Poppies

Some of you will have travelled through Belgium and northern France across Flanders’ fields and the level plains of Picardy.  In high summer, the yellow corn fields blush with poppies. It is a smiling, happy landscape.

 But then you pass the war graves: rows of marble slabs aligned with mathematical precision, not golden like the lives of young men eager with expectation, not red like the passionate furies of the war they went to fight, but white and stark and cold with death. And you remember how those killing fields were ploughed up and liquified by engines of death, in the collective madness the world found it had walked into, the Great War that “slew half the seed of Europe one by one”. Sleep-walked into, indeed, a narcotic association that fits the black-shadowed poppy whose very profile seems to “hang in sleep”. 

A century ago the Great War still had a year to run. By then the association of poppies to the memory of the fallen had been made. We know how it was inspired by the poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

John McCrae its Canadian author captured the public mood. The point about the poppy was not just its colour that seemed to reflect the contradictory experiences of war: its passion and perplexity, its pain and its pride.  It was that poppies were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up soil where soldiers fell and the mud in which they lay. 

Fifty years earlier, the historian Lord Macaulay, writing about a 17^th century battle in Flanders, foreshadowed the symbolism. “The next summer” he wrote, “the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies. The traveller who saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet could [imagine] that the prediction of the Hebrew prophet was [being] accomplished, that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the slain.”  

“Flowers preach to us, if we will hear” says Christina Rossetti in one of her poems. She is drawing from today’s gospel: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Flowers stand for larger things says Jesus: good, noble, inspiring kingdom-shaped truths in the case of lilies, more paradoxical realities in the case of poppies. For the poppy is freighted with conflict, bloodshed, loss and lament, pride, our duty of care; our anger at this waste of human life. In classical myth it stands for the sleep of death, but can also represent immortality. So by extension, it symbolises our hope for those who have died, and our pleas for the better future we crave, our longings to live without fear of what tomorrow will bring as Jesus says in the reading.  

A flower is perhaps the best symbol we have of a truly innocent way of being alive. It grows because it can simply be itself. It flowers to please nothing and no-one apart from its own unconscious instinct. It realises its own life artlessly, effortlessly, without having to try. Mother Julian would have said it exists because God loves it. So it points to a love that is boundless in its possibilities. If only we could see it for ourselves, if only our world could live like that: joyfully, spontaneously, unafraid, open to the sky and the rain, the breezes and the sunshine!  For then, Jesus seems to say, we would be close to the kingdom of heaven. We would live and breathe not out of suspicion but out of trust. We would not succumb to worry but be sustained by a deep and lasting hope. We would feel after God and find him, would understand that we came from God and are going to God. 

So, could the simple poppy and the associations we make to it lead us into a new vision of life? “Strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness” says Jesus. That’s as true in armed conflict as it is in every other walk of life. It defines who and what we aspire to be: human beings who live and die purposefully, for good ends, not in vain. War is only just if it is in pursuit of those good ends: freedom and justice and the welfare of the planet and the defence of the powerless and victims. The young men and women of today who sign up to serve in the armed forces know that they may find themselves in some faraway theatre of war, or ambushed by terrorists, or helping victims of cruelty or natural disaster. They need to know why they are there, and how it will contribute to the world’s safety, how it will help establish a more peaceable order where human beings can make a better life for themselves. To be able to think these thoughts and frame an ethical and spiritual response to the challenges they pose is what makes for goodness and keeps integrity intact.  

All of us need to be alive to these questions if we are to remember well and honour the fallen. Only then do we do justice to their sacrifice. McCrae’s poem ends on a combative note where the poppy is not just a symbol of memory and pride but also of the intention to strike down the enemy.  If you had just watched your friend die in the mud of Flanders, you would understand that. But we know what the true enemy is: pride, lust, avarice, greed, wrath, envy and sloth, the seven deadly sins that stalk the earth and degrade our collective and personal lives? Unchecked, they will destroy us in the end. Isn't this what our brothers’ blood cries out from the ground where the fallen have lain and the poppies grow? We need to be worthy of them and construct the better world for which they lived and died. On this solemn day, the poppy can stand for our resolve in Christ crucified and risen to arouse ourselves to do good and serve well, to heal the wounds of history, and keep hope alive. 

St Mary the Virgin, Oxford
Remembrance Sunday 2017 (Revelation 22.1-5, Matthew 6.25-34)

70 Years after the End of the War in Europe

‘Greater love has no-one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ Those words we heard in today’s gospel are familiar to us from thousands of wartime graves and memorials from both world wars of the twentieth century. Our thoughts have been much occupied with the Great War for the past year. But 2015 marks the seventy years that have passed since the end of the war in Europe.  We must not forget that in the Far East the war did not end until August 1945 with the terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But here in Europe, on the 8 May seventy years ago, the bells rang out to announce the long awaited end of hostilities. We observed the silence here on Friday to remember the fallen, and yesterday the bells rang out at 1100 as they did in cathedrals across the country.

