HOMILY FOR REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
Everywhere you look in this beautiful Church there are objects to help you remember, in the stained glass, in the statues, on the banner of St Alban behind me, as we look around us the lives of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the saints are made present to us, lives that give witness to the adventure and beauty of holiness, lives that had their proper direction and were made radiant.
Today, though our minds are directed not just to the saints, but to those who gave their lives in defending our freedom.
Their lives, like the lives of the saints, point to the goodness of a life lived for others; of a life ultimately defined by a love which takes the us outside of our own small sphere of self-interest, comfort, and self-preservation, lives characterised by the love of which Jesus speaks, ‘for greater love hath no man than this that he would die for his friends.’
By remembering these men and women we make them present in some way to us. Some of you may have known them personally as friends or relatives, and others of you have heard about them. It is important that we speak about them. Some we speak of because we need their example and what they have done should not be forgotten, others because in spite of all they did they still need our prayers, and most probably a bit of both.
One of the reasons we seek to remember the heroic men and women who gave their lives in war for the sake of something greater than just existing, who saw more to life than mere survival, is so that we can be inspired by their example. Gratitude for the freedoms that we now enjoy is a part of the purpose of remembering, but, just as important, is the idea that our present and our future might be changed by remembering their past.
It’s one of the reasons in the Dominican Order we remember our dead each evening as we pray the De Profundis, as we name those who died on this particular day, their memory is kept alive and we learn about them and from them. That’s something you could easily do in your families too. It would be an act of love to do so.
Another way is to take more notice of the street names around you, or on a more personal level the ruins of the Dominican Priory in Sophia Gardens, . . . do you remember St Philip Evans and St John Lloyd as you walk past the Castle, do you remember what they loved enough to die for?
We don’t remember just out of historical interest, we remember because the remembrance of the past is powerful, and it is part of what makes us human. It’s part of why a battle has raged over statues in certain places over statues at the moment.
Both sides warring over statues, correctly understand that our remembrance of the past can change our futures, and that what and how we remember matters.
This truth is at the heart of our Faith, and it is why, everyday, the Church collectively remembers those saving truths, first uttered in the past, but which reverberate in our present. And the source and summit of our collective remembrances is the Mass: the Mass is the memorial that makes present . . . makes present to us the saving sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.
In the Mass, our Lord’s sacrifice and its saving effects becomes present to us under the sacramental form of bread and wine. The Catechism tells us:
The victim is one and the same: it is the same victim who now offers Himself through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of His offering is different. . . . In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered Himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner.
Memory for the Christian is powerful then. Memory makes Christ present to us.
Memory also changes the way we see. Our remembrance of the past helps us make sense of the present, it gives us the perspective that we need to see the present clearly, and our remembrance of the past gives us hope for the future.
But our remembering can also be painful. The pain of memories was something that came across forcefully when I recently watched the Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie en Rose. Some of you might be old to remember her and not just the war heroes!
As was poignantly shown, remembering can open up the wounds which are the cost of our loving, or sometimes of the failure to love or be loved. And I think it is important to remember that the Lord can enter into these too.
We live in a society which seems crippled by pains of the past. For many the answer is to seek therapy, to demand that punishment be meted out on those seen as oppressors and the purpose of what I say is not to disparage therapy, nor the demands of justice, but a call to remember the primacy of the sacraments and the power of the Holy Spirit in our need for healing.
We might ask ourselves as we prepare for communion today: Do we give Him an opportunity to heal us? Do we show Him our wounds? Do we say, ‘Jesus, enter into and heal these wounds’?
Because God is the great transformer. Bread that is not presented remains ordinary bread. Much in our life remains as it was, much stagnates, because it is not offered up.
I remember hearing once of a sacristan who dropped an altar bread on the floor when preparing for Mass, saying, ‘Oh, how I weep for you little bread, you were to become the most wondrous thing in all the world, and now dirtied by the floor, no longer spotless, you no longer shall.’ But that fate is not ours, yes, we have been dirtied by sin, we have been on the floor, but by the power of confession, the forgiveness of sin, once more we can join ourselves to the spotless sacrifice of Christ, and so with confession so easily available in this Parish, take advantage of it, and make your friends do the same!
It can happen that we struggle with certain weaknesses or sins, with character defects, psychological wounds, fear. All of this is material for transformation. Every sin can become a felix culpa (happy fault), every weakness a door through which God can enter into us. Every suffering can become a cross that saves us and others.
But the transformation does not happen automatically. Some small gesture is required of us, a gesture of sacrifice. The object must be lifted up and exposed to God’s transforming power.
I suspect a great deal more would happen in our lives if every time we celebrated the Eucharist, we would place on the paten something of our own, something that we know is directed wrongly and that therefore blocks us. It would help us to be more engaged in the Eucharist, it would also allow us to live more consciously, to learn to know ourselves better, to live more in the truth.
A healthy memory, then, does NOT mean that one forgets the difficult things of the past and remembers only happy events. Rather, a memory becomes healthy to the extent that it increasingly coincides with God’s memory. When this happens, we begin to see with his eyes and remember his work, his forgiveness, His mercy, His justice, and His love. We remember that our Cross is united to his Cross, that our Cross can be redemptive like his Cross. And our memory becomes healthy then to the extent that we surrender our past to God.
And I think it is in such a way, when we surrender our past to the Lord as well as our present and future that the words of the gospel I most frequently read when giving the Last Rites (Matthew 11:25-30) begin to become true for us: ‘Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’
It takes a certain bravery to remember, a certain bravery to see myself as I truly am, but it should not lead us into despair, for God is merciful, if only we’re brave enough to call upon his mercy. Forgetting can be a way of running from the Cross, but Christian love will not forget and so like Mary we dare to come to close, love enables us to approach places of suffering, not to flee.
A lady to whom I’ve been giving some spiritual direction, a lady who has known great suffering, some inflicted at the hands of others, some of her own making, and who has been away from the Church for quite some decades recently wrote to me about her experience of healing in Walsingham:
I can feel the change as I heal . . . the fundamental change was in going to confession. How such a private, intimate, and brave act, can be such an agency of change and self-determination for truth is incredible. You only understand redemption once you allow yourself to be forgiven. Yes, there is forgiveness of some sin in the Mass, but confession is the seal and covenant of your honest relationship with Christ . . . and yourself.
There was something powerful for me in that Edith Piaf film I mentioned earlier, when a frail Edith Piaf, approaching the end of her singing career, her body ravaged by the side effects of the medications to which she had become addicted, refused to go on stage until her Cross pendant had been found and she could wear it. This was more than superstition. Implicit in this, seemed to me, the truth that one who had suffered greatly had understood profoundly, that united to the Cross unbearable burdens, are no longer ours alone.
And that is why in our remembering today, we remember not only the sacrifice of our fallen service men and woman to whom we owe so much, but unite it to the living memory of the sacrifice of the Son of God on the Cross for us, the perfect sacrifice of love, balm for the wounds of our past, food for the present journey, and fount of our hope.
We trust that by remembering them, and by remembering the Lord that when it comes to the writing of names in the book of life, the Lord will remember both them and us.
Remember the Lord, and He will remember you!