Reflection for ‘Till the Boys Come Home’
Sunday 30th November 2014, Corton Denham
A Service of Music and Readings to Remember with Gratitude the lives of the 43 Corton Denham men who returned from the Great War and have no memorials.
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.
If I had not been a preacher but a novelist I might have seized on this detail and constructed a story on it - maybe of heroism, his rescue of a young girl floundering in the drowning seas, or maybe of unrequited love, she lost to the sinking ship never to be seen again, leaving him with just the lock of hair to contemplate what might have been.
But I am a preacher and so my task is to give voice to one of the unspoken questions raised in my great-grandfather’s silences: where was God in all this?
Well, let’s just turn that question around a moment. Where is the Devil in all this? Some say that the devil is in the detail. I suggest that in the majority of the great wars of modern times the devil has been in our unquestioning devotion to the Nation State, an invention of modernity which has replaced God with nationalism as the focus for people’s faithfulness, and the driving force behind most of the major conflicts of the past two hundred years. In the words of the historian Karen Armstrong,
The secular war for the nation had given some of the participants experiences associated with the religious traditions: an ekstasis, a sense of liberation, freedom, equanimity, community and a profound relationship with other human beings, even the enemy. Yet the First World War heralded a century of unprecedented slaughter and genocide that was not inspired by religion as people had come to know it, but by an equally commanding notion of the sacred: men fought for power, glory, scarce resources and, above all, for their nation. [1]
And so, if the world’s peoples are to work out how to live in peace in the future we need to address this sobering proposition, that the nation is now our idol.
So where is God in all this? I propose that it is not the devil, but God who is in the detail.
A God of small things, who stood alongside people in their suffering in the trenches and other arenas of war, who then accompanied them home. Who stood with those at home, waiting anxiously for their loved ones’ return.
A God of modest things, whose great skill is to help humans to learn to be humane in the everyday exchanges of ordinary life.
A God whose kingdom is very much of this earth, as taught by Jesus to ordinary people through parables set in everyday situations - the workplace, the mountainside, the sea shore.
What did they bring back from the war?
A desire to move on, to learn how to live now in peace. To find love, to make a home, to build families, to apply themselves to neighbourliness and community.
I believe that God was with them in those details, as they went about the humble, but noble, task of making the peace.
I believe that god was with my great-grandfather as he overcame the trauma of the Lusitania and set about building a life for himself - building a home and family which eventually included me.
And so I invite you now, to take a few moments to consider the lives we are commemorating today, and other lives whose memories have been rekindled for you in this hour.
Consider what they brought back from the war; consider their stories and their silences, and what you learned from them.
Two minutes silence.
God, we give you thanks that you are with us in the details of our lives in peacetime; help us to hold ourselves close to you, keep us fixed on the humble, but noble, task of making and keeping the peace. Amen.
The Lord's Prayer.
Notes
[1] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence p.274
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