Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!

Last week's destruction of Nimrud by Daesh-IS is nothing less than a calamity.

Nimrud is a very ancient Assyrian site. The city was founded in the 2^nd millennium BC, and became the capital of the mighty Assyrian empire in the 9^th century under its legendary king Ashurnasirpal II. His palace was one of the most magnificent buildings of its age. You can see for yourself by going to the marvellous Assyrian Galleries in the British Museum (or by visiting the website www.britishmuseum.org). Two whole rooms are dedicated to Nimrud including the famous palace reliefs. They show in amazing detail the kind of activities that kings liked to engage in such as battles, lion-hunts, chariot rides and sacrifices. From Nimrud king Tiglath-Pileser III launched his campaign to overrun the kingdom of Israel in 721 BC. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold; his cohorts were gleaming with silver and gold wrote Byron. It was the end for Israel. Twenty years later, when the capital had been moved to Nineveh, the Assyrians attacked again, this time the southern kingdom of Judah. The palace reliefs showing the siege of Lachish are among the Museum’s most precious treasures.

One of the Nimrud sculptures in the galleries is a statue of a winged lion. It was one of a pair that stood at the entrance to Ashurnasirpal’s throne-room. Because the king was seen as a divine figure, this room was the most sacred space in the palace complex. The carved lamassu, as they were called, had a ritual, protective function. The lion’s strength and the eagle’s wings together symbolised keeping chaos at bay. By defending the space against the demonic, they kept it as a ritually safe place where the gods could do business with the king and through him with the people whose sacred representative he was.

Some sculptures from that era survived in situ at Nimrud until last week. They must have been a magnificent sight. Not now. Even its famous winged lions and bulls have not been able to protect it against the power of the bulldozer. IS has said that it has levelled it. We needn’t doubt that they have razed its walls and buildings, ground its peerless sculptures and decorations into dust. They claim that these relics of an ancient civilisation are idolatrous. They are an affront to Islam with its prohibition of images; whatever is pre-Islamic must be destroyed. They glory in the iconoclastic project of erasing every survival, every trace, every memory of what is seen as subverting the purity of monotheism. It is an act of cultural cleansing. It's a crime against humanity. And it's heart breaking.  

How do you measure the value of heritage as against the value of human life? 

I've learned a little about the human and spiritual significance of heritage, having lived and worked in the Durham World Heritage Site these past 12 years. It has raised for me the sharp question about whether we shouldn't have an uneasy conscience about investing too much in ancient stones. We no doubt regret the loss of Nimrud, but shouldn’t we care more about the human beings and communities of Iraq and Syria who have been treated so cruelly? Isn’t the life of even one man or woman or child worth more than all the treasures of antiquity?

As soon as I pose the question that way, I see that it’s based on a false premise. It's not either-or: each is part of the other. The callous treatment of Iraq and Syria’s heritage is just another aspect of a regime that is callous in every other respect. Nothing is sacred to it except its own corrupted version of faith, its concept of a hideous deity whose pleasure is to exact vengeance. The destruction of heritage with all that it symbolises of human life, culture and achievement is just another expression of this murderous world-view. It is hardly the first time. Iconoclasts have flourished in many periods of history. In the 20th century, precisely this was true of Nazi Germany with its hatred of all that was not Aryan. The book-burnings, the re-writing of history, the suppression of ‘decadent’ art and culture were part and parcel of the terror, the deportations and the extermination camps. Where life is cheap, so are civilisation and heritage. These too become the objects of wrath and revenge. There is nothing new under the sun.

We have wept for many months for the victims of this tragedy that is being played out in the lands of the ancient near east. We would not have believed the cruelty inflicted on so many innocent victims if we had not seen it on our screens with our own eyes. The world seems powerless to stop it. ‘Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!’ And desperate is what it seems, when the lone and level sands stretch far away over the bodies of murdered victims and the vanishing human traces of millennia. But Ozymandias himself had become a mere memory in Shelley’s sonnet, his impotent toppled colossus a symbol of how all principalities and powers fall in time. There is a reign we look for that will be the judgment of all the cruelties and corruptions of human systems. Only this kingdom lasts for ever.

