Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 11 November, Armistice Day

Christmas truce when German and allied soldiers met in peace

I hope you can forgive me ignoring the Sunday readings on this momentous day, 100 years after the end of the Great War in Europe.

It seems to me appropriate that we all stop, stand still in that silence at 11 o'clock and just let the memories, presence and power of the dead wash over us. As Catholics (and as Orthodox, Anglicans or whatever denomination we belong to) we do not believe in annihilation after death, the power of the book of Wisdom is rooted in our belief and the resurrection of Christ will not let human or life's death have the final say:

"But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them.
In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die: and their departure was taken for misery:

And their going away from us, for utter destruction: but they are in peace". (Wisdom 3:1-1 3) That phrase, 'but they are in peace is haunting'. I don't know about you but it chokes me up, those who have gone, beyond our reach are now, unlike us, at peace! It's magnificent statement and a profound image- it takes me into a vision of God's enormous care and love, of God's utter abandonment of any norms of true justice to rescue creation and hold it close, no matter what we may have done, not to let anything of us be lost! It takes courage to perceive the Most High in this way, don't get me wrong, I don't have that courage, but I sense and understand in my gut that God loves and loves us all profoundly. This is reflected in the way we live, and as we remember those who gave much, we are humbled to understand that in their frailty they climbed over the barriers of time and space so that whatever they did, whatever they managed to achieve no matter how they thought or felt, affects us still.

Let me share a bit of vulnerability with you all. I am now the last in my family to know and remember my maternal Grandfather in a real way, I have a sister who has vague memories, but for me his voice and person are all too real, and who I love (and that is used judiciously) very much. His death in 1959 left a hole which has never been filled, but it is a hole of exploration and discernment rather that of absence. I believe in my faith, that I shall meet him again! He was a young man called to the Somme, wounded there and then sent to join the Royal Flying Corps as a mapper and machine gunner, the odds on his survival very limited, but he made it!

My youngest brother and I have researched his military life as we have also my paternal Grandfather, badly gassed in 1917. As a child he often talked to me about his soldier friends in heaven, I even remember him say to me 'remember Robin (or little man!) I was at the Somme' but it is only now 59 years later that I begin, and only begin, to see the cost that he and the other Grandfather and all like him paid. The scars, the losses the pain and sacrifice they made are incalculable. I cannot match up to them; I do not want to match up to them. But the true reality is that all of them were forced and reluctant heroes.

Frightened, brutalised, thrown into a senseless conflict, they were forever traumatised.

I say 'senseless' with a heavy heart, for I ask myself, as I ask you, we honour them, but what have we learnt? What has their sacrifice done for us in a constructive way? The answer for me lies in love. There are others of my ancestral families who died in the 14-18 war, my Grandfathers survived, one I heard about as he died before I was born, the other I love dearly and always shall for I knew him and knew his love for me his first grandchild. He became a Catholic as a result of his experiences; he became a doctor because of the pain and suffering he saw. The fact I pay tribute to him, Philip Brookes, and to the other Leonard Gibbons, means a lot. It is that anamnesis, the remembering in God, which means all are alive, all are one!

It is as Edith Sitwell writes:

Love is not changed by death
And nothing is lost
And all in the end is harvest.
Is that not our faith in the resurrection?

Lectio Divina

Rabindranath Tagore: 'Death is not the extinguishing of the light, but the putting out of the lamp, because Dawn has come.'

Thomas Merton : Seeds of Contemplation: 'Prayers and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people. We may never succeed in this campaign, but whether we succeed or not, the duty is evident.

'It is the great Christian task of our time. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it. We must at least face this responsibility and do something about it. And the first job of all is to understand the psychological forces at work in ourselves and in society.'

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Catholic Chaplain for Melkites in the UK. He is also an Ecumenical Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. See: www.indcatholicnews.com/news/35821