Remembrance Service – Williams College                                                             14 June, 2009

Joshua 4.1-3, 8, 19-24 (The stones in Gilgal) Your children [will] ask their parents in time to come, “What do these stones mean?”
Matthew 5.43-48 Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…. You, therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Sura 16.70(The Bee): Of you, some are sent back to a feeble age, so that they know nothing after having known much, for God is all-knowing, all-powerful.

Your children will ask in time to come, “What do these stones mean?” We are gathered today here in the presence of many stones that we remember and love. And for many of us, this meeting is itself a stone, another milestone in our lives. As we remember with love and gratitude what this place has meant to us, and what those whom we loved and see no more have meant to us, it is essential here, in the presence of God, to look further into memory with its happiness and its warnings.

Remember, remember….  We do a lot of that in Great Britain as the days grow shorter in November. After the Christian observances of All Saints’ and All Souls’ come in quick succession commemorations of  November 5, 1605 and November 11, 1918. The first was a plot, by one Guy Fawkes and associates, to blow up the King and both Houses of Parliament in one go, which, had it been successful, would have been as devastating as the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001. The other was the end of the most destructive war the world has known. It would have been an active and probably painful memory for those who celebrated their 50th reunion here in 1959, the year that our class graduated.  

They are both certainly worth remembering, and they both have lessons to teach. In the words of George Santanya: “Those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.”  And if any saying is regularly illustrated in practice, that must surely be one of them! But if we think that learning is simply not forgetting, we are in great danger. That is not enough. When, like the young children of the Israelites, our children come to ask as they look at our memorials, “What do these stones mean?”, what will they hear, and what will they learn? And, perhaps more to the point, of what will they accuse us?

It is only too easy to remember badly, and not only for those who, in the words of the prophet, have been sent back to a feeble age. I early became a little cautious about history as taught in school, by learning the history of the War of 1812 partly in the United States and partly in Canada. If the dates hadn’t been the same, it would have been hard to imagine that the same war was being described – different leaders, different battles, and most remarkable of all, a different result!

 Often, our memory is simply inaccurate. Oscar Wilde puts this with his usual brilliance and humour in The Importance of being Earnest when the governess, Miss Prism, is attempting to persuade her ward, the impetuous young Cicely Cardew, of the folly of keeping a diary: “Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us.” To which Cecily replies, “Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that are published.” And, one might add, sadly, things far more toxic than three-volume novels.

More serious even than inaccuracy can be selective memory. An often quoted aphorism, usually attributed to Talleyrand, concerns the Bourbons, the French Royal family overthrown in the revolution of the 1790s, and then briefly restored after 1815: “They learned nothing, and they forgot nothing.” It is sadly a way of remembering all too prevalent in both religious and secular bodies. Features of events long in the past are remembered as a way of retaining a hostility, and often, to an outsider, they appear as they are: “things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened”. There is more to true learning than simply not forgetting.

Back in the nineteen seventies, our family spent a year in the beautiful eastern Netherlands, very close to the border with Germany. It had, however, not been so beautiful in the last months of the Second World War, when it had been a place of intensive fighting, in which Canadian and other Commonwealth troops had played a large role. This is  probably best known to us now through the film A Bridge too Far about the battle of Arnhem.  A resplendent and well-kept Canadian Cemetery was on our doorstep in the village of Groesbeek. Those who had died in this bloody campaign were remembered both in individual graves and in the magnificent gateway. Central to the plot was a large structure giving thanks also for the bravery of the missing, all of whom had come so far to die here.  One day, mainly in curiosity, while we were on the opposite side of the border, we visited the German cemetery in Kranenburg.  It was also well kept, but dark and largely hidden by trees.  The graves ware laid out in the same regular order, and, as one might expect in a cemetery for those who lived where battle had actually taken place, the names showed how many families had lost several members in a single day.  There was – there could be – no celebration, no indication of why these people had died.  At last we became aware of a larger, but still very low, stone.  It had a single inscription: “Remembering those who fell in the east”.  For, on the eastern front, there were no cemeteries.  There were a few other visitors, all Germans, who seemed both surprised and a little unhappy that someone with a British license-plate had come here. Perhaps they thought we were gloating. We weren’t. We were simply asking, as the children of the Israelites were to ask their parents, “What do these stones mean?” And we could hear these stones crying, rather more clearly than those in the other cemetery, “This must not happen again!”