Meanwhile, we can still visit the Assyrian Galleries in London and wonder at the treasures from Nimrud. But for me, it will be with a deeper sense of the tears in things. The Assyrian empire was itself a theatre of cruelty: the atrocities of Ashurnasirpal were legendary. These ancient artefacts already speak of terror from the past. Now they speak of a terror of today that is the daily experience of ordinary people in Iraq and Syria. The palace reliefs, sculptures and winged lions mustn’t leave us untouched. They should evoke our lament and compassion, return us to the work of prayer and action on behalf of people we must go on holding in our hearts.

Valuing heritage must always mean reverencing human life, showing our solidarity with all of humanity past and present, especially the suffering peoples of all ages. If we don't cherish the memory of the past and try to understand it, perhaps there's something missing from our care for the victims of the present. Good remembering is a symbol of our capacity to be humane. It should excite our social conscience because at heart it is always about people. Those who despise it show us what their values really are.

At least no one can destroy the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Germany: thoughts on Remembrance Sunday

The week Coventry will mark its most significant anniversary of modern times. On the night of 14 November 1940 the German Luftwaffe sent 515 bombers over the medieval city and destroyed it. The operation was code-named 'Moonlight Sonata'. 568 people are known to have perished. The Cathedral was reduced to a ruin. 

50 years later, I was on the staff of the 'new' Cathedral. It fell to me to devise an act of worship to commemorate the city's destruction. It was a big challenge because the service was bound to be heavily freighted with symbolism. Many of those who would be attending were survivors of that terrible night. They had lost members of their families and seen their homes destroyed in the firestorm. Listening to their stories would be the key to understanding what we needed to do in the light of how they remembered half a century after the event and what meanings they attached to it. 

For me, an unforgettable focus of the service lay in its two principal guests: the President of the newly united Germany Richard von Weizsäcker, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Because of the central place Coventry Cathedral has always given to forgiveness and reconciliation, we wanted to explore how these senior representatives of Germany and the UK might publicly recognise each other's presence during the service. After months of negotiation, it was agreed that there would be a simple exchange of symbolic gifts representing our two nations, a handshake, and a form of words for each of them that included the prayer 'May God bless the people of your country'. You can imagine the power of that moment: so small in scale, so huge in significance. 

Earlier that day in the ruins, another remarkable event had taken place. It was unplanned: only a few people were there to witness it. A Luftwaffe pilot who had flown a bomber over Coventry in 1940 had decided to come to the commemoration. By then of course, he was an elderly man. He arrived alone, walked up the nave and stood silently in front of the rubble altar gazing at the gaunt charred cross that had been made out of two scorched roof timbers that had fallen across each other during the fire. He took in the words carved in the wall behind the altar: 'Father, forgive'. And quietly he began to weep. One of the Cathedral clergy happened to be there, took him by the hand and embraced him. He said it was a transfiguring moment of his life, as if the whole world's history of alienation, bitterness, bloodshed and cruelty had fallen away. In that moment, reconciliation became real. 

I had these memories in mind as I watched the beautiful, poignant ceremony at the Cenotaph on TV this morning. I am always moved by it, but today I was especially touched by the Commonwealth High Commissioners laying wreaths, and then, for the first time, the Irish Ambassador - a marvellous, conciliatory gesture. But then I asked myself: where were the ambassadors of our allied nations in the wars of the past century? There was a powerful interview with a Dutch veteran who spoke of the huge debt Holland owed the British for its liberation, despite the calamity of Arnhem. I may have missed it, but we did not hear anything from the French, the Russians or the Americans. Are their ambassadors invited to the Cenotaph? Are they invited to lay wreaths?

And inevitably, the logic pushed me to ask: what about Germany? Is that nation represented in any official way in our Remembrance ceremonies? My experience at Coventry, not to mention many visits to Germany, suggests that it is not as difficult as it sounds to make small but important gestures of friendship on these vitally important national occasions. Germany has been prominent among our continental partners since 1945 in helping build the common European home that we share. Anglo-German friendships flourish all over Britain through sporting, civic and cultural exchanges. Is it not time to give this public recognition on this most solemn day? 

