Details

Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 01 November 2016

Hits: 2501

 Remembrance Sunday 2016

Beyond the Agony and Hatred

A Story of Suffering and Hope by Rev. Marcus Braybrooke*

Rev. Marcus Braybrooke

On Remembrance Sunday, it is right first to express our sympathy to those wounded in or bereaved by War. We think especially of the victims of Two World Wars, but sadly we also remember more recent conflicts and their many victims. We also give thanks for those who sacrificed or risked their lives for others and for those who labour for reconciliation.

May our remembering bring them some comfort and strength.

Today is not the time to discuss the rights and wrongs of past conflicts, but to pray that past sacrifices may both makes us grateful for the freedom we enjoy and renew our commitment to work for a more just and peaceful world.

I am so used to thinking of the Cross as a sign of God’s love that it came as something of a shock when someone said it is a sign of human evil. This, of course, is true. The cross is a symbol of human cruelty just as much as it is a symbol of new life.

It was at the church of St Peter in Gallicantu in Jerusalem that I felt most vividly the cruelty and torture that Our Lord endured. It is thought that this church is built on the site of the High Priest’s house, where Jesus was taken after he had been arrested. You go right down into a pit, probably once a cistern. It is there that a prisoner was thrown (as also happened to the prophet Jeremiah). There was no way out. The pillars still have marks of the metal rings to which prisoners were chained when they were stretched out to be flogged. In the pit below you could their cries, as you, as a prisoner, would have waited your turn.

Different methods of torture are used today – but there are different pits and prison cells where the cruelty and agony are the same. We can be thankful if we have been spared such agony, but unless, at least in our imagination, we have tried to come alongside the victims, our preaching of the Cross as a symbol of love may seem superficial.

When I was Director of the Council of Christians and Jews hardly a day passed without some vivid reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. I still remember someone telling me that two hundred of his relations were murdered in the concentration camps – to which there is no answer.  I have tried to take seriously the words of the German theologian Johann-Baptist Metz that ‘there is no God to whom I could pray with my back turned toward Auschwitz.’ If our words are to be authentic then they have to be spoken in the presence of burning children, whether in Auschwitz or Aleppo.

Yet, it was in Auschwitz that Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who was well known as a contributor to the BBC’s Moral Maze, found faith. I was on the Day of Atonement. Hugo, fasting, found somewhere to hide and recited to himself many of the prayers. ‘I sobbed for hours,’ he said, ‘I have never cried with such intensity and then I seemed to be granted curious inner peace… I was found by God… I believe that God was there himself – violated and blasphemed.’

I had something of the same feeling when I visited Hiroshima. On the way there, I did not know if I could face the experience. I was shown round by a survivor. She was six at the time when, from a clear blue sky, the deadly bomb dropped. She told me of the horror of that day – going home to find there was no home, looking for her parents to find she had now no parents – and then the physical effects of the radiation and the endless operations and as she somewhat recovered being shunned by many younger Japanese people, who wanted no reminder of their past.  She was a Buddhist – there was no sense of bitterness or self-pity. She showed me round the Peace Park and at the end by one of the memorials we were silent. She was ashamed of Japanese treatment of prisoners of war, I was aware of British responsibility for the suffering of the people of Hiroshima – but in the silence I was aware of an overwhelming sense of the ‘peace that passeth all understanding’ – that beyond the wraths and sorrows of the world there is another reality of a Love which holds all the world in its embrace.

Christianity is not escapism. It is almost too realistic to bear. We turn away from suffering in Aleppo and so many other places. The press admits there are pictures which are too gruesome to print. It is no wonder that so many who had endured the trenches or other wars did not wish to speak of it when they came home.  The Cross confronts us with the reality of evil.

As we contemplate the Passion of Our Lord we see him taking upon himself the pain of all who suffer. As Timothy Rees, who served in the trenches, wrote

Today we see your passion

Spread open to our gaze

The crowded street, the country road

Its Calvary displays…

The groaning of Creation

Wrung out by pain and care

The anguish of a million hearts,

That break in dumb despair;

O crucified Redeemer,

These are your cries of pain

O may they break our selfish hearts

And love come in to reign.

But we also look inwards and we recall our own selfishness and lack of love –our own potential to deceive and act with cruelty.  In other circumstances would we have behaved better? Yet in the midst of the horror there is the heroism. Think of the courage of a soldier under enemy fire risking his life to carry back a wounded comrade; of a fireman entering a burning building; of a mother jumping into a river to save a drowning toddler. Pray too for those doctors and nurses in Aleppo who still try to bring comfort to those whose limbs have been shattered by bombs.

All of us, the Bible says, are made in the divine image. We are called to grow up into the likeness of Christ, but we cannot do this of ourselves – it is only when we recognise our own potential for evil, our own failures and throw ourselves at the foot of the Cross and allow God to transform us. It is there that we know there is power stronger than death, a love, which no evil can obscure.

But the future is open. God does not compel, but asks us to choose between good and evil. Will we share with God in the redeeming of the world? Will we open ourselves so God’s love can flow through us into the war-torn waste places of the Earth?

As we remember to day those who died in war or in other ways gave their lives for others, we honour them and see in them witnesses to the Truth that amidst the darkness of the world a light shines – that God’s love is more powerful that human brutality.  The Cross is a reminder of human evil, but far more it is a sign of Hope, a pledge of God’s unfailing Love. From the cross Jesus calls to us ‘Follow me: Share with me in “preaching good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, release for the oppressed  and God’s goodwill to all people.”

