Remembering atheists

There is a rather strange article published in The Guardian by Dan Snow in which he claims that a lack of a secular presence at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday means that the occasion could be diminished for many people and that they might stop engaging with it. It is a rather disingenuous article because what Snow is really arguing for is not a secular presence but the removal of a religious presence at the ceremony. In response to his arguments I would make the following observations.

Snow tells us that he first attended the ceremony as a child:

I remember my dad taking me when I was a boy. Pressed against the temporary railings, overwhelmed by the power of the British state’s simplest yet most moving ritual.

The author was 'overwhelmed' by the ritual he observed. So as a child Snow wasn't put off by the religious aspects of the ceremony which he argues are an intrinsic part of what takes place, rather he was captivated by it.

In the next paragraph Snow comments:

The leaders of the political parties stand side by side, their bickering stilled for an hour, the Queen in jet black, alone, bows her head with a mournful gratitude and then the veterans march past, obviously enjoying the chance to meet old friends and grieve for old comrades.

Two of those political leaders laying wreaths are self described atheists. No one steps in and says 'hang on, you ain't C of E you can't lay a wreath during this ceremony, it's religious.' Their presence and participation is a secular presence. As for the figure in jet black, the Queen, well she is Head of State and also Head of the Church of England, so unless she has developed some sort of Nestorian trick, you are going to need to find a new monarch to participate in the ceremony. And when Her Majesty bows her head I would hazard a guess that this might be more than an act of 'mournful gratitude', it might just be that she is praying because, as anyone who has seen her Christmas speeches of late will know, she is a woman of faith and prayer. Following Snow's argument there is no place for the present monarch in his new improved version of Remembrance Sunday.

Snow continues:

Yet for many of us in today’s Britain, this important ceremony is diminished by the dominance of a religion that fewer and fewer people follow. An Anglican bishop presides over a portion of the ceremony. His fellow imams, priests, patriarchs and primates stand by like also-rans and there is no sign of a secular representative.

Who is to be the secular representative, apart from the elected politicians already mentioned, that Snow would like to see at the Cenotaph? Who would command his and other atheists' approval? Richard Dawkins? Ricky Gervais? Polly Toynbee? Andrew Copson, who in case you are wondering is the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Society? Someone from the National Secular Society, whose membership is roughly the same as the British Sausage Appreciation Society?

And who are the 'many of us' who find the ceremony diminished by the participation of a bishop. Can Snow point to any research to support this claim, or is it based on the chattering of a few of his mates in the pub? Has a poll been conducted to show how the present ceremony is diminished 'for many of us'? As I observed earlier, it does not seem as if Snow's own experience was diminished as a child. Snow acknowledges that the bishop only presides over a portion of the ceremony so is he really saying that he doesn't think that religious leaders should participate, be present or even acknowledged at all? What of the sensibilities of the many people of the different faith communities in our country, including many of the relatives of those who gave their lives, who would then be unrepresented?

I could go on but want to finish by picking up on this claim by Snow:

There is a great danger that by letting a bishop dominate and refusing to admit a secular presence at the ceremony it will be diminished or even ignored by modern Britons.

Again I ask who has refused a secular presence at the ceremony and what is the evidence to support this great danger that Snow fears? Last year I was chaplain to the Mayor of the City of Chelmsford and as part of my duties I participated in a Service of Remembrance at the war memorial outside the Civic Centre. I was staggered by how many people attended. The streets were packed with representatives from the armed services, veterans and the public. I asked one of the Mayoral party if it was like this each year and was informed that the numbers had been increasing year on year. Perhaps this was because our armed services have been on active duty in recent years or it may be because of the approaching centenary and the renewed focus of attention. One thing is certain, the ceremony hasn't been diminished or ignored. I wonder what would have happened if I and the Vice Dean of the Cathedral had suggested we don't participate because it might put some people off attending? I can visualise the headlines in the local and national press!

This year I will be preaching at our Remembrance Sunday Service at St. Mary's. As in previous years it will be very well attended by many who are not regular church goers and some may even describe themselves as atheists. Representatives from the British Legion will participate. We have been approached for the first time by the Parish Council and asked if they might participate in the service and I welcomed that request. Hardly signs of a diminishing or ignoring of the ceremony.

I confess that I have a certain ambivalence towards Remembrance Sunday. I feel uncomfortable with the way it can slip into an unquestioning glorification of war. I was deeply concerned with the Prime Minister's suggestion that the centenary of the outbreak of World War One be commemorated like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. I see this Sunday, like Snow, as an occasion to remember the sacrifice of those who gave their lives. But unlike Snow, I also see this Sunday as a time of repentance for the sin in our lives and relationships that leads to conflict and destruction. And I see this Sunday as a time to focus on the Lord Jesus Christ, who offers forgiveness, healing, reconciliation and invites us into a new way of peace made possible through his sacrifice on the cross.

