on again. My grandfather remembered and in that present moment he desired a different future for his grandson.
There are those who ponder why some churches, such as ours, observe Remembrance Day. It has been, in my experience, an occasion for some ‘vigorous fellowship’ in some of the circles in which I live and work. What I tell my friends who have different views from mine is this. Deeply embedded in the human soul is the need to remember, but that deeply-felt need must be shaped by a vision for the future. Without a vision for the future, remembering becomes a comfortable or an unsettling experience that does not lead into productive action. As Christians we have a vision for the future and that future is the creation made new, the restoration of right relationship between God and humanity, right relationship between humanity and creation, right relationships between all human beings regardless of any category we might wish to place ourselves or others, right relationship within ourselves as persons who know both the light and the shadow within us. And so we remember our past in order to unleash its power to shape the future, a future that embodies the good news of God in Jesus of Nazareth.
So remember, my friends. Remember in order that today we can take even just small steps into the future God has shown us. Je me souviens. Nous nous souvenons. We remember who we have come from so that who we are today is a sign of who we shall be.
God is working his purpose out
as year succeeds to year:
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.[1]
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