A most challenging quest for humanity is to find a safe path through painful memories. How do we heal our memories? This very question applies to individuals. It applies, for example, to those who have been abused as a child. How do they heal their inner child? To those who have been the victims of torture, how do they heal their soul? For those who have gone through broken relationships and have been left alone, how do they heal their ego? For those who have been discriminated against because of their race or their ethnicity, how do they heal their identities? It is an age-old question, an age-old search! How do you heal terrible memories?
The same applies to humanity in its collective form. How do we heal, for example, those who have had their land taken from them, and have found themselves without a homeland? Or, for a place that has been invaded and taken over, how do they heal their anger? For those who have experienced genocide, who have had many within their own ranks taken from them, how do they heal their grief? For those who have lost their children as a result of gunfire or war or simply a lone gunman, as in the case of Sandy Hook, how do they heal their future?
The nations who have fought in wars, who have their soldiers in their graves, how do they heal their collective memories? Well clearly, the first step on the road to healing is remembering. And, by remembering, I mean, as a minister in Dunedin, NZ wrote, “re-membering”- putting back together that which is disparate and broken, taking the fabric and the thread of what seemingly are parts that are lost from our consciousness and bringing them together as a cohesive whole so that we can remember and recall. It is the bringing together the attachment of what has been divided to remember. The opposite of this is to dis-member, really, to tear apart, to break off, to excoriate, to deny, to pretend, and to not look for remembrance.
Remembering is the key to any form of healing, and remembering is what we are doing today. It is always a process of healing: our nation has so many key moments in its history that we have much to recall. As a nation, we have been formed and our iconography and our statues and many of the symbols of our nation have revolved around what those who went before us have done: of Passchendaele, of Ypres, of Dieppe or the Battle of the Atlantic. They are more numerous than we can count! Those who gave their lives and gave their souls for the sake of those historic moments are worthy of our remembrance, for they have formed us and they have brought us here, and without those moments, we might not even be free to remember.
Remembrance has been born in our very culture and our very ideals from the very first armistice. The very first armistice remembrance at the end of World War I occurred on November 11, 1919, a year after the signing of the end of the war on the western front in Europe, although conflict still remained in Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Buckingham Palace, at the behest of the monarch, felt it was important to have an armistice, to have a day to remember. As a generation, they had gone through one of the bloodiest and one of the most violent conflagrations in the history of humanity: ditches, gas, chemical weapons, hand-to-hand combat, hours of boredom, hours of terror, moments of strife that we could not in any way fathom or gather or duplicate unless we had been there.
The first armistice was not designed in any way, shape or form to glory in that war, but rather to glory in celebrating the peace. It was a moment of collective healing for the sake of it not happening again. Oh, how those who took part in that armistice must have been disappointed with the rest of the century that followed. Peace was their desire. Remembrance Day, which followed World War II and Veterans Day, which has followed in the United States, are similar ways simply to remember, to start or to continue a process of healing, a process of realization of who we are.
I fear that remembering has come upon some rocky roads in recent years. There are those who would rather dismiss the remembrance as if nothing had occurred or it is not worthy of it. Or, there are those that feel remembrance is in fact the celebration of war, which to anyone who was in that war was nonsense. Rather, the point is it is to be a remembrance of peace – but still some would dismember rather than remember. Maybe it is because of the new tyrannies that have come along in recent years: other wars, other conflicts. Many of those who have been part of our peacekeeping forces and our military forces have been involved in many things since World War II – from Korea to Afghanistan. In many ways, what happens is even their sacrifice seems soon to be forgotten.
Maybe it is because not everyone has the same shared memory. The memory that we have is that which we celebrate as Canadians. Anyone who is a Canadian has been formed or will be formed by those common memories – lest we forget! Maybe the fact that we do not remember with quite the same passion as before is due to the change of generations. Maybe it is due to the clouding of minds in the mist of memories as time moves along. Within each successive year, the cenotaphs get smaller in terms of those who fought in the two Great Wars, but there are others of course who followed them.
There cannot be a collective healing of nations and there cannot be the collective healing of the world if we do not remember what has taken place. There is a strong biblical mandate for that. Effie, who`s father ministered to many of those that were involved in World War II in this very church, read from Psalm 145, and this is one of the great Psalms of The Old Testament. It is known as an acrostic Psalm. In Hebrew, each of the sentences begins with a different letter within the Hebrew alphabet. It is magnificent, really, crafted beautifully, but in the midst of it, there are these words for today: “One generation shall laud your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts.”