Today we can be thankful that since then our continent has been spared armed conflict on this scale.  We must not be complacent about this. The Balkans and Ukraine showed that war can erupt along forgotten fault-lines without warning.  Global terror poses new threats to peace and stability.  Our democracies must be vigilant in the face of far-right neo-fascist movements that reawaken old hatreds.  We must keep alive the vision of our common European home where our peoples are learning to live together as a community and heal past memories.  This vision ought forever to have laid to rest any thought that we could ever be at war again.  You cannot stand in the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral, or in the Frauenkirche in Dresden, or in the Marienkirche in our partner city of Lübeck where the shattered bells still lie where they fell during the allied bombing raids of 1942 without recognising this.  Each human life that was lost in the war on either side was unique and precious.  We do not forget that today.  Because of this attrition, our nations have invested in peace.  The memory of sacrifice demands it of us.  The work of reconciliation is how we best honour the fallen.  

What is a Christian take on today as we look back to the 8 May 1945? In our church, the same day is kept as the festival of one of our most remarkable saints.  Her name was Julian, and she lived in the fourteenth century.  She devoted her life to prayer walled up in a small cell attached to a church in Norwich. You can see a rare example of a surviving anchorite cell just up the road at the beautiful church of Chester-le-Street. Many people came to her for spiritual guidance.  She was famous for the visions she received, her ‘showings’. Julian wrote them down in her book Revelations of Divine Love, to this day one of the most treasured classics of English spiritual writing.  She said, you might almost think for VE Day: ‘He did not say, you shall not be troubled, you shall thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased; but he said, you shall not be overcome.’ It came out of the profound assurance that whatever life’s circumstances, whatever the trouble or difficulty or pain, whatever the hardships and sufferings, nevertheless God’s nature and God’s name is love.  So she wrote: ‘all shall be well; and all shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well.’

It is a promising saying for this day. On 8 May 1945, the message was that despite all that war had inflicted, people dared to look forward.  They dared to hope once more, dared to believe that all might ‘be well’.  After the pain, there was the prospect of healing; after the conflict, reconciliation; after the passion, resurrection; after death and destruction, life and love. No doubt it felt hard to say this out of the ashes of war. No doubt it was hard to say it in Julian’s time: the middle ages were a cruel and dangerous era for most ordinary people. There are times for all of us when it is still hard to say, and harder still to believe.  Yet Easter requires us to take this massive step of faith.  For the first dawning of Easter faith was a hoping against hope that God had indeed raised Jesus from the dead.  Easter faith dares to believe that God’s purposes of love can never be thwarted: all shall be well. 

This is our faith in this eucharist as we gather together on the first day of the week to give thanks once more that God raised Jesus from death and that he is alive forever in our midst and in the life of our world.  Thursday is Ascension Day when we acclaim that he is Lord of all things.  He fills heaven and earth with his presence, for as the psalm says of the Son of Man, ‘God has put all things under his feet’.  That means all nations and rulers, the world empires, every human family and institution, even, in the New Testament, the demonic powers of the air.  His reign gives us the strength to do his work on earth.  He is the Prince of Peace, so we make peace in his name.  He is the righteous Servant, so we establish justice in his name.  He is King of creation, so we care for the environment in his name.  He is King of kings, so we bring hope in his name.  And because this Lord of glory bears the wounds of the passion, we stand with all who suffer, in his name.

Our world is more broken than ever: the reign of the risen and exalted Christ is not realised yet.  That is to come in God’s time, be it soon, be it late. But the resurrection invites us into the movement of God’s eternal love for the world to play our part in embodying and living it in our own love for the world and our service of humanity. It is as clear as the day in this morning’s gospel: ‘this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ The greater love of a friend for a friend, of a comrade for a comrade, of one human being for another is the love of the Saviour for his people, of an incarnate Son for those whose lives he comes into our world to share. The laying down of our lives for our friends delineates the cross-shaped character of our humanity as the Spirit of Jesus is re-making it in his own image. It is the self-emptying, self-giving sacrificial character of God himself. It is how love manifests itself in the myriad ways whose truth and beauty we see all around us when people are good, and merciful, just, and kind, that is to say, when they act out of their true God-given humanity and recognise, with Julian, that in all things, ‘love was his meaning’. 

We have just emerged from an election. Our freedoms to speak, debate and vote are central to VE Day, because the war was fought precisely to resist the tyranny that overwhelmed Europe in the 1930s. Now our politicians must turn their thoughts to building a society where people flourish, the common good is honoured, and all are treated with justice and compassion. Peace-making and the quest for a better world order, about which we have heard far too little in the campaign, require that the voice of the weak is heard, refugees are cared for, the despairing are given hope and the poor are not forgotten. But the lesson of the last war is that nationhood, like patriotism, is not enough. Our flourishing happens as we play our part in the family of nations to whom it falls to care for the world and for humanity. This was the vision that sustained those who fought and fell in the war, and the architects of the peace that followed seventy years ago.

Mother Julian gives us the inspiration to turn our hope into the prayer that all may be well because ‘love is his meaning’. She says: ‘See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?’. This is what we see with our own eyes at Golgotha in the greater love God shows us as he lays down his life for his friends. 

Durham Cathedral, 10 May 2015.  1 John 5.1-6, John 15.9-17