Love's Labour's Lost.

Spent a wonderful evening last Tuesday with the family seeing Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost at

the RSC Stratford Upon Avon. The play is not one I was familiar with and is one of the Bard's earlier works with what appears to be a very simple plot. However, the production is a delight. The story focuses on the King of Navarre and three nobles who determine to turn their back on romance for three years to focus on scholarly endeavours. No sooner is the vow made than the Princess of France and three ladies arrive and the men fall in love with them with hilarious consequences.

The director, Christopher Luscombe, places the action in a stately home, based on nearby Charlecote House, at the outbreak of the First World War. The production is like a cross between Downton Abbey and Oh What A Lovely War with a splash of Gilbert and Sullivan added towards the end. The sets are beautifully constructed giving a sense of real substance and history. In the background of the outdoor scenes is a simple broken fence with a few poppies growing, hinting at the more sombre wider context in which the farce takes place. The acting is, as always with the RSC, superb and some of the 'minor' characters almost steal the show, not least Peter McGovern as Moth whose singing is excellent and overall the musical accompaniment is perfectly judged. 

The play finishes on a downbeat note when the Princess receives news of her father's death and tells the King and nobles that they cannot continue their romances for a year. In this production the final scene has the men dressed in uniform saying goodbye to their fiancées, household and locals and then marching off to war. It is not as dramatic as the final moments of Blackadder IV but is almost as powerful.

There is much speculation because of the way the play ends that Shakespeare wrote a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost titled Love's Labour's Won. Of course we all know from Doctor Who that the second play was destroyed when The Doctor vanquished the witches in The Shakespeare Code. Luscombe's answer is to present Much Ado About Nothing as Love's Labour's Won, set back at the stately home at Christmas after the end of the First World War. We didn't see the second play but I can imagine it working very well and Berowne and Rosaline can easily be imagined as Benedick and Beatrice.

The morning after seeing the show we had a tour of the theatre and an added bonus was briefly meeting Christopher Luscombe giving us the opportunity to say how much we had enjoyed his production. 

Wreath row

Had a brief look at my Twitter timeline this afternoon to discover a row breaking out about the wreath laying ceremony to commemorate the outbreak of World War One. It seems that the Prime Minister had written a personal message for his wreath while the Leader of the Opposition had not. It didn't take long for some of the commentariat to begin attacking Ed Miliband for not caring or being incompetent. However, it seems that none of those laying wreaths, apart from the PM, had the opportunity to write a personal message and the hand writing on each of the wreaths looks identical. This hasn't stopped the criticism and the cheap political point scoring in the mainstream and social media. Is this where our public political discourse has ended up when even commemorating the war dead is seen as a legitimate excuse to attack political opponents? If you want to know why so many people are disengaging from mainstream politics you need look no further.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Slogging up to Arras

A couple of weeks ago we sat down as a family and watched the film War Horse, both my children had already read Michael Morpurgo’s book, and then we chatted about the First World War.

I learnt about the horrors of war not in my history lessons but in English. The War Poets captured, in a way no historian could, the horror and waste of life on the front line during  the ‘war to end all wars’. Of course the ‘Great War’ didn’t signal an end to conflict, its outcome doomed Europe to a period of instability which was the seed bed of the Second World War and so many of the tensions and conflict which followed in Europe. On this day, when we remember all those who died as a result of these conflicts, I turn to one of those great writers of the early part of the last century to glimpse again something of what so many went through at such great cost.

‘Good-morning; good-morning!’ the General said 
When we met him last week on our way to the line. 
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead, 
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine. 
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

The General: Siegfried Sassoon

And then a sonnet for this day called Silence by Michael Guite:

listen to ‘Silence; a sonnet’ on Audioboo

A tale of two homecomings

On Tuesday two planes landed in England, returning two groups of young men to their home country. One plane landed at Heathrow and taxied to a discrete area of the airport so that the men could disembark, away from sight of public and press. The area is normally used by royalty, heads of state and celebrities. The young men were transferred to a set of expensive cars, waiting to whisk them off to various parts of the country from  where they would travel on to their luxury holidays with family and friends. These young men are some of the best paid people in their profession, earning more in a year than most people will earn in a lifetime. In a few weeks time they will return to the work they love and to the adulation of crowds around the country. Household names, feted by the public and press, idolised by youngsters who wear their heroes’ names on the back of replica shirts.

The other plane landed at Brize Norton. Seven young men disembarked, taken to a group of specifically designed vehicles and driven in a cortege through the streets of the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett. No one saw their faces, nor their bodies because each of the seven had been killed in Afghanistan within the space of 72 hours last week. They lay in coffins over which were  draped the Union flag in the back of hearses. They were not returning to meet family and friends, not returning ready to depart on a holiday, not returning ready to take up their chosen profession in a few weeks time. The crowds who lined the streets did not cheer or chant but stood in respectful silence while loved ones wept.