I don't want to be insensitive to the feelings of ex-service men and women, though I have never come across rancour or bitterness in any of those I have known. The opposite, in fact. But if you ask why this touches me personally, as well as being suggested by my Christian faith, it's all part of my family history. As the child of a British father and a German mother, I began to learn at an early age that nursing ill-feeling is simply feeding a poison-tree, to quote William Blake. My Jewish mother and grandmother had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis and had lost relatives and friends in the death camps. My father served with the UK armed forces but I never recalled him uttering a word of hostility against his former enemy. 

Today, 9 November, is not only Remembrance Sunday. This year, it also happens to mark the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1989. All thoughts in Germany today have been on the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the end of division, the hopes for the new future that opened up for the German people a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps this is the time to think in new ways about those who did us grievous harm but now count themselves among our friends. Not 'forgive and forget' - reconciliation is far more difficult and costly than that. But maybe, 'we can't forget, nor should we. But we can begin to forgive'. It could add an important dimension not only to what we remember today, but how to remember well. 

Jesus taught us to love our enemies. He prayed for them from the cross in those words quoted in the ruins at Coventry, 'Father, forgive'. Nothing less than this is needed if we are truly to heal memories. You could say that this is how we 'remember forward' towards the better world we hope and pray for and, on this day, publicly pledge ourselves to help build. 

More about Germany in the two previous blogs inspired by Neil MacGregor's magnificent series of programmes on BBC Radio 4. 

Germany - memories of childhood

Neil MacGregor's wonderful 30-part BBC Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation came to an end today. 

Germany has always been part of my life. My very earliest childhood memories are of Germany in the early 1950s. As I've written before, my mother was born into a German Jewish family. She came to England as a refugee in 1938. After the war my parents needed to go back to Germany to sort out the family's affairs. I recall that on one of these trips we were in an attic room in some modest B&B. I was lying in a cot which tells you how young I must have been. Through the little window across the street was a church with a huge copper-green spire. Its two bells were tolling a semitone apart; to me even as an infant, the elemental sound somehow bore into my soul, seeming to be filled with both an ethereal beauty and a profound longing. 

The fact that my very first memory is both musical and religious makes me stop and think. Then I remember playing with toy cars and bulging pine cones on the rush floor under the tables of our Gasthaus restaurant. I could make out the tips of pine trees outside, so it was either the Harz Mountains or the Black Forest where I know from photographs we spent time. Another recollection is of the island of Nordeney in the North Sea. I was amazed and not a little alarmed by the artificial wave machine in the local swimming pool, my first experience of reliable German 'Vorsprung durch Technik'. 

My mixed parentage made me a European: the first five years of my life seemed happily suspended between two languages, histories and cultures. My mother had become a fluent English speaker as a nurse in London during the war, and my father learned German when he met her. So our home was bilingual: I'm told I spoke German with a distinct North-Rhine accent (my grandmother was from Cologne and my mother from Düsseldorf). I was read to and sung to in German as well as English. My father found German music stations on the immense wireless set that stood proudly in the corner of the living room and whose valves took many minutes to warm up and start buzzing and glowing. 

What was never spoken of (after all, I was under 5) was what my mother's family had undergone in Nazi Germany. I only gradually began to piece this together and even now am learning about aspects of it that I had not known before. The first stirrings of awareness happened when I went to school. I must have picked up early on that in 1955, a mere 10 years after the end of the war, it didn't do to be heard speaking German in the street. When I was collected at the school gate, I insisted that we always speak English. Soon I had dropped German altogether. I never quite lost an intuitive understanding of how the language works, but in adult life it felt as though I needed to learn it all over again - one of many regrets as I look back and think about what has been lost.

As a teenager I fell under the spell of France where I spent my gap year. The nearest I got to Germany was in its eastern province of Alsace where I worked for a few months near the beautiful city of Strasbourg. I lived with a Protestant family whose Grand' Maman could recall German and French battle lines drawn on opposite sides of the road in her village during the Great War. Alsace had been part of Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to be liberated and French again after 1918. The church services were mostly in German, and everyone spoke the local Alsatian patois, a Germanic dialect incomprehensible to all but the natives. In a land so fought-over, it was understandable that attitudes to Germany were ambiguous. Maybe, I reckoned, you could be a Francophile or a Germanophile, a Romantic or a Teuton but not both.

