Remembering Tomorrow

Today is Armistice Day, one of a number of opportunities to do something vitally important to preserving a hopeful tomorrow - remembering yesterday.

This is one of the days when I hope that the entire blogosphere will write about the same thing, because to me, this is so important. 

Anamnesis, that whole notion of memory, is one of the fundamental heartbeats of sacramental Christianity. It is that moment, during the Prayer of Consecration when we remember the great act of sacrifice made by Jesus Christ for us. Christian Anamnesis shares much with the Jewish notion of Yad Vashem, and is placed before us in our thoughts today, and this week. 

Remembering, that means by which we re-assemble [re-member] something from our past is perhaps the best way of learning how to live in the future. Today, of course, we remember a specific historical event, that being the end of the Great War in 1918. Sunday sees the broader Remembrance Sunday, when we are called as a nation, to re-member those young men and women whose lives were taken from them in the worst of circumstances, and for a cause not of their choosing. Last week, we had the spiritual component to all of this when we remembered the faithful departed on All Souls Day. 

I once heard it said that all this remembering should reach a natural conclusion and that we should perhaps draw an end to the practice. It was suggested that we should do that when the last survivor of the Second World War succumbs to death. It is easy to forget that our "war dead" is a community that almost daily increases. Last Sunday, among the list of those who had died in our community, I read out the considerable list of more young men and women who have died for their country during 2011. A new name has been added even since Sunday. 

The simple fact behind all of this is that the names we remember are those who did not choose death. They did not choose war. They just agreed to serve. Added to the list of our war heroes, we must also remember the people who died away from the front-line - those at home bombed in their beds, the countless millions of the Shoah genocide (Jews, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, those with learning difficulties and physical disablements and so many others), those who died servicing the machines of war, those who patrolled our streets at home, those women who died in the factories that supplied the front-line, those who died of war-related symptoms many years after the ceasefire, family members who died of heartbreak in the wake of losing their life's love - countless myriad millions of people who did not choose death. 

Half of today is about remembering those who died on our behalf. They died for you. They died for me. They died for our children. The other half is to remember tomorrow - that fateful day when we can stop choosing war over compassion and generosity, when we give instead of take, when we can dream of waking  to a day where no-one will die violently at the hands of another human being. 

They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old; age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

When you go home tell them of us, and say for your tomorrow we gave our today

Anamnesis

This is my article for my forthcoming Parish Magazine - placed here so I don't have to write it twice! 

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November is a month most associated with a key Christian behaviour—remembrance [anamnesis / ἀνάμνησις].

As many of you may know, I have just returned from a two week Seminar at the International Centre for Holocaust Studies based in Jerusalem. The school forms part of the Yad Vashem institute which was created by legal decree in the 1950s, and its name is taken from Isaiah 56:5: ‘I will give, in my house and within my walls, a memory and a name’   -   יד ושמ  - and as it suggests, is an establishment entrusted with the responsibility and task of recovering and commemorating the identities of most of the six-million Jewish victims of the Holocaust/Shoah.

This month will manifest its most famous tradition of ‘anamnesis’ in Britain — Remembrance Day when of course we remember yet more victims of conflicts throughout our recent history. We will pause once or maybe more times for a minute or two to remember those who died to assure us of a freedom that we enjoy in our day, closing that moment with the words ‘we will remember them’.

A key part (and indeed a necessary part) of the great prayer of consecration which we pray during our Eucharist services at various times during every week is the Anamnesis—’we remember his dying and rising in glory…’ - the moment when we as Christians connect with the narrative of love and sacrifice embodied by Our Lord.

In all of these things we acknowledge that we are connected with a heritage, a past that has helped form us and continues to form us in the present. Our world is one of hurried progress, or a striving always to move forwards—and of course this is right and proper in its own way—but it is for nothing if we don’t remember. To fail to remember, to connect. renders us all as accidents in time and space, and as God’s People we are certainly not that. During the course of this month we will also draw to the end of another Liturgical / Church year and we wish ourselves ‘Happy New Year’ on Advent Sunday, maybe even opening a door on a calendar. It is right to take stock of the challenges and successes of the year that draws to its close so that we are best prepared for the year that opens out before us. We can pray for lost loved ones, celebrate our new arrivals, give thanks for many blessings and ponder the lessons learned from situations that didn’t go as we might have chosen. May God bless you all this month as we begin to prepare once again to remember the great moment of the Incarnation, itself a precious moment amid the chaos of daily life, itself connecting past with present so that all people may have a future.

Fr David

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NB - I can manage to write like a proper vicar when I have to!