War can shatter Faith - in the midst of great suffering we find ourselves crying out to God with the Crucified Christ "Why have you forsaken me?" Yet Christ bore our terrors on the Cross and rose again - like the poppy sprouting up defiantly from the destruction of the First World War, Christ's resurrection gives us hope, that from this vale of tears will spring up a new and perfect life. We are not abandoned orphans, but sons and daughters of God marching on to the heavenly Jerusalem. We keep our gaze fixed on eternity, and do not allow ourselves to fall into despair.
In the last year of his life, my grandfather had to move from his home in Norfolk to live with my family in Southampton. A car-full of possessions was all he could bring with him – the rest either donated to charity or thrown away. One of the things he brought with him was a little black photo album, containing in it pictures of his family from his childhood in Leipzig and then Berlin and from his early life in England. In that black photo album, there is a picture of a young man, about nineteen years old, who looks like me when I was that age. He is in an army uniform, cap on his head, backpack and bedroll on his back, bayonet on his belt and rifle by his side. He is carrying a little bunch of flowers. His name was Kurt, he was my grandfather’s father, and this photo was taken just before he went off to fight on the Western Front of the First World War. In that same black album is another photo, twenty years later, of another young man barely twenty years of age, in a Luftwaffe uniform, silver wings on his chest and at his collar. My grandfather, preparing to go off to the front in another World War.
The Great War brought about a kind of devastation that we who never lived through it find hard to comprehend. 20 million dead. 21 million wounded. Just as the war ended, the Spanish flu would sweep through an already devastated world and claim maybe as many as 50 million lives. The wanton destruction, the terrible evil, of that war was followed by another, more violent war that cost another 60 million lives. In the face of such awful destruction, the words of the suffering Christ on the Cross must have seemed an apt response;
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God my God, why have you forsaken me?
St Ambrose of Milan comments on Christ’s naked humanity in that moment of extreme suffering:
As human… he speaks on the Cross, bearing with him our terrors. For amid dangers it is a very human response to think ourselves abandoned.
The feeling of abandonment, the great wave of distress, that all but killed the faith in a Europe no longer able to see beauty around them. One need only read Wilfrid Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth to get the true sense of lost hope; in which church bells were replaced with the “monstrous anger of the guns” and church choirs usurped by “the shrill demented choirs of wailing shells” – beauty replaced by violence, and ugliness of destruction. It seeps out of the poetry and the art of that age, it gave birth to brutalism and a virulent kind of atheism. Europe on the Cross cried out with the Crucified Christ that they had been abandoned by God.
And yet, in the fields of Flanders the poppies began to grow – out of devastation and destruction, and ugliness, a thing of beauty sprung up almost defiantly out of the ground. Just as Christ rose from the dead, this little red flower poked its head above the earth and dared to blossom and flourish, and mark with beauty the places where there had been so much ugliness. And so we still gather on the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, and keep silence at the eleventh hour, to commemorate the armistice of a war that ended over 100 years ago. We pin those resilient little flowers to our breast and we remember. We remember the dead of the great war, and the second war, and every war since then, we remember the men, women, and children who have suffered and died and who are suffering and dying. We pray for their souls.
But we also cling to those poppies, those little symbols that life cannot be crushed so easily, that hope always remains. This hope permeates our readings today, and stands as a shining light against the darkness of despair;
The book of Wisdom speaks of those who died young, like so many who die in war, who attained honour not by grey hair and old age but by understanding, untarnished life, and seeking to please God. The Wisdom author reminds us that our deaths need not be a tragedy, that taken up from the wickedness of this world we await God’s grace and mercy.
The Psalmist, cries to the Lord from the depths, his soul longing for the Lord, more he says than the watchman waits for daybreak. He hopes in the Lord’s Mercy and forgiveness.
Finally, we stand with Christ at the foot of His Cross. As St Paul writes to the Romans, we wait no more; grace and mercy have found us and there is no longer anything, no power on earth, or in heaven, or in the depths of hell, that can come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord; our beloved who laid down His life on the Cross for us.
Christ carried our terrors with him on the Cross, and they died with Him. God did not abandon us to sin, He did not abandon Christ on the Cross, nor does he abandon us now. He calls us each by name to our true homeland. We are travelling through this vale of tears as pilgrims to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the place where there is no more suffering, where there are no more tears, where there is only joy. Do not lose hope, do not let the state of the world drag you down into despair. Remember that Poppy, stubbornly growing amid the carnage, and take it for a sign of hope, a symbol of the resurrection. Remember that our lives are fleeting, but that eternity awaits us.
Mass for the Dead, celebrated on Remembrance Sunday 2023
First Reading: Wisdom 4:7-15
Psalm: 130 - De Profundis
Second Reading: Romans 8:31-35,37-39
Gospel: Mark 15:33-39
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