Since those days I have been back to Germany many times to preach and take part in events in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Dresden (in the days of the Democratic Republic), Berlin and on the Baltic Coast of Schleswig-Holstein. I began to re-connect with the country, acknowledge my roots, and recognise my debt to it for the way it has shaped so much of my life, often unconsciously. This hasn't always been easy when its history is so coloured by terror and shame. 20 years ago in Düsseldorf, I went to the Goethestrasse where my mother's family had lived. It is a street of fine 19th century villas, but where her house should have been, there was a gap. An allied bomb had scored a direct hit; now an unlovely block of flats had been built on the site. It was a painful discovery (though if by some miracle my mother had still been living there, that bomb would have seen to it that neither she nor I would be here today). 

These are among the reveries that have been reawakened by Neil MacGregor's series on Germany. This blog started out as a response, but it rapidly turned autobiographical. Should I apologise - or is this part of understanding why I've found these programmes so stimulating - and, to my surprise, moving? I'll write a Part 2 that tries to reflect on some of the issues this series has raised. It feels timely. This weekend sees not only Remembrance Sunday in this Great War centenary year, but also the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1989, not to mention the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938 which many see as the true igniting of the Nazi Holocaust. Food for thought during the coming days. 

Meanwhile, you'll find all the broadcasts on the BBC iPlayer where I think they will be available for a year. Well worth tuning into. 

Edith Cavell: a universal woman for a £2 coin.

I have signed the nationwide petition to have Edith Cavell depicted on a £2 coin in commemoration of the centenary of the Great War. This follows the Royal Mint’s announcement of a first commemorative coin showing Lord Kitchener pointing his finger on the famous recruitment poster with its motto ‘Your country needs you’.

I am not against the Kitchener coin provided that it doesn’t set the tone for our nation's World War One commemorations. I understand that there is to be a series of coins issued during the four years of the centenary. I welcome this, but am sorry that Kitchener was chosen to be the first. Our country does not need him to blaze this trail. While revisionist historians (and Michael Gove?) may be reassessing the crude, uncritical jingoism popularly associated with his image and recruiting style, this is not a move that would have endeared itself to the war poets and others who dared as servicemen to ask uncomfortable but necessary questions about Britain’s conduct of the war.

Edith Cavell is an altogether different kind of emblem of the Great War. As a nurse, she understood that her vocation to care and heal could not make distinctions between victims of war. They all needed what she had to give. She saved the lives of men on both sides, as the German authorities were quick to recognise. However, her patriotism was a conviction no less profoundly felt than Kitchener’s. This was why she helped British and French soldiers escape occupied Belgium for the safety of the Dutch frontier. For this she was charged with treason. She did not deny that her actions had helped a ‘hostile power’; she was executed by firing squad at first light on 12 October 1915.

Her words to her Anglican chaplain on the night before she died have passed into immortality. But I find them profoundly moving. ‘I realise that patriotism is not enough.  I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’ It’s important to read that credo alongside what she was reported to have said to the German Lutheran chaplain on the morning of her execution itself: ‘Tell my loved ones…that my soul, as I believe, is safe, and that I am glad to die for my country’. Pro patria mori: ‘that old lie’, Wilfred Owen had called it, yet it was Edith Cavell’s truth – honourable because it understood patriotism within the wider, and primary, context of humanity itself.

To rise above the warmongering rhetoric that so many of her generation (including Church of England bishops and clergy) espoused called for courage and resolve. I believe that her restatement of patriotic love-of-country as part of love-for-humanity makes her a truly universal figure of the Great War. Those who were our enemies in world war will be able to honour this too. She can become a true symbol of integrity and conscience in warfare where, as we know, truth is always the first casualty. More than that, she can stand for the possibility of reconciliation, building a society in which human beings are aspiring to renounce hatred and bitterness and learning the more excellent way of love.

I am saying that Edith Cavell can help us to remember the Great War well. This matters because we only learn from our history if we can reach back into our corporate memory and converse with it intelligently. This means bringing critical insights to bear on the ways we tell our story.  It's a complex, subtle interpretative task. Some recent right-wing commentary on the educational challenges of the centenary does not seem to have realised this yet.

So I hope, with thousands of others, that we shall see this great Englishwoman soon honoured on a coin of the realm. If you would like to add your name to the petition, you can find it at www.change.org.

Christmas Past and Present: reminiscences and reflections.

