REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY, 2015

 

T. Noyes Lewis, The Place of Meeting. C. 1920.

The Armistice that took effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, concluded the bloodiest war the world had ever yet seen. The loss of life in the trench warfare on the Western Front was unimaginably horrendous. For example, on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army suffered the loss of approximately 20,000 soldiers: the most deaths it sustained in the field on any one day of battle before or since.

Observances commemorating the fallen on November 11^th, or the Sunday closest, began just after the Great War itself. In 1919, Pope Benedict XV granted an indult to the English Catholic Church, permitting a Requiem on Remembrance Sunday in addition to the Mass of the day.

Every year on this day in London, at an outdoor service of Remembrance, the Queen lays a wreath of poppies at the Cenotaph in Whitehall. A cenotaph, incidentally, represents an empty tomb, erected in honor of a person or persons whose mortal remains lie elsewhere. In that sense, it’s similar to the catafalque we have here in the church today, which represents the bier on which the coffin or casket would normally rest at a funeral.

On Monday, All Souls Day, we offered a Sung Requiem Mass for All Faithful Departed. Throughout the year, here at S. Stephen’s, we offer weekday Requiems for the departed of this parish, generally on the first Monday of the month. At our daily Masses we remember by name those of the parish whose anniversaries fall during the current week, as well as those who’ve died recently.

This privilege of being able to pray for our beloved dead has a deep historical connection to our annual commemoration of Remembrance Sunday, which comes from the Church of England. Before World War I, only a few extreme Anglo-Catholic parishes in England offered prayers and Masses for the dead. The Anglican mainstream regarded the practice with deep suspicion as subversive of the principles of the English Reformation.

The dominant Protestant theology held that as soon as you died, you were consigned immediately either to heaven or to hell. Those in heaven didn’t need our prayers; those in hell were beyond all help. So, as you lay dying in Victorian or Edwardian England, your religiously minded relatives and friends might gather round your deathbed, anxiously awaiting some pious word indicating that you had the faith necessary to get into heaven. Nothing less would suffice as comfort for the bereaved.

The Great War of 1914 to 1918 changed all that. Anglican chaplains who went to the front discovered that the majority of enlisted men had no Church upbringing and professed no explicit Christian faith. In the previous centuries of industrialization and urbanization, the active churchgoing population of England had become a minority of the nation. Here they were, dying daily in the trenches by the hundreds and thousands. Yet the lives and deaths of these un-churched soldiers nonetheless often exemplified what seemed basic Christian virtues of generosity, camaraderie, bravery, and self-sacrifice.

These observations engendered a crisis in traditional Anglican patterns of belief about death and judgment, heaven and hell. According to the received criteria, these fallen soldiers were unqualified, by their lack of an explicitly professed religious faith, to enter heaven; yet, because of their heroism and self-sacrifice, it seemed neither credible nor fair that they should be consigned eternally to hell.

This conundrum led to new openness among mainstream Anglicans to the traditional Catholic doctrine of an intermediate state, where the souls of the departed are purified and purged of their sins, and so made ready for heaven. In that case, there might be some point to praying for the dead after all. The prayers of the living might indeed assist the dead in their continuing journey into the fullness of God’s presence.

The practice of praying for the dead also addressed a profound psychological and spiritual need among the bereaved. The loss of almost an entire generation had a deeply traumatic effect on British society. According to historian David Nash, the survivors collectively experienced an overwhelming desire for some kind of continuing relationship with the fallen. This was especially the case when the government decided out of necessity to stop repatriating the bodies of the dead and began burying them in vast cemeteries near the battlefields.

One result was an upsurge of spiritualism. Bereaved parents, brothers, sisters, and lovers attempted to make contact with the fallen by means of séances conducted by mediums. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame wrote a book commending spiritualism as a means of receiving communications from the dead.

In line with traditional Christian teaching, the Church of England rightly discouraged these practices. The more liberal clergy condemned spiritualism as superstitious nonsense by which unscrupulous charlatans took advantage of people at their most vulnerable; the more traditional clergy warned that fooling with the occult can open the door to malign spiritual presences that are indeed real but best avoided and left alone. The deeper question, however, was what alternative the Church had to offer.

The answer was the traditional Catholic belief in the Communion of Saints: the unbroken spiritual fellowship of the Church Triumphant in heaven, the Church Expectant in purgatory, and the Church Militant on earth. Integral to this doctrine was the conviction that just as the saints in heaven pray for us, so we have the privilege of praying for the souls of those whom we love but see no longer.

Historian Alan Wilkinson writes, “In 1914 public prayer for the dead was uncommon in the Church of England; by the end of the war it had become widespread.” In a sermon in Westminster Abbey on All Saints Day, 1919, William Temple, the future Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury, exhorted the congregation: “Let us pray for those whom we know and love who have passed to the other life …” Death does not settle everything irrevocably. Growth continues beyond the grave. We do not pray for the dead because we believe that God will otherwise neglect them but because “we claim the privilege of uniting our love for them with God’s.”

On Christmas Eve, 1918, King’s College Cambridge offered its Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for the first time. The concluding petition of the well-known Bidding Prayer written by Eric Milner-White reads: "Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are for ever one." What must those words have meant to the vast majority in the congregation who had almost certainly lost close friends and family in the war that had ended only the previous month!

Anglo-Catholics of course welcomed this recognition of a practice they had long commended and they gladly offered prayers and Requiems for the fallen. Holy cards were issued depicting a priest celebrating a Requiem; above the altar was a cloud containing the figures of the soldiers for whom the Requiem was being offered. The painting on those cards was “The Place of Meeting” by T. Noyes Lewis, reproduced on the cover of today’s Kalendar.

Today, we continue the same tradition in another place, in another country, in another time. War is a horrible thing. As Christians we’re called to be peacemakers, to work and pray always for peace. Yet on at least some occasions the horrors of war have served as the catalyst for the Church’s rediscovery and re-appropriation of the riches of its own spiritual tradition. For that we may be thankful, much as we deplore war having to be the occasion of such a blessing. This morning, then, we commend to Almighty God the souls of all the fallen, trusting that Christ will bring them, and us with them, to the fullness of eternal life.

Acknowledgments

Key background for this sermon came from Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth, 2014, originally published 1978), and David Nash, Christian Ideals in British Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).