Remembering

This week the Junior Chapel carries the whole school in prayer into the serious business of Remembrance Day on Monday, November 11. Remembering is an essential and fundamental feature of our humanity. In the face of the dark and difficult things of war, our remembering of those who died is sobering and reflective. Our students sit in the very seats where former students of King’s Collegiate School and College sat before they went off to the miseries and the horror of the great wars of the Twentieth century, many of whom did not return. Our remembering them by name at our Cenotaph recalls us to the larger community of the School.

 

Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ day which follows immediately upon All Saints’ Day, itself the great celebration of the end and dignity of our humanity in the Communion of Saints. The Beatitudes belong to that remembrance as signalling the qualities of grace which perfect and redeem human activity.

 

Two literary passages come to mind. The first is from Louise Penny’s latest mystery novel, The Grey Wolf. All of her nineteen mystery novels focus to some extent on the fictional place of Three Pines in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Almost if not all of the novels make reference to the little chapel of St. Thomas in Three Pines. As often as not reference is made to the stained glass window in the Chapel which depicts in brilliant colours three brothers who marched off to their fate in the Great War and never returned home. Yet they are always there by way of the window which commemorates their sacrifice. “There was in the little chapel”, Louise Penny observes, “the stench of shame and the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable.”

 

It is an arresting phrase that belongs to our contemplation of the incredible horrors of the wars of the twentieth century, the deadliest and most destructive century ever, the legacy of which sadly remains with us. I can’t help but think of this phrase without recalling an equally powerful phrase from the great Canadian anti-war novel, The Wars, by Timothy Findley. At one point, a character asks, “Do you think we will ever be forgiven?”, meaning the generation of those who fought in the First World War and the immense carnage, devastation and loss of life and civilisation that it occasioned. Another character responds, “I doubt we will ever be forgiven. All I hope is - they’ll remember we were human beings.”

 

Yet to remember we are human beings belongs to the greater remembering to God of those who have gone before us. That greater remembering turns on the power of forgiveness, the motions of God’s love towards us in forgiveness and mercy. To remember is not to condemn but to place their lives and deaths with God in his infinite knowing and loving. This is the great teaching of the Beatitudes which opens us out to the summum bonum of our humanity; its highest good as found in the love which transcends and yet perfects our human loves. At the heart of the Beatitudes is mercy, the mercy which seasons and perfects justice, the mercy which points us to the true worth and dignity of our humanity. It is “the overpowering fragrance of forgiveness for the unforgivable”, an awakening to what transcends the divisions and animosities in our hearts and world.

 

Our remembering participates in God’s eternal remembering and forgiving of the follies of our world and day, of the sins and evils of our broken humanity. In that sense remembering is profoundly restorative. The Beatitudes recall us to the grace which perfects and restores what is broken and in disarray. They speak of what belongs to the truth and dignity of our humanity.