Germany, Britain, Two wars, Rememberence and living with a shared history.

What follows is the text my address to seminar looking at, Britain and Germany: Our Shared History, it will take place in Munich in May.

Firstly a little bit about myself, because in offering this reflection on Remembrance it is important to acknowledge certain things about me and what I bring to Remembrance. 

 I was born in February 1967 towards the end of the twenty-second year after the end of the second world war. To the boy who grew up in the 1970s that might have seemed like a long time. To the middle-aged man of 43, 22 years ago seems like yesterday. A bit more context: Both my parents were born in 1943; both of them war babies. My mother was born in Tilsit, now in the Russian Federation, then part of East Prussia. As a two-year-old she was one of the thousands of refugees fleeing the Red Army as they moved west through an eastern winter. By contrast, my father was born on a farm in rural Kent.  
 As a child I was a member of uniformed organisations like the Scouts and the Air Training Corps, which my German cousins would have been horrified by, I think. As a young man I served in both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Yeomanry (a regiment of part-time soldiers).So you can see that upon almost my entire life, the shadow of the second world war has lain.
 In Britain Remembrance Sunday is about Remembrance and Thanksgiving. Remembering the dead and giving thanks for the freedoms their sacrifice has achieved. It is both a civic and military spectacle. Although black is very much the order of the day, this is broken up by the glimmer of medals, the colours of flags and of course the ubiquitous red of the poppies. Despite all of its sad associations it is a day that we Brits look forward to with pride. 
A pride that is easy when your cause was won and your purpose was righteous. It is a pride that I have never been fully able to own. Because, you see, half the combatants in my family were on the losing and unrighteous side also, it seems.
 A few years ago I was in a town in the north-east of Germany and I noticed a small memorial with words in Hebrew and German. “Zur erinnerung und mahnug” These words translated are “To remember and give warning” The memorial marked the site of the synagogue.
 I have to say that I share the same ambivalence to Remembrance Sunday. We are asked to remember the glorious dead, but surely we should also ask why they are dead. Every year we sing “O valiant hearts” written by a local grandee, Sir john Arkwright, and I quote from this hymn 
“Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war,
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind yourselves you scorned to save.

These were his servants, in his steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred son of God:
Victor he rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk his cup of sacrifice”.

Clearly here the sacrifice on the Somme is equated with the sacrifice on Calvary. Not only that, but it seems from this hymn, that the victorious dead have won their salvation through fighting for the right side. I have to say nothing could be further from Christian truth than this. I wouldn’t dream of saying it on Remembrance Sunday.
In the final verse of the hymn we find these lines:
“In glorious hope, their proud and sorrowing land
Commits her children to thy gracious hand.”

To me that says it all. The reason I dislike this hymn so much is not its lack of Christian truth but those final words are a sop to thousands of working class men who lost their lives; thousands more whose lives were ruined by injury, thousands of parents, wives and children whose loss all was due to a confidence trick perpetrated by the military industrial complexes of both nations.
The hymn is a way of pacifying what anger there might have been into a ritual of sorrow and pride.
 Could the same be said of Remembrance Sunday itself?
 In recent years the focus has begun to shift away from the two World Wars of the last century. My country has become involved in one very dubious war in Iraq, and in my opinion, a far more justifiable conflict in Afghanistan. On several occasions in most months of the year service personnel killed in action are brought back with great solemnity through the town of Wootton Bassett, and each occasion is a Remembrance Sunday. What I note about this is that we are still proud of our soldiers. We continue to wear our poppies on these occasions with pride. We give our soldiers our support. But many of us, including the most loyal, question our government about the nature and reason for those conflicts. We do so on behalf of our soldiers, sailors and Air-force personnel.
 A few years ago on Remembrance Sunday I asked the question What shall I tell my children about the wars – second and first? It is question that lays right at the heart of our shared history, My response is that I shall tell them about their great-grandfathers: Franz Teubler and John Fell, both of whom fought on the Somme. They may even have fought each other. They came back and my children are their descendents. But I will also tell them of Uncle George and Uncle Werner who remained uncles with no descendents because they did not come back.
 Remembrance Sunday can be about pride and thanksgiving, but we all may have something to learn from those words on the German memorial. Remembrance is also a warning. 
I will finish with a better poem than “O valiant hearts”:
 This is poem, written by Wilfred Owen, a man who knew only too well the reality and pity of war. It is soldier’s poem and perhaps a pastor’s too.
One ever hangs where shelled roads part. 
In this war He too lost a limb, 
But His disciples hide apart; 
And now the Soldiers bear with Him. 

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest, 
And in their faces there is pride 
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast 
By whom the gentle Christ's denied 

The scribes on all the people shove 
And bawl allegiance to the state, 
But they who love the greater love 
Lay down their life; they do not hate.

How many anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? Change!

It is pollarded oaks that live the longest. For up to 1000 years, every Autumn they sew the seeds of their own successes. By contrast, their un-pollarded cousins are short-lived. What lesson here then, is there for the Church of England?

