John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

What did they bring back from the war?

What did they bring back from the war?

Some came back with heroic stories, of bold actions which won battles and rewarded medals.

Some returned with stories of the camaraderie and comradeship they had found in battle - a new community which for many stretched across enemy lines, with a sense of solidarity with the troops from the other too.

Some brought back from the war a heightened sense of right and wrong, a politicised view of life, as never before critical of God and of State.

Some brought back forms of madness, shell-shock, despair, anger which would never heal.

And yet others brought back silence; as if all they had experienced had numbed them. And the families of these combatants developed the skill of listening to the gaps, learning from what went unspoken.

My great-grandfather was one of these. The man for whom I was named, John Cyril Davies, was a First World War Survivor. A ship’s carpenter on the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania which was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland in May 1915.

1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives that day, but my great-grandfather was one of the 764 who survived. I’m told that he never spoke of the events; but he did have a totem, an item which he brought home with him - a lock of a young woman’s hair, which he kept in a box in the attic but again never told the story of whose it was or how he came to have it. ...

- from my talk What did they bring back from the war?, a reflection for a service of hymns, somgs and readings called ‘Till the Boys Come Home’, remembering the lives of the 43 Corton Denham men who returned from World War One and have no memorials.

 

Exploring worship - Introductory talk

Perhaps my first memory of Christian worship is of the day when, at the age of three or four, in a Baptist Church in suburban Liverpool, I spent the whole of one particular service in the pew alongside my grandmother, rather than out in the creche as I usually did.

When it came to the congregation starting to recite together the Lord’s Prayer, my eyes opened, lit up, and I turned to my grandma and said excitably, 'I know this prayer! We say it every day at nursery school!' 

Now besides my grandmother who was mortified by my loud interjection, and shusshed me up quickly, this must have amused the rest of the adults around me, as it amuses me (and a little bit embarrasses me) now, but it was a revelation at the time.

In that moment of recognition I learned something significant about Christian worship - that in different places at different times there was a common prayer which connected people as they said it; a prayer that had been passed on to us by others before us. 

I was later to learn, of course, that the Lord’s Prayer went all the way back to first-century Palestine and formed part of the teaching of Jesus to his followers in what we now call The Sermon on the Mount. ...

 

We're starting a series taking a close look at Christian Worship, in all its forms, today. This is the start of my introductory talk.

The Beatitudes - Christianity with its eyes wide open

... The preeminent contemporary historian of religion Karen Armstrong has recently written of her belief that ‘modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.’ ‘In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident,’ she writes. She speaks of the mantra recited to her constantly, by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics - the view that ‘Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history’. 

It is an odd remark [she says]. Obviously the two world Wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material and ideological factors are involved, among the chief of them competition for scarce resources. Experts in political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet …  we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century on to the back of ‘religion’ and drive it out into the political wilderness.

This makes it difficult for an authentic Christian voice to contribute to discussions about conflict in our times. But perhaps no more difficult than Jesus found it in the conflicted society of his day.

And the joy is that The Beatitudes do not offer a mere sticking-plaster to the suffering scapegoats of the world. The beauty in the Sermon on the Mount is that it proposes a new way of human behaving towards others which, if followed, will introduce a new realm of human well-being, in the here-and-now, which Jesus calls The Kingdom of God. ...

 
- from my Remembrance Sunday talk, The Beatitudes - Christianity with its eyes wide open, today. Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence is my latest page-turner, highly recommended.

To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain

 Seldom do I read books which feel like real page-turners, but I've just finished a great exception to that: Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: How the First World War Divided Britain. It's a thoroughly engaging journey from pre-1914 to post-1918 through the lives of some of the most influential figures involved in the conflict, mostly on the British / Allied side but including Russians, Germans, Austrians too. The beauty of the book is in the way it combines the struggles of those in the trenches with those imprisoned facing firing squads for their conscientious objection; the way it demonstrates the remarkable strength of the anti-war movement in Britain and (towards the end of the conflict especially) in Russia and Germany; and the way that it shows how the war radically divided families. Among these were the Pankhursts, who broke off their suffragette campaigns, two to become leading advocates of the war, two to publicly oppose it, and Field Marshal John French, 1st Earl of Ypres, and his campaigning pacifist sister suffragist, Sinn Féin activist sister Charlotte Despard. A great book to read for right now.

The saints were not perfect

Some of us struggle with the idea of the saints as being outstandingly godly human beings. A friend of mine, reflecting on a time of deep soul-searching about his own life and faith, once wrote: "I needed to recover words like 'saint', the 'righteous' and 'prophet' from the religious ghetto where they mean long dead people who weren't ordinary like me. They did magic things, and God spoke to them in magic ways and theologians had buried them under mountains of words. I decided that the real, breathing men had to be like us if they were to be of any use to us." 

When we talk about saints we assume we're talking about the great people of faith. Those who put their lives on the line for their faith, those who made amazing sacrifices to witness for God. But we must remember that the saints were not perfect. That is something which our modern-day secular Halloween reminds us of: that all of us have a darker side.

- from my talk for All Saints Day, Matthew 5 - The saints as signs of contradiction.