It’s hard not to be nostalgic at Christmas. Memories of childhood Christmases come flooding back at this time of year. If I am at risk of self-indulging, take it as a sign that I am getting old. Some may want to stop reading now.

Our memories inevitably include the people we used to celebrate Christmas with, and who are no longer with us. My father died on Christmas Eve six years ago, so today is an oddly elegiac day, a bitter-sweet mixture of loss, thankfulness and those childhood longings we had when Christmas had almost arrived, but not quite. I remember on the day of his death thinking how strange it was to be mourning an elderly man while everyone else was celebrating a child’s birth. That same afternoon I had to get up in the pulpit in front of a thousand people and read the bidding prayer at the Nine Lessons and Carols. Its haunting phrase about ‘those who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light’: I still find it difficult to get those words out.

As regular readers of this blog know, we were not a religious family. But my mother and grandmother, both of German-Jewish origin, knew how to celebrate Christmas. Perhaps no European nation does Advent and Christmas more beautifully than Germany. My father was a long-lapsed Anglican, but he loved Christmas too, and our merged family traditions made for enjoyable, even magical, festivities. My grandmother would bake sweetmeats to die for: Stollen, gingerbread and Lebkuchen in a hundred different shapes and colours, huge piles of them that were not to be touched until Christmas Eve at sundown. She would create an immense herring salad that filled vast mixing bowls with its pink mixture of fish, nuts, raw cabbage, potato and beetroot that filled the house in late Advent with a heady unmistakeable aroma. If I ever scented it again, it would transport me straight back to Christmas in Lauradale Road in the 1950s. Sadly, it died with her.

I’m not sure what I thought Christmas was about when I was very young. I suppose it was a glorious midwinter festival of colour, light and gifts. I first came across Jesus at primary school. There, aged five, I got to read my very first words of scripture. It was my moment of fame at the nativity play where I had to read St Luke’s words from memory: ‘and she brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.’ Whenever I hear that verse read aloud at Christmas, there is a shock of recognition that I can’t quite explain. I doubt if many people can recall the moment their Bible-virginity was lost, but my memory of it is vivid.

The following year, there were voice-trials at school among those children who had made good reading progress to see who was capable of tackling the opening verses of St John’s Gospel at the end of the nativity. I failed miserably to make any sense of it. My best friend Andrew, who was brighter than me, got the part. How envious I was! But that too remains an important memory of the first time I heard a text read that was clearly portentous, laden with profound meanings that eluded me. I am preaching on John 1.1-14 on Christmas morning this year. I’m not sure even now whether I have fully understood it. It takes a lifetime to begin to plumb its rich depths.

One more memory. This comes from my first Christmas in the church choir at St John’s Hampstead. It sang to cathedral standard under its legendary Director of Music Martindale Sidwell, and my parents thought I’d benefit from a good musical education there. They were right (though the fact that the choir offered musical scholarships to University College School down the road wasn’t lost on them). As I’d never been to a church service before, the liturgy both excited and baffled me. I have never forgotten that first churchgoing Christmas early in the 1960s with the lambent beauty of the Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve and the exhilaration of sung Christmas matins (yes!) next morning. We sang ‘Of the Father’s heart begotten’. I didn’t know it but the ancient hymn by Prudentius soon became my favourite Christmas hymn, and so it has been ever since. Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour, let the world his praises cry, evermore and evermore. It still moves me deeply, as I know it will when we sing it at the climax of the carol service in Durham Cathedral tonight.

Festivals should help us cherish memories. Our new grandson Isaac, 9 months old, is with us in the Deanery to celebrate his first Christmas. He won’t know much about it. But his parents and grandparents, aunts and uncle know that to have a new-born infant in your home at Christmas time is something to treasure. And maybe, at some deep and hidden level of his little life, memories of light and colour, of warmth, laughter and love, of a magical and holy time are already being formed. Who knows? 

Poppies

I’ve read a couple of articles during the past week by people who have fallen out of love with the poppy. I don’t mean the flower itself, but the symbol most of us wear at this time of Remembrance. The argument is that its meaning has been debased into unthinking support for a narrow nationalism and the militarism that goes with it. Wearing the poppy is to collude with assumptions that drag our world back into the mind-set of conflict between nations rather than forward towards a global community of reconciliation and friendship.

