SACRED MEMORIES

In Canada and throughout the Commonwealth, Remembrance Day falls on November 11th each year. It marks the end of hostilities in the First and Second World Wars (1914-18 and 1939-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). In the USA on the same date, Veterans Day is also celebrated with appropriate ceremonies. It is day of sacred memories for the dwindling few service men and women remaining from the Great Wars of the 20^th century.

“Sacred?” Is that the right term for terrible conflicts in which so many died. Not just those who served in armies, navies and air forces, but even millions more civilians too.

A book review in the Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine cites the memories of an American veteran of the Viet Nam War as having given him “the profound belief that combat is a potentially sacred experience.” That experience incorporates four components of a mystical event: premature awareness of one’s own mortality, total focus on the present moment, valuing the lives of others more than one’s own, and feeling part of a larger community.

By no means did every veteran have such an experience. Nor is the experience limited to veterans alone. Families and descendants also shared something similar. As early as ten years of age I was aware that my paternal grandmother and my father’s sisters felt that way about Remembrance Day. When the Vimy Ridge Memorial was dedicated in 1936, my aunts travelled to France to attend the ceremony. One of my father’s elder brother’s had died in the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. His name is forever sculpted on the Vimy Ridge memorial along with the names of thousands who has no known grave.

Another brother had been taken prisoner in the same battle at Ypres. Though he lived into his seventies, his three and a half years in a German prison camp ruined the rest of his life. Eligible for military service, my father was exempted because he was the only remaining male able to support his parents in their old age. So too was my future father-in-law.

I was too young to serve in the military in World War II. My older brother was wounded in the Normandy campaign in 1944. Several of my classmates did serve, however, and the chap who sat behind me in class died in the Battle of the Bulge in France while serving in the US Army. Since then I have marked Remembrance Day in the churches where I was pastor. Those services were usually held on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day. On November 11^th there is a community ceremony at the cenotaphs in each community as well as at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

My wife frequently reminds me that civilians too also served in our nation’s war effort on the home front. During high school, she spent three summer vacations working in various roles. For two summers she was a civil servant, the third she worked as a farm labourer in the Ontario Farm Service program. Those same summers I too was a farm labourer.

While I may quibble with these being “sacred memories,” I do feel that our work was as essential to the war effort as on the battle front.

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"KARMA IS NOT AN EQUATION"

That title has been plagiarized from the October 8^th edition of the Toronto Star. It headed a column on ethics written by a friend and colleague of mine, Ken Gallinger. Most likely, the headline had been written by someone else, as is the normal practice in the newspaper business.

Be that as it may, my friend’s advice was not to equate good behaviour with

blessings while also believing that bad behavior is inevitably punished. “It’s

obviously not true,” he wrote, “that people who do good always get good. But it

is true that people who are generous, kind, faithful in their relationships –

people who love, keep promises, work hard – tend to be happier, more peaceful

and more hopeful.

“They have friendships that last. They deal with adversity with more equanimity.

 They laugh in the daylight and sleep soundly at night. They do, overall, have more
 fulfilling lives ... even when the math doesn’t work out as precisely as we might
 wish.”

Was my friend being overly optimistic? Certainly more so than I would have been. Or was he contradicting himself?
His comments reminded of another article by a well-known Canadian humourist,

Scott Feschuk, in a recent issue of Maclean’s Magazine. He made the sly comment
that “these are prosperous times for pessimists.” Feschuk was writing about the
current global economic malaise and the threat of a double dip recession. For most
people this isn’t funny at all.

By sheer coincidence on this same day, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded to two Americans, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. Working separately in the 1970s and 1980s, they developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary mandated increase in the interest rate or a tax cut. By even greater coincidence, all this happened on our Canadian Thanksgiving Day.

Was it coincidence, or what our scriptures keep reminding us: a touch of God’s

almighty hand in the history of our times?

That is a metaphorical expression, a poetic and theological way of saying what the Bible takes for granted. God's almighty hand - aka Providence - is in all human affairs. Theologians struggle to find new ways of describing the same religious experience in terms of an expanded view of human consciousness without a literalist approach to biblical metaphors of that Transcendent Reality we call God. 

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Theophanies – Then and Now.

One of Cuyler Black’s biblical cartoons, (www.inheritthemarth.com) shows Moses coming down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandment stones and grumbling to himself. “Kill joy! Out of the cloud overhead comes the Voice, “I heard that!” That’s a delightful turn of phrase about the meaning of a theophany.

 Part of the title of this note could be reversed to now and then. That’s how some even very religious people think of theophanies. It is not just occasional, but rare and bestowed on very few individuals as a special gift. That is not what the dictionary definition states. A theophany is defined as the appearance of a god to a human. Note the singular. Usually a theophany is an individual religious experience a manifestation of that spiritual reality we call “God.”

 Just how theophanies take place is quite unknown. The Bible is full of them. In particular prophets have them and so become spokespersons for God. Because of the male bias of the authors of the writings we have collected in what we call our Scriptures, we have come to think of particular men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul as having such experiences. That is a pity, because there is no reason why women and other men may also have theophanies. Deborah (Joshua 5), Mary, the mother of Jesus, (Luke 1:26-56); Anna (Luke 2:36-38), Lydia (Acts 16:14), Priscilla (Acts 18:1, 26) are women of the Bible known to have had similar experiences.

 Are we then to presume that every person who claims to have had a spiritual experiences of this kind have had a theophany. That would be foolish. It is not the experience per se that is evidence of a theophany, but the spiritual fruits that results from it that determines its validity.

 I recall attending an evangelistic revival in a large stadium that was normally used for football games. The preacher held forth for nearly an hour, then called for people who felt so moved to come forward in an altar call. I am not sure that that either the preacher or any of those who went forward for a special blessing and prayers would claim that any had a theophany. Yet there are plenty of examples of evangelists who desperately tried to create the circumstances for a theophany to occur - but failed.

 The truth is that we cannot manipulate God to appear or to communicate with us at will. Yet we do need to maintain our relationship with God in public worship an in private devotions.

 An article in the current issue of The United Church Observer asks, “Does God need to be thanked?” The author proceeds to give what he calls “four good reasons to argue that there is no need to offer thanks to God.” He concludes by saying, nevertheless, that if we believe in the God Jesus revealed we need to remind ourselves that we have a relationship with the God who loves us and the whole universe. We have a place in God’s whole scheme of things. “God needs our thanks to know that we care.” He quotes from the First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:18 where Paul wrote, “In everything give thank: for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning you.”

 It is to people who practice their faith on a regular basis that a theophany may occur, if God so wills.

 
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