Rev. Marcus Braybrooke, a GCGI Senior Ambassador, is a retired Anglican parish priest. He has been involved in interfaith work for nearly fifty years. He joined the World Congress of Faiths in 1964 and is now president. He served as executive director of the Council of Christians and Jews from 1984 to 1988, is a co-founder of the Three Faiths Forum and patron of the International Interfaith Centre at Oxford. He has travelled widely to attend interfaith conferences and to lecture. Rev. Braybrooke is author of over forty books on world religions, including Pilgrimage of Hope: One Hundred Years of Global Interfaith Dialogue (1992), the history of the interfaith movement’s first century, and Promoting the Common Good (with Kamran Mofid).

Details

Written by: Kamran Mofid

Published: 27 October 2016

Hits: 2824

Remembrance Sunday 2016

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME, A HUNDRED YEARS ON

A Story of Suffering and Hope by Canon Paul Oestreicher*

 Canon Paul Oestreicher

I could not be writing of the pity of war, had not my father survived the gruelling, seemingly endless months of the merciless Battle of the Somme a century ago. When I was twenty five and he sixty years old, my father took me across those battle-fields on a sunny day, through cornflowers and poppies. It felt like the golden rays of the sun were caressing the earth that had been drenched in blood forty years before.  We walked from graveyard to graveyard where men with a name that could still be deciphered were buried in orderly, endless and well-tended rows.

War graves commissions had done their work with respectful care. The inscriptions differed only in their language: French, German, English. Lives given for, lives taken by Patrie, Vaterland, King & Country: the best part of a generation, willing and not so willing victims, united in death. Yet walking across those fields that were witnesses to mindless nationalism did not, strangely, leave me in despair, but only with deep sadness for the grief of those who had loved each of the countless sons and lovers, fathers and brothers whose memory was slowly fading, very slowly. In the bright sunshine, nature seemed to have overcome death. But the clouds were already gathering over Europe.

This had been ‘the war to end all wars’.  It was not. The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that ended it had sowed the seed for an even more criminal catastrophe. My father at 19 had gone straight from school in 1914 to volunteer with patriotic fervour, like so many on both sides. ‘That war’, he often said, ‘left no-one unchanged. You either lost your faith, or found it’. It prepared the ground in my father, born a secular Jew, for a deep commitment to Jesus. Several more years passed before he, by then a young country doctor driving through the snow after visiting a sick baby, heard a voice saying: ‘Go and be baptised.’

From private to lieutenant in the 11^th Bavarian Artillery, the end of the war found my father in a field hospital in Alsace, just well enough to run for his life back to Germany, to escape being taken prisoner. Defeat was bitter, his pride in the Fatherland was still intact, but not for very long. In 1918 he fled from the French. In 1938, born of Jewish parents, he fled from the Germans. Hitler’s reign had changed everything. His mother would not survive the Holocaust, his mother to whom he had written dutifully, if only a few lines, every single day of the war. Those letters have now found their way to the new German Museum of Military History in Dresden, a museum that glorifies not war but peace.

The Great War had been pure tragedy. As the historians tell us, it was a war into which the European powers stumbled in their quest for supremacy. The great massacre had been senseless, yet both sides with their chaplains had been made to believe that the call to arms was not just service to their nation, but a sacrifice to God. I still have my father’s belt-buckle inscribed with the words Gott mit Uns. The British Tommies didn’t need that spelled out. They knew which side God was on. Both sides had recruited the same God to their crusade. The Psalmist’s words His mercy endureth forever might just cover even this unconscious blasphemy. On both sides, the young men’s duty was to kill and, if need be, to die. Such is the nature of war.

Commemoration of the dead after two victorious wars is still, in Britain, imbued with deeply rooted nationalism. That is not surprising. The red poppy is a symbol not just of grief but of national pride. Not to wear it has, in public life, become almost impossible. Patriotism demands no less. Its charitable purpose, to assist all war veterans, could not be better. I will give to that gladly, but wear it, no. Its nationalist overtones fail to take account of our common humanity, our shared vulnerability. Our ceremonies still fail to challenge our national pride. How telling was Margaret Thatcher’s anger when after the Falklands War Archbishop Runcie prayed in St Paul’s for the Argentinean dead as well as our own. Had he not been prepared to do so, Cardinal Hume had threatened to stay away.  That humanity is above all nations should be, yet is far from, obvious in our national consciousness. Is Brexit’s success not warning enough?

In Germany after two lost wars, the mood is very different: penitence rather than pride. In Berlin’s central act of worship on the National Day of Grief three years ago, its Remembrance Sunday, I, an Anglican pacifist with a German Jewish background, was invited to preach by the German War Graves Commission. Yes, the German top brass were there at the state ceremony, military band and all, with the President speaking only of the duty to be peacemakers. Could the British Legion have invited anyone like me?

My once chauvinist, right-wing German nationalist father had made the long journey before he died to becoming a liberal Quaker, who nonetheless continued to love dearly the Fatherland that had betrayed and rejected him. Patriotism takes many forms. In his wallet, close to his heart, he always carried the prayer attributed to St Francis: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

* Canon Paul Oestreicher, a residentiary canon of Coventry Cathedral and former director of the Cathedral's Centre for International Reconciliation, founding Chair of Amnesty International; Vice President, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND); and a lifetime worker for peace and social Justice.

Read more in My Coventry Story