I admit I have reservations about enforcing the wearing of poppies or regarding them as a kind of fashion accessory. The meaning must surely have something to do with what it symbolises for the wearer. For instance, on tonight’s Strictly Come Dancing, contestants were all sporting them over every conceivable kind of costume from ball gowns to tight leotards and skimpy outfits. It was no doubt well-meant, but it did not always look like a personal choice, more an expression of BBC policy that it is de rigeur not only for its own staff but everyone who takes part in a show.

That said, let me try to defend the poppy. The Great War gave our Remembrance rituals their defining shape. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies grow….’  The poppy seemed to resonate with the instincts of ordinary people to memorialise war in a simple way through a blood-hued flower, beautiful as a life laid down, prolific as millions of victims, short-lived as the young men who fell. There are not many invented symbols that are as eloquent as this. Its popularity speaks for itself.

It’s true that like any symbol, the poppy carries many meanings: loss, grief, the pity of war and the tragedy of wasted lives. But it also stands for pride and gratitude for sacrifice offered and service rendered. It is both honourable and necessary for every people to cherish its common memory of war in this way. Yet because the poppy focuses on the debt we owe to the armed forces, and because it is largely they and the ex-service organisations that keep remembrance alive, it is susceptible to a narrow militaristic twist. But this is not the poppy’s fault. The answer to the abuse of a symbol is to use it properly. That is to say, we need to learn how to remember accurately, and then ‘remember forward’ to a world in which we have learned the lessons of war. In such a peaceable world, there will be no place for the divisive nationalisms that inevitably lead to conflict. Ultimately the poppy is a symbol of our humanity, our ability to remember and to care.

Perhaps the poppy is like the Christian cross. That too is the reddened memory of suffering, pain and bloodshed. But it is also a redemptive symbol of sacrifice offered and new life given. Like the poppy, the cross has at times been grossly abused by being turned into a sign of blood-filled destructiveness in, for example, the Crusades that took their very name from it. It has taken the church a long time to wean itself off its addiction to coersive force. If it is doing this, it is through a deeper reflection on what the cross truly means: self-emptying, vulnerable love and the reconciling peace that flows from it.

Might a deeper reflection on the fragile poppy help recover the richness of its symbolism?  I stood in the Cathedral tonight at the annual Festival of Remembrance and watched the poppies drift down from the lantern tower during the silence. I was moved as I always am, by this simple but powerful ceremony. I do not think I was being seduced by it, nor was I colluding with anything. The awfulness of war, the honour of those who served, our mortality, the 'heartbreak at the heart of things', our agonised longing for a better world – all this seemed to be there. I doubt if this marriage of the collective and the personal could be done in better.

Good rituals and symbolism reminds us who and what we are as peoples and as individuals. They open the doors of perception, enlarge our vision and imagination.  This is more and more necessary with every year that passes if we are serious about re-making the world as a safer, wiser, kinder place. In that spirit I shall go on wearing the poppy.

Why We Need Holocaust Memorial Day

Next Sunday is Holocaust Memorial Day. So I thought I would blog a few reflections on it, partly to help me prepare for a sermon I am preaching in Oxford on the day itself. Last year I blogged about the big schools' event we have in the Cathedral to mark the day each year. But here are some more personal thoughts.

Lost in Translation is a book by Eva Hoffmann, published in 1989.  She was born in Poland just after the end of the war.  Her Jewish parents had been victims of the Holocaust who had lost family members in the death camps.  They were among the few survivors of a once flourishing Polish Jewry.  Her parents decided, like many of their generation, that there was no future for them in Poland.  So they emigrated to the new world to make their home in Canada. 

She had a dream a few days after arriving there.

I’m drowning in the ocean while my mother and father swim further and further away from me.  I know, in this dream, what it is to be cast adrift in incomprehensible space; I know what it is to lose one’s mooring.  I wake up in the middle of a prolonged scream.  The fear is stronger than anything I’ve ever known…. I try to calm myself and go back to sleep, but I feel as though I’ve stepped through a door into a dark place…and from then on fragments of the fear lodge themselves in my consciousness, thorns and pinpricks of anxiety, loose electricity floating in a psyche that has been forcibly plied from its structures.  Eventually I become accustomed to it; I know that it comes and that it also goes, but when it hits with full force, in its pure form, I call it the Big Fear.