November 11th, “eleven eleven” we might call it, is the day that ended an even worse conflict than that that had been fought in Groesbeek and Kranenburg, when Christian Europe tore itself to pieces in what was afterwards, and sadly inaccurately, called the “war to end war”. The carnage of that war became as great as it did because neither side could afford peace – only victory would do, and, despite the example of the War of 1812, it is usually beyond human wisdom to have both sides victorious in a war. Those who wish to rail against the Church and the folly of religion in general were handed one of their strongest arguments, and the unpleasant echoes of that war continue to this day, in recent years encapsulated in the flood of “First World War novels” of varying quality that have tumbled from the press – some of them, indeed, with the sinister three volumes….

Europe, today, is a wiser place, and we can be thankful for the growth in care and cooperation among old enemies. The Second War, following on from the so-called “peace” at the end of the First, did indeed have a real force of evil which had to be overcome. But even it did not bring a lasting peace. In these last years, our armies have as before been called to be as brave as ever. We can be even more proud, however, that much of their activity has been directly in helping to bring peace. And despite many blunders, we can hope that in the end, some contribution will be made to peace in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We must pray for a situation where there is a vision, even if it is still a long way off, of a time when loving enemies does just become possible, and where the interest in a true peace has precedence over interest in a hollow victory. And in this hope, faith has a role, good or ill, to play.

A frightening feature of our day has become the cult of self-inflicted martyrdom. It is Islam which suffers most seriously from this at present, but it has affected both Christianity and Judaism in the past. We must not fall into the trap of believing that our faith calls us to protect God. God is all-powerful, and calls us to follow him. People who do fall into this trap feel that others must be killed for their wrong ideas, and that God will reward them for losing their lives in doing this. Fortunately Guy Fawkes and his friends were not affected by the idea that they should blow themselves up with the Houses of Parliament – if they had been, they would probably have succeeded!  The fact that religion can be said to be playing a larger role in conflict today than it has at any time since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is not good news for people of faith.  Jesus over and over gives us the example of firmness with humility. In the end, right prevails not by its violence but by its patience and its rightness.

But remembrance is like prophecy, in the sense of the Israelite prophets of old. By recalling the past, it points to the future. It is not possible to say – happily not possible to say – what someone may be remembering from this pulpit in 50 or even 25 years’ time. We do have some reason to believe, though, that it might well have something to do with the fact that we are observing an increasing gap between rich and poor, both in the world as a whole, and in the countries we used to call “the West” and now more accurately call “the North”. This has been accompanied by an unprecedented consumption of resources and interference with the composition of our atmosphere. None of this is surprising news to any of us, but it is useful to put it into the context of remembrance – the memory our successors will have of us. It is in this context that we are called on to be generous, not only to this College to which we all owe a great deal, but to give of our time, our efforts and our resources to the bettering of this world we have been given to care for.

This has been a remarkable year, and by no means an entirely gloomy one. As a Canadian resident in Europe, I will not comment on the outcome of last year’s presidential election. The world outside the United States, and, yes, we do exist, had to be heartened by what seemed to have been the most active and the most cheerful campaign in many years, despite the economic situation. The history of the Civil Rights movement has, of course, had many unpleasant episodes. What is remarkable is that they were not the centre of this campaign. Force is at times inevitable, but true peace, justice and love will only come when force can retire and the true strength of firmness and humility can reign.

Christ’s command to be perfect is not easy; it would be much easier to  paraphrase Oscar Wilde and say that it has never happened, and couldn’t possibly ever happen.  Nor is it even possible in human terms.  But whether we look back in remembrance or forward in hope, that example of Jesus himself, that call to love our enemies transcends all others. God grant that we respond to it.

The Rev. Robert Gould ‘59