In the village of Ramsbury, near to where I grew up, there was an ancient tree, standing resplendent in the market-place. It was the symbol of the Ramsbury Building Society, and my childhood money –box from the same Society had a picture of the tree upon it. Like our own Great Oak, it was hollow. By the time I was a teenager, the tree had begun to die. Everything was done to preserve it, but eventually the decision was made to cut it down. This, of course, created a bit of an uproar. How could this symbol of the village be allowed to die? The fact was it was already dead. Its branches had gone, and all that was left was a hollowed-out trunk. In its place a sapling was planted. – one that still continues to grow to the stature of its predecessor.
I think there is a message that may be hard to listen to, but never-the-less needs to be heard. There is no point in trying to preserve something that has become a hollowed-out husk of its former self. Pruning and pollarding perhaps postpone that hollowed-out fate.
I don’t know whether the Church of England has yet reached the stage of being a hollowed-out husk, but it seems to me that it is in great danger of becoming just that. It is over 500 years old and it can no longer touch lives in the way that it formerly did.
When I was training for Ministry I was asked when had I decided to go into the church? I answered somewhat pedantically that I had been in the church since 20th August 1967, the date of my baptism. In the end old trees cannot be preserved, and they go the way of things. No amount of preservation can preserve something that is both out of time and out of place. What’s needed is the renewal of new life, and that renewal can only come when the minister, that servant within ourselves. When we receive a service from anyone, we are receiving something from that which is good.
Trees come and go. So too do institutions. Let us not weep over the demise of old trees and tired institutions. Rather, let us continue to rejoice in the life that is within us, and the service to which each life is called. These are the green shoots of May, and these are the things worth nurturing.
Nobody likes change. That’s tough. The impermanence of all things is an unchanging reality. Not even the stones live for ever. Living things change by continuing to grow. Whereas dead things change only through decay.

Spiritual but not religious

“It seems that many people like to describe themselves as "spiritual," but, if pressed to define the word as it applies to them/explain what they mean by it, I imagine that they wouldn't be able to and/or wouldn't want to. That's incredibly frustrating.”
 These are the words of an atheist blogger and college lecturer, Miranda Celeste Hale. She voices a typical frustration felt by many atheists at the word “spiritual” and the similar word “spirituality”.
 So what do these words mean? The word “spirit” from which they both come, is usually taken to mean a non-material part of our personal existence and/or existence in general. In terms of its origin, it just means “breath”. Neither of these really helps us understand the words spiritual or spirituality. And, although these words look similar, they are speaking about different things. 
 I often hear people say “I’m not religious but I am spiritual.” Perhaps they mean that although they have religious feelings, and perhaps a belief in God and life after death, they don’t sign up to belonging to a particular religion or set of religious beliefs. So, saying “I am spiritual but not religious” is a less clumsy way of saying “I am religious, but I don’t believe in any particular religion”.
 So, if that is “spiritual” what is “spirituality”?
 If “spiritual” describes the person, then “spirituality” is a word that describes our way of being spiritual or religious. For instance, one might talk about a Cistercian spirituality, Cistercians were the monks that built the Abbeys at Tintern, Fountains and Dore. Cistercians live lives of silence, simplicity and solitude. They live their lives in silence. They spend a lot of time on their own. Their churches are very simple in design and even their clothes are made of un-dyed wool. In these three things they find their royal route to God.  
 Franciscans also live in simplicity and at the heart of their spirituality is a life of poverty combined with the service to others. That is their way of being Christian. 
 Of course spirituality is not limited to Christianity or even, some would argue, to Religion. There is even a little Atheist book of spirituality by a French philosopher. 
 So, spirituality is a way of being spiritual or religious or even non-religious. But I think it is also a way of living with reference to the big questions: Who are we? What are we? Why are we? and How shall we live?
 You might call it applying big answers to big questions in everyday living. Lent continues during this month (Ash Wednesday was 17th February). It’s as good a time as any, to reflect on those questions, and to apply our answers to our everyday lives.

Why Wilderness?

What often strikes me about the stories told in the Bible is the landscape, the wilderness in which they often take place. We are told about encounters with God in the wilderness. Moses led the children of Israel through the wilderness to the promised land. He received the Ten Commandments in the wilderness.
John appeared in the wilderness to prepare the way for Jesus.
Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. And during his ministry on earth he would spend time alone with God in the wilderness. It has been said that the God of Israel is a God of the wilderness.
In the wilderness you often find large skies and perfect silences. Such places speak of the infinity of the divine, of a God beyond description who cannot be placed into a neat and tidy dogmatic box.
We don’t need the desert to find the wilderness, any wild place is a wilderness, and any place we go to be alone can be a wilderness. It seems to me that we can find God in the wild places simply because God can be more easily found in places beyond human contrivance and preference. In the wilderness things are simply what they are, revealing something of the God who is what God is.
In the wilderness there is space, though not emptiness, this is a space like a baby’s mind, open to all the possibilities that God and or the universe have to offer.