This is the voice of a Holocaust survivor, in her case of the second generation.  It is the inherited memory of the ordeals either or both parents underwent during the Nazi Shoah.  It is only recently through psychoanalytic engagement with children of survivors that such memories can be unconsciously transmitted to the next generation.  This ‘colouring’ of life is frequently described as an unexplained shadow that haunts existence.  Although it is not restricted to the holocaust (the memory of any terrifying experience, particularly if endured for a long period of time, may well be inherited by children), the events of the Shoah provide the most extreme instance of it in the history of the west in the past century.

I recognise an echo of Eva Hoffman’s story in myself.  My mother was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Düsseldorf.  Her father owned a thriving business in the town.  He had fought for Germany in the Great War and was proud to be an assimilated Jew in a civilised and flourishing nation.  They were liberal Jews who observed Passover, did not eat pork and would not have been seen shopping on Yom Kippur, though they did not attend synagogue regularly.  They loved what Richard Wagner called in Die Meistersinger ‘holy German art’: it was a cultured home full of books and paintings and music.  The 20^th century was for them a time of optimism.  Then came the rise of Hitler.  Like most of their family and friends in the Jewish community that time, they did not at first see in Nazism more than a temporary aberration from the historical values of a great nation, a fit of madness that would soon exhaust itself. 

Almost too late, they realised that they must act to save themselves.  My grandparents fled to Holland, leaving behind family and friends most of whom ended their days in Auschwitz.  After the invasion of Holland, they went underground, being hidden by a couple of extraordinarily courageous evangelical women in Edam.  In 1945, my uncle who had been sent out of Germany before my mother and joined the Black Watch drove his tank into the town square of Edam, and calling through his loud-hailer asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of his parents.  My grandfather died shortly afterwards, broken by the war.  But my grandmother lived on to a great age, first in Holland and then in this country where she exercised a deep influence on all her grandchildren, particularly this one.  I paid tribute to her in a blog last year.

It didn't dawn on me at once that the Holocaust was part of my own formation.  My mother had married my father in 1947.  He was an Englishman she had met during the war.  He was a disenchanted Anglican who had discarded churchgoing along with short trousers and model railways.  He regarded religion as a principal cause of human division and conflict, of which the war was a recent instance.  Any vestigial faith my mother might have had was shattered by the experience she had lived through.  So I grew up in a home in which religion was not to be spoken about: at best it was an irrelevance, at worst, malignant.  But we did not speak much about the Holocaust either.  It was one of those ‘secrets in the family’: it was simply too painful.  At times the spectre of anti-semitism would come up, and I was reminded by my mother that as a child born to a Jewish mother, I was myself Jewish according to rabbinic law and while this was not something to make too much of, neither was it to be forgotten. 

It was only as I became a teenager that I became curious about my family’s story and my own identity.  Even now, I can only say that at best it is work in progress.  For instance, I was not expecting when I first drove my family through Holland on holiday in the 1990s how moved I would be to find myself in the country that had taken in my family when they needed asylum and kept them safe.  Again, when I led a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000, and we visited the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, I was not anticipating that I would be incapable of speech in the face of what overwhelmed me there, particularly the memorial to the millions of children who perished at that time. 

I began to understand three things.  Firstly, that I was a ‘survivor’, and that it was really rather extraordinary that I was alive.  Second, that the personal history I have been describing was for me a participation in the fragility and dislocation that so often emerge as the dark heart of things in a broken world, Eva Hoffmann’s ‘Big Fear’.  But third, that we must never succumb to despair: tragedy must always purify our vision and point us towards redemption.  If it does not do this, if it does not lead to a more just and humane aspiration for life, then the last word will have been uttered by all that is evil and destructive. 

This is why we need Holocaust Memorial Day. In the well-known tag, if we do not learn the lessons of history in this generation, we are doomed to repeat them in the next....and we have: in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Sudan and so many other places that have become part of the litany of places where innocents have been massacred not just in recent years but today. 'All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.'

 

The Durham Miners' Gala

Today the Miners’ Gala has taken place in Durham. 