The names of these young men, mentioned in the news bulletins for a few hours, will soon be forgotten except by those who knew them and loved them. They are: Lance Corporal David Ramsden; Colour Sergeant Martyn Horton; Private Alex Isaac; Private Douglas Halliday; Sergeant Steven Darbyshire; Lance Corporal Michael Taylor; Marine Paul Warren.

Two planes, two homecomings, two groups of young men who represented their country. And there the similarity ends.

United 93

There has been a plethora of programmes and films on T.V. over the last few days to mark the anniversary of 9/11. By far the best I have seen so far is United 93, a powerful film about the flight of the United Airlines plane that crashed before reaching its designated target. The film was shown on ITV and to their credit they showed the film without the interruption of adverts.

United 93 is a docudrama by British film maker Paul Greengrass and based on recordings, interviews and testimonies from many of those involved in the unfolding horror of 9/11. Several of the participants in the events play themselves in the film, giving the unfolding narrative authenticity and avoiding the melodrama of offerings like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre. The story begins with the hijackers preparing to depart for the airport and passengers going through the mundane process of checking in for an everyday internal flight. Knowing what is to come, there is genuine tension from the start in watching as late passengers check in and people make routine phone calls before take off. The flight is backed up due to heavy air traffic and there is a real possibility that it won’t take off before news comes in of the other terrorist attacks. The short glimpses of passengers reactions when the plane finally takes to the air are truly poignant because the viewer knows what is to come.

The film depicts the reactions to the unfolding horror from several perspectives; the passengers and crew of the plane, air traffic controllers and the military . What emerges is the chaos and confusion as well as the inability to comprehend what is happening and how to respond. Some of the most effective scenes are the reaction shots as controllers watch the second plane crashing into the World Trade Centre; no one can quite believe what they are watching and all are struck dumb as the fireball envelopes the top of the tower.

The later half of the film focuses on the events inside United 93 during its last few minutes in the air. There is a certain amount of speculation as to exactly what happened but much of the story is pieced together from the phone calls to loved ones made by the passengers. It gradually dawns on the captive passengers that this is not a straightforward hijacking as they hear news of the Trade Centre attacks and the explosion at the Pentagon. The decision to try and retake the plane is no gung-ho act of bravado typical of Hollywood blockbusters, but the hesitant conclusion drawn by terrified men and women who see no alternative course of action. The last few moments are truly harrowing as the passengers almost succeed in over powering the hijackers before the all too familiar final event.

From start to finish United 93 maintains an almost unbearable tension, remarkable for a film in which the ending is so well known. The routine of the flight, the ordinariness of the passengers, the disbelief and confusion of those responding to the unthinkable, the breakdown of communication between the authorities and uncertainty about how to react, all effect a realism seldom achieved on the big or small screen. United 93 comes as close as any film can in creating a fitting tribute to those caught up directly in the tragedy of 9/11.

holy land reflections (5) - dark fog

An excellent piece in The Guardian this morning written by Paul Kaye: A dark fog has enveloped us. 'When a rocket killed his mother-in-law in Israel, actor Paul Kaye was appalled by the celebrations in Gaza. Six months on, he feels a different kind of despair'.

Kaye powerfully conveys something of the complexity of the situation in the Holy Land and the conflicting responses evoked by the Hamas' shelling of Israel and Israel's military response. He concludes the article with the following:

'At Shuli's funeral last May, her son Jonathon, my brother-in-law, gave a speech. "Where are the doves?" he asked. "What is this land worth without someone with a vision? Nothing. Without doves it wasn't worth the struggle." Jonny is 34. He's an army reservist who is studying to be a neurologist and has a two-year-old son called Boaz. He didn't scream for blood at his mother's graveside, he screamed for peace.

In our house we have our own thinking to do. My eldest son, Jordy, has Israeli citizenship and in two years he will have to choose either to relinquish that citizenship or to fight in the Israeli army. It can be only his choice. But, unlike the Palestinians in Gaza, at least he has one.'

war, what is it good for?

There are a few clips from film, television and radio which come to my mind when thinking about war and its toll on human beings. The opening scenes from Saving Private Ryan portraying the Battle for Omaha Beach during the D-Day Landings; the final scene from the last episode of Blackadder Goes Forth as Blackadder and his troops go over the top of their trench and bleed into a field of poppies; Fergal Keane’s description of bodies being tossed across the Rusomo Falls, victims of the horrors of Rwanda, broadcast in A Letter From Africa.

However, one of the most powerful descriptions I have encountered is from Siegfried Sasoon’s Out In No-Man’s-Land taken from The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. I first read this piece of prose in 1982 as the Falklands War was getting under way.

Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed that place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives. Such insights must be taken for granted, I thought, as I gasped and slithered and stumbled with my disconsolate crew. Floating on the surface of the flooded trench was the mask of a human face which had detached itself from the skull.