To the writer of the Psalm, God had delivered Israel; God had set Israel free from the hand of Pharaoh and the Egyptians. From those moments when they had faced tyranny, God was at work, he heard the cry of his people, he listened to their plea, he stopped the wicked in their path, and he was remembered by and remembered his own people. For the Psalmist, there is no question that remembrance is remembrance also of what God has done: it is a recollection of the Lord`s goodness and grace, and one successive generation to the other only learns of this if the generation before passes it on to the generation that follows.
What is magnificent about this Psalm is the fact the fact that it is a Psalm of all time and for all peoples. Seventeen times in the Psalm the word “all” is used that the people may remember the justice of the Lord in all ways, the goodness of the Lord in all ways, the kindness of the Lord in all ways, and that he is a keeper of people in all ways: “All flesh will know of the goodness of God.” There is the belief then that in memory, God speaks, and as God speaks, memories are healed. But, memories can be painful – very, very painful!
Some years ago, when my father was in hospital as an older man, he found himself aptly in The Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Middleton, Nova Scotia. Attached to that hospital was a wing: The Veterans Wing, very much like Sunnybrook has here, the place where veterans can go and receive medical care. My father had been well known in the community and the surrounding communities, and even though he was a member of the British Army and not the Canadian, he was well loved by the veterans in that area. He performed their funerals, he visited them in their homes and their hospitals, and so there were some days when my father needed extra care that they implored the doctors and the nurses to allow my father to be in a bed beside them.
In the bed next to my father, there was a gentleman who had lost both his legs during the war. In July 1943, as part of Operation Husky, this veteran had been part of the 1st Canadian Infantry Division. He had fought in Ortona in Italy. The New York Times was later to call this “the miniature battle for Stalingrad” one of the bloodiest, one of the fiercest, one of the most dangerous battles of the Second World War. It was the moment when the Allied Forces crossed what was known as “The Hitler Line.” I asked him how he had survived fifty years with no legs, for our conversation was in 1997.
A land mine had taken his leg at the beginning of the battle, and his other leg soon had to be amputated. He had come home to Canada and had struggled. He had tried to find work. He eventually became a store keeper as new prostheses were able to help him, but he was forever in pain, a daily reminder of the sacrifice he had made. I asked him, “Is there any good news? Has anything good come of all this?”
He said, “Well, yes.”
You see, when children come in to see him, because children are very honest, their first question is “How did you lose your legs?” So blunt! So innocent!
He said, “It is that moment that opens the door for me to remember the history and to tell the story, and to recount what had happened to us so it might never, ever happen again.”
I think about the names of those people that Colonel David Temple read for us a few moments ago at the beginning of this service, and I wonder what their stories would have to say and what they would tell us from the grave: what their remembrances give and what they would have encountered. Their stories are painful, they hurt. Virginia Woolf once wrote: “Memory is the seamstress and a capricious one at that.” In other words, memories go through the cloth and the warp and the woof of life, and they are painful and capricious and they hurt, but without them, there is no healing.
Simple remembrance, just simply recalling the facts, can produce with it bitterness and anger and despair, and a tyranny all of its own. People in the past can be hated, nations can be downtrodden, old hostilities can be renewed. There are countless nations throughout the world that remember, but they remember for the sake of being pernicious and violent in the present. Remembering is not a guarantee of healing, but it is a necessary part towards it, and something more is needed.
One theologian who has had a profound effect on me is a man call Samuel Cyuma, who is a Rwandan Christian theologian. He recounts that between April and July 1994 – that recently – 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered. Three hundred-and-fifty more were killed in The Congo. Three million people were driven from their homes. Our Canadian General Dallaire has recorded much of the plight. Cyuma does another thing. He says, “I ask myself this question: if all we do is remember that tyranny, then the hatred will remain in our breasts, and they will be a source of continued violence between Tutsi and Hutu in years to come. There must come a point where we remember for the sake of healing and reconciliation.” Here, I am pleased to say, he has found the South African experience helpful.
He quotes Desmond Tutu, and he quotes others within the African Church who say the same thing: you must remember and never forget that there comes a point where you have to let the great pain go into the hands of God. For the person who has been abused, there comes a point where they have to find a place to be removed from their abuser in their soul. For nation and nations, there is a point in which we have to let go of the pain of the memories and find healing. The psalmist knew, and he goes on and he writes, after recounting that we should remember from one generation to the other, he says, “My mouth shall speak of God’s praise forever and all nations will know the love of God.”
We are Christians. We bring something to this discussion of healing. We desire peace, for we worship the Prince of Peace. We know we cannot forget. We know we must not forget. But, there comes a moment in the soul of every person and of every nation where they have to leave those memories in God’s hands. The great poet, Lord Alfred Tennyson, in the memory of his great friend, wrote these great words of In Memorium A.H.H.:
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowing dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Amen.