The ‘Big Meeting’ has been an annual fixture in the Durham calendar since 1871.  Once upon a time when coal was king here in north-east England, there were as many as 100 deep mines in the County.  Now there are none. Yet up to a hundred thousand people throng the narrow city streets on the 2^nd Saturday in July to watch the long procession of banners and colliery bands snake its way slowly towards the race course for a day of political speeches and partying.  It’s a noisy and colourful affair, the sort of thing you don’t often see in sedate English streets.  This year’s Gala will go down in history because it’s the first time for almost a quarter of a century that the Labour Party leader has spoken at it.  Once it would have been death to a leader’s prospects not to have been seen in Durham on this day.

There’s a service in the Cathedral in the afternoon, one of the biggest of the year in terms of the crowd it pulls in. Many of these are not people you normally see in church. They come from all over County Durham from its colliery towns and pit villages (you must never say ‘former’ pit villages: these are still mining communities today and you will not be thanked for speaking of their identity in the past tense). For them, the Cathedral is where miners have come since the industry’s heyday to celebrate their achievements as working people and to mourn their losses in the pit disasters of that year.  Before and after the service, people go quietly to the Miners’ Memorial in the south aisles where the names of those who have died in mining accidents are recorded.  The sense of kinship and solidarity in mining communities runs very deep.

Half an hour before the service begins, the church is already full.  A silence descends, and from outside the Cathedral, as if from a far-off place, you hear a colliery band begin to play. The solemn music, usually a hymn, grows in intensity as it enters the Cathedral. A crowd follows the band quietly, respectfully, bringing up their new colliery banner to be blessed and dedicated.  This happens as many times as there are new banners that have been made during the past year.  For yes, colliery banners are still being lovingly created and proudly presented. It always moves me to see Durham Cathedral depicted on these noble banners as it is on some of them, including one from Burnhope that was blessed today.

You might think that the Gala is an exercise in nostalgia for an industry that is gone.  It is not this at all. What strikes you as you walk the streets or look round the Cathedral congregation is how many children and young people are in the throng, playing in the bands or walking with the banners.  This year, a school in Gateshead had created a banner, and they were here in force to bring it up with pride.  An increasing proportion of people who loyally come to the Gala year after year have never known working pits – just as most of those who fill churches on Remembrance Sunday have never lived through a war. But the power of memory is palpable, and one of the aims of the event is to keep it alive.  Even incomers like me fall under its spell because it is such a genuine celebration of the life and traditions of working people in the north-east. 

The Gala has a strong political agenda too, of course.  It was always an occasion for the unions to demonstrate their muscle, and still is.  The memories of the systematic and ruthless winding down of their proud industry by distant London administrations are fresh and still bitter.  I was a parish priest in Northumberland during the 1980s, just beyond the northern tip of the Great North Coalfield. You could touch the anger and hostility of miners who felt betrayed not only by the government but, sometimes, by members of their own families. It is there in Billy Elliot (set in Easington, the site of one of Durham’s biggest, most modern and most successful pits).  But the reality was harsher than that feel-good film suggests.  Brassed Off perhaps came closer to the heart of it. 

The preacher at today’s service was Leslie Griffiths, a well-respected Methodist minister who sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.  He is a son of a Welsh mining community and – no doubt because of this – judged the nature of the Gala perfectly.  His sermon will appear on the Cathedral website in due course so I won’t summarise it here.  But he is only the second preacher in my time to win a spontaneous round of applause at the end (the first was Tony Benn in 2003).  The crowd recognised him as one of their own and loved what he had to say. 

It all ends too soon, with Jerusalem and then another long procession out, this time to joyful marches played by the bands and much enthusiastic hand-clapping by the congregations.  As people head for the doors, a surprising number are too moved to say much.  For so many, the sense of what they have lost is mingled with fierce pride in what the working people of Durham stand for in their achievements past and present.  I am moved by that too, because this warm-hearted, generous community includes me in its celebration, and make me feel I too am a little part of its long history.  

When I first came to Durham, a senior priest said to me: ‘Michael, you will only understand what this Cathedral means when you have been to your first Miners’ Gala service’.  He was right. There’s a powerful feeling that today the Cathedral is being claimed by the people it truly belongs to.  Whatever bishops, deans and canons may say, they know.  And of course, they are right.