The University Chaplain, Revd Dr Harriet Harris, gave this address to the four universities in Edinburgh on Remembrance Sunday 2023

The Readings

Micah 4.3-5

He will judge between many peoples

    and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.

They will beat their swords into ploughshares

    and their spears into pruning hooks.

Nation will not take up sword against nation,

    nor will they train for war anymore.

Everyone will sit under their own vine

    and under their own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid,

    for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

All the nations may walk

    in the name of their gods,

but we will walk in the name of the Lord

    our God for ever and ever.

 

Matthew 5.1-10

 

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

The Address

It is a sorry state that the world is in, that these blessings are so needed; for crushed spirits, deep mourning, injustice and persecution.

Today we are 100 years on from the first Remembrance Sunday at the War Memorial outside. The Memorial was unveiled in 1923. The son of Dean Paterson of New College, who led the Service, died in 1915, and his name was on the unveiled stone. As we know many more died after 1915: 88 thousand killed for every 1 mile gained in the Battle of the Somme, and to our horror we are hearing the numbers of war dead every day across the world, those in service, whom we especially remember today, and also civilians, whom servicemen and women strive to protect.

Remembrance Sunday calls us to remember things that are so immense: the suffering so terrible, the numbers so vast, our failings to make peace so catastrophic, that it can be helpful to focus in on one thing as a way of helping us take in reality and find our response.

Poppies have become our symbol, and while we also fall into discord over that, and our desire to be right is very strong, poppies at Remembrance have a tender history that can help us to honour the lives lost in past wars, and find our compass needle in relation to current conflicts.

Poppies were first associated with Armistice Day in 1921, three years after the end of the First World War, by which time injustice was felt by servicemen and their families. The Home Office had not repatriated the dead, and surviving soldiers were left too long in the field, and pensioned inadequately.

Poppies tempered a tone of victory-celebration to acts of Remembrance, because they invoked the cost of war and the fragility of existence. They were also a practical way to raise funds for service men in need.

Their poignancy is not only that they are blood-red, but that they grew in previously barren fields over the graves of fallen soldiers, because the earth had been churned up by war. The seeds were brought to the surface and exposed to light, and fertilised by nitrogen from the explosions, and lime from the shattered rubble of buildings.

The same had happened 110 years earlier in the Napoleonic wars.

The French wear cornflowers for the same reason. The flowers symbolise that life is tender and fragile, strong and persistent, and it takes its chances amidst our brokenness and humility.

The C20 Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, wrote

 ‘From the place where we are right

Flowers will never grow

In the spring.’

 ‘The place where we are right

Is hard and trampled

Like a yard.’

When the treaty of Versailles was drawn up following WW1, the Allies, so intent on being right, produced such hard reparations that they cultivated more death than life. 20 years after that Treaty, we entered into WW2.

Amichai continues:

‘But doubts and loves

Dig up the world,’        (Blessed are the merciful.)

Digging up the world, and we can do this by beating our swords into ploughshares, means that light and air, water and nutrients get in, and life can pull through; the cracks were people are searched for in the rubble.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Jesus spoke these blessings not only to give consolation when all is devastation. He gave them for our formation, to (trans)form us into something different from our primal fear responses. There is so much trauma in the world, and we feel it in our collective and individual nervous systems. We go into fight response (express outrage, march, shout) or fright (wanting to hide away, avoid, keep small, not leave our rooms), or we freeze (go numb, dissociate, feel powerless). All of this is trauma; it was playing out in London yesterday, and plays out in our campuses, and inside our own selves in different ways and degrees. Blessed are the poor in spirit. If we can start there, with poverty of spirit and broken ground, we can find the imagination to transform our interactions in ways that give us all a future.

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes:

‘Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by’.

Blessed are the meek: the cornflowers, poppies and blades of grass – they will inherit the earth.

I’ll close by Returning to WWI, in which our Acts of Remembrance are rooted, and the imagination of a young officer, Douglas Gillespie, who shared his vision in a letter to his former headmaster at Winchester College in 1915, from where he was stationed near the Belgian border.

“I wish that when peace comes, our government might combine with

the French government to make one long Avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea”.

“The ground is so pitted, and scarred, and torn with shells, and tangled with wire, that it will take years to bring it back to use again, but I would make a fine broad road in the ‘No Man’s Land’ between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot and plant trees for shade, and

fruit trees, so the soil should not be altogether wasted. Then I would like to send every man, [woman] and child in Western Europe on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra, so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.”

Douglas Gillespie was killed in September 2015, in the opening hours of the Battle of Loos. His body was never recovered. His

proposal of a Via Sacra, also known as The Western Front Way, can now be walked, thanks to what this young soldier could imagine, despite the devastation all around him ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’