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Yesterday, on my way back from Holland, I drove through Flanders. The fields were bathed in sunshine and the autumn colours of the trees added a particular beauty to the place. It was not always so. Of all places associated with World War 1 and with War generally, it is Flanders which is the most evocative.
In part, this is because, every day, a ceremony of remembrance takes place at Ypres, under the Menin Gate - a memorial erected by the British Government in 1927 on which is recorded the names of British and Commonwealth soldiers who were killed in Flanders but who have no known grave. When the Gate was dedicated in July 1927, buglers from the Somerset Light Infantry played The Last Post. The local chief of police was so moved by this that he persuaded the people of Ypres to find a way of showing their gratitude towards those who had died and so a ceremony began one year later which included the Last post. Since September 1944 the ceremony has happened each evening. The Menin Gate has become not only a memorial but a vivid place of both remembrance and of peace. There were two main battles of Ypres in 1914 and 1915. British and Commonwealth losses were 220-240,000 soldiers. Of those 140,00 are commemorated on War Graves. The rest are unknown.
The Belgians lost 42,000 soldiers and France 50,000.
The Germans lost 220,000.
These are horrific numbers even when placed against the millions who have lost their lives in conflicts and wars ever since.
Ypres today is known as the City of Peace. Rebuilt after the War by money paid by Germany in reparations, it has, today, a close friendship with another town which suffered the ultimate horror of war – Hiroshima. Both were subjected to being the first to feel the technological power of war. Ypres was one of the first places where chemical warfare was used by the Germans, and Hiroshima, of course, became the first place on earth to feel the force of the atomic bomb. Both places have become centres of the Peace Movement which demands the abolition of weapons of mass destruction. So Flanders remains a symbol of war and also of peace.
It was on Flanders battlefields that the flower, which has come to symbol our remembrance, grew in profusion – the Red poppy – the symbol of the Royal British Legion. This single flower has become both a token of Remembrance and also of why war must be overcome by peace. Its place in our Remembrance story is not simply that it grew in the battlefields were so much blood was shed but also because it was made famous in that most moving of war poems, In Flanders fields, by the World war One poet, John McCrea.
In Flanders field the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
that marks our place;
We are the dead- McCrea goes on to say,
Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields.
McCrea, ended his poem with those stirring words which bid us not only to Remember the sacrifice of that time but also the fight we too must take up for freedom, justice and peace – today and always – here and everywhere, whenever peace is threatened and oppression destroys innocent human lives.
This year we meet against a background of horrific fighting in the Congo and our television screens are filled with images of people – men, women and especially children, bewilderingly caught up in a battle not of their own making but whose future is both uncertain and desperate. Alongside the Congo we can put Darfur, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine; Afghanistan and so many other places. We are especially conscious that in Afghanistan alone our own soldiers are in grave danger and this was brought home in last nights Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall and also when the local Regiment of Paratroopers in Colchester marched recently through the streets there to attend a special Church service to remember and pay tribute to those of their own number who have died or who have suffered horrific injury.
McCrea’s call to:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
Immediately finds resonance in the lives of those of our countrymen and women who heroically strive against the evil that grips so much of our world today.
It is this struggle that we remember today as we commemorate those who have paid the ultimate human sacrifice in wars not of their own making but in which they have contended not just for victory in the sense of one side beating another but rather the kind of victory that allows peace to grow. A peace we must all strive for if this act of remembrance is to avoid becoming an act nostalgia and be an act of both true Thanksgiving and of real Inspiration for peace.
So, I want to take you to another place I visited earlier this year. It is a city in Burgundy called Vezelay. Vezelay has a magnificent Cathedral made specially famous because it has been for many centuries a starting place for the spiritual pilgrimage made by thousands and thousands of Christians to the Shrine of St. James at Compostella in Spain. It was also the place when in 1146 St. Bernard of Clairvaulx preached a sermon in the Cathedral in favour of the Second Holy Crusade to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Infidel.
Exactly 800 years later in became famous for an entirely different crusade – one of prayer for peace and reconciliation. At the end of the 2nd World War a movement began within the Roman Catholic Church which is known today as Pax Christi –The Peace of Christ.. It began life as a crusade of prayer for reconciliation and healing to Germany from the spiritual and moral implications of 12 years of Nazi rule. 40 French bishops signed a petition calling for a joint crusade of reconciliation between Germany and France. This was followed by a moving pilgrimage. 40,000 people representing the countries of Europe plus Canada & the United States of America walked to the Cathedral at Vezelay. The Groups carried 14 simple, life-size crosses. Each represented a desire for peace and the Cross, the symbol of Christ’s victory over death and sin – the sign of Christ’s triumph of love and peace over evil – was the natural focus for this desire.
If you visit the Cathedral of Vezelay today you will see all 14 of them, along the walls of the nave – each one of them a moving symbol of the Christian desire to walk Christ’s way of love, reconciliation and forgiveness. But there is another Cross, even more moving than those 14. Near Vezelay was a Prisoner of War Camp in which defeated German soldiers were held. They heard of the pilgrimage and they begged to be allowed to take part. As reconciliation was at the heart of the pilgrimage, their wish was granted. The prisoners constructed a simple cross from the roof beams of a house destroyed by their own bombs. Together with the others they carried the cross to the Cathedral and in the North Transept of Vezelay Cathedral you will find it today. Unlike the other crosses it bears an inscription in French which translated reads
1946 GERMANY, Crusade of Peace. Vezelay.
At its feet there are always flowers. It stands powerfully for the Peace and Reconciliation desired, first for a Europe torn apart by war but also, through the continuing work of Pax Christi, for that striving for Peace which flows out of every act of Remembrance.
Pax Christi today, working with Human rights Groups, other Christian Churches, Governments and multi faith groups is an International movement working tirelessly to bring Peace to Nations torn apart by War. The movement recognizes the threats to human security cut across national boundaries and are to be seen not only in war but in acts of terrorism and tensions created by differing groups flexing their might against the innocent, the vulnerable and the afraid.
Pax Christi believes that long-term solutions for peace must be found by addressing the root causes of conflict and is striving at international and local levels to help people to find the truth which is contained in the lesson we have heard this afternoon from Jesus’s teaching on the mount – in what we call our Lord’s Beatitudes.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,
and Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy;
and Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
The whole of the Beatitudes are our Lord’s manifesto for a better, more just, more loving and more Godly world. The Crosses of Vezelay and the Poppies of Flanders are expressions of that same hope.
90 years ago this year an Armistice was signed. Today we remember especially those who made that Armistice possible by their selfless sacrifice and those who have gone on doing so through countless conflicts and wars. But peace will come and those memories will be truly honoured, not only by the Cross of Christ and the Poppy of Flanders, but also when each and every one of us seeks and works for, that peace which is the desperate need of our world today and which, of course, must begin in our own hearts - and so we pray:
Lord
Lead us from death to life
from falsehood to truth
Lead us from despair to hope
from fear to trust
Lead us from hate to love
from War to Peace.
Let peace fill our heart; our world; our universe.
Amen