It must be the case that my father’s preaching had a lasting
and formative influence on my life. Wherever we moved, it turned out that he
was always the vicar. I don’t really recall much of his preaching, but it was
part of the environment in which I grew up. Two things are etched on my mind.
One is his annual attempt to explain the Trinity. The other is his Remembrance
Day sermon in which he was fond of saying that my generation was the first in
modern times in which we had not been obliged to take up arms and fight.
Certainly, my father was in the army in the Second World War. He never spoke
about it. Yet, at the end of his life, when he was in his 90s, a package of
letters was returned to him. These he had written to a friend, during that war,
and on the friend’s death they had been returned to him. Why would that friend
have kept these letters for so long? We were allowed to read them. They not
only describe some of the horrors my father experienced, but also reveal the deep
sensitivity and thoughtfulness of my father, as a young man, as he pondered on
why we did not pray more for our enemies.
His father never spoke about his experience in the First
World War and it was an unsolved mystery to us as to how and why he had won a
Military Cross in 1914. Only recently I solved that puzzle. Working through a
chest of papers that I had inherited from his sister, I discovered an account
of his act of heroism. He took a shot to the chest, which bounced off his
identity tag and passed through his elbow. Yet he, as a young lieutenant,
together with his captain and sergeant, held together their troop of men and
fought on. Such was the experience of so many of that generation, many of whom
never came home.
His father fought in the Zulu wars, not at Rorke’s Drift (the
subject of the film Zulu) but in other actions in that area. His father also
saw action as an army officer. For generations young men have gone to war (it
was usually the men who fought, although in the C20th women were very much
drawn into the war effort). My father’s point, in his preaching, was that the
present era, in which the young have not had to be called up, is not what has
been normal life, historically speaking. He would go on to say that we can so
easily take peace and prosperity for granted, forgetting the sacrifice of previous
generations.
It seems to me that the current pandemic, that we are
struggling to cope with, is also not a divergence from normal life, but part of
what was accepted as normal in previous generations. My paternal grandmother
died of appendicitis, between the two World Wars. Penicillin had been
discovered, but was not yet generally available. To die of her infection was
not unexpected in those days. Reading the book Wolf Hall, the ‘sweating
sickness’ is presented as an expected part of life and something the rich and
privileged would seek to avoid by moving out into the countryside. My point is
that we have grown to assume that living peaceful, infection free lives is part
of our expectation in life, whereas (historically speaking) such sickness free
living has never been people’s normal experience of life. Two things have been
obvious for quite some time. Firstly, that a pandemic was coming (not if? but
when?) and, secondly, that the age of antibiotics (as we know it) is moving
towards its end. Yes, Covid-19 is untreatable by antibiotics (it is a virus),
but we live in constant conflict with viruses and bacteria and we cannot assume
that somehow we are entitled to a germ free existence.
So we return to normal. We need to treasure life, rather than
assume we can put off death until the end of old age. We need to value and
engage in the web of our relationships with one another (and our environment)
in the present moment. We need to see those relationships as the real treasure
and wealth of our lives, rather than storing up material wealth for a future
that may never some. Perhaps, above all, we need to embrace the reality of
death and discover afresh the Transcendent in life and live for that Eternity,
which can be grasped in the here-and-now of daily living, yet will find its
fulfilment beyond the grave.
