Growing Old Gracefully

This week I'm taking part in a 24 hour event for clergy who are coming up to retirement. So here's another in a series of occasional blogs on retirement "from the front line". This one's about growing old.

And it's trending nowadays. We baby boomers are about to add to the pressure on our struggling health and social care provision. My generation was born just after the last war. We're getting to the age when we're going to need looking-after in the last years, even decades, of our lives. Some have already reached that difficult turning-point in life where we can't go on without the help of others, whether we're wholly or partly dependent on family, friends, neighbours or social welfare.

The trouble is, we are living too long, a lot longer than was imagined in the 1940s and 50s when I was born. And this at a time when healthcare expectations and the strains on our public finances are greater than they have ever been. Many of us retired people in the so-called "third age" enjoy a quality of life that compared to most others across the world is altogether extraordinary. We look at people like Cliff Richard in his seventies and Joan Collins in her eighties, and can't quite believe they aren't still in middle age. (Perhaps they think they are!) Even at this modest age of sixty eight, I occasionally get told off for pretending to be older than I really am, old enough to be retired.

Well, most of us last played that game of pretending when we were kids, trying to get in to watch "A" films at the local cinema. Or worse... I can see you're worried. Let me reassure you. It was nothing salacious, but I was underage, eleven probably, when I went to see Whisky Galore after school one day with a friend. How grown-up it felt! (Who was that friend? I wish I could remember. Another symptom of ageing, that...)

"Be your age" we used to scold our children. But of course that's precisely the point about how ageing tends to be viewed in western society. "You're as old as you feel" we're told; "sixty is the new forty. Welcome to middle age." And while I get impatient with that kind of talk, there's some truth in it. We don't really feel our calendar age. My consciousness of being "me" tells me that I'm fundamentally the same person as I was a lot earlier in life. Inside, I feel I be back at school again, or getting married, or starting my working life, or having children. And a lot else. Use your imagination. It's when bits drop off my body and its parts start to fail or stamina falls off that I'm reminded where I am on this timeline of being, not Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters, but Michael, now fast approaching seventy. It can feel hard at times.

But why should it be hard to admit that? It's a very western problem to see growing old in this nostalgic regretful way. Most other cultures respect the old. The Japanese even have a special "day of the elderly". Yes, we should look back and be thankful for all the good things that have happened to us in youth and middle-age, all that has blessed and enriched us, fulfilled us and made us glad to be alive. Thankful too for the capacity to recognise our mistakes, say sorry and try to put them right, or at least live well with memories that will always be sad or painful or dark. And especially I am trying to be thankful for God's inestimable love, as the General Thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God's constant presence and care from first breath to last, whether I knew it or not. If being human means lifelong learning, then no experience we've undergone is ever wasted.  Yes, there's a lot that's been lost, and most of all the people who have loved us and have died. But "all in the end is harvest". Loss is real, but the memories of cherished souls still touch my life and continue to make me what I am.

I've just read a rather wonderful book by Lynne Segal, Out of Time: the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. She writes with insight about the ambiguities of growing old, and how the elderly are perceived in our society, especially by the young. We comfortable baby boomers who "never had it so good" are, she observes, increasingly resented by young and middle-aged people who struggle with unemployment, lack of opportunity, poverty, poor (or no) housing and the near-collapse of proper social welfare. By contrast, as some see it, baby-boomers' self-interest has begotten consumerism with all its ills, caused financial mayhem across the planet and has continued to plunder the world's resources when we should have known better. Add to that (too late for the book) how the young regard the silver-haired generation who have stolen their future from them by voting so decisively for a Brexit they (the young) do not understand or want.

Segal recognises that there's caricature in some of this. When has any generation not scorned or blamed their forebears for the predicaments they find themselves in. And yet... I know as we all do, so many inspirational young people who want to make the world a better place and find common cause with my contemporaries who want the same thing. Self-interest is not, I think, age-specific. I'm always heartened by that saying in the Rule of St Benedict about how we need to listen to the young, for God often tells them things he withholds from those who are older but not necessarily wiser.

The book urges me to be honest and realistic as I answer the question, "how old are you?" And that's about much more than what I'm feeling. Having read it, I now want to respond as truthfully as I can and acknowledge what belongs to the age I am rather than five, ten or twenty years younger. There's dignity in that, especially when it includes facing up to our physical or mental deterioration, our dwindling beauty or attractiveness, our sexual prowess or athletic ability. It isn't always easy to own up to. We can long to recapture those first, fine careless raptures wherever, whatever they were. In one way or another, we can devote all our lives to that attempt to re-set ourselves to some point in the past.

In the end, though, it's a futile quest. We are mortal. We know that one day we shall die, even if we pretend (back to that word again) that we can sit out the summons to join in the dance of death. When I laid down my work as a stipendiary priest, I wondered whether retirement might prove to be the last really big rite of passage of my life until either my wife or I myself died - a portentous thought to concentrate the mind. But more gently, ancient wisdom invites us to cultivate the art of living well in the time that we have left, to make old age a true summing-up of all that we've tried to be in life. Paradoxically, as we contemplate death, far from finding it a depressing or sinister thought, we discover that perhaps it's the clue to embracing life in all its fulness and living joyfully in our old age. Read the great seventeenth century classics of spiritual writing, Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and Holy Living if you don't believe me.

Late in life, I'm trying harder to celebrate the miracle that I am "alive, alive-oh" to quote the title of a book by that doughty writer on old age, Diana Athill. I don't mean anything dramatic, simply learning how to be more present to being alive, how to pay more attention. To live contemplatively and thankfully in the present tense is truly transformative. And that's also to recognise the past and future tenses of ageing, how grace has brought me thus far, and how, I trust, it will lead me home.

I realise (how can I not?) that "old age is not for wimps". It takes courage to peer into the possible futures that could await us in this adventure of growing old. Some of them could be bleak indeed. The spiritual question I live with is, how do I keep alive the sense of God, whatever may happen? When it gets hard, I so want still to be able to sing alleluia. But even if courage fails in whatever ordeals may await, I hope I shall always hear that still small voice calling to me deep down, and be able to whisper back: For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, Yes!

A Picture Worth a Thousand Words: Thoughts on an Armistice Photo

For me, this will be the abiding image of this weekend's Armistice centenary commemorations.

Amid so much that has been moving in the ceremonies in France and Belgium, and here in the UK, I keep coming back to this photograph. It was taken at Compiègne in northern France where the Armistice was signed in a railway carriage in 1918. It has added poignancy because it was on this very spot that Adolph Hitler received the surrender of France in 1940, a highly symbolic location chosen out of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles.

That clasp of hands, the touching embrace that followed: it came across as completely authentic, entirely unstaged. It touched me deeply, and I wasn't alone. Here's what a non-European posted on Twitter. I'm from the Middle East. This picture moves me nearly to tears - curiously, more than I find it moves young Europeans. Do young Europeans even realize what has been achieved? It's nothing less than sacred, because peace is sacred, because human life is sacred.

I ended my last blog by writing that "there is nothing left to say. Except to be thankful". That's still true today. A picture's worth a thousand words. Yet there is more to say, and I want to write it while the events of this extraordinary weekend are still vivid in the memory. Here are three comments I'd like to make.

First, and most important, could we have asked for a more powerful image of reconciliation and friendship than this? France and Germany had fought each other no fewer than three times in the century leading up to the end of the last war. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the Great War of 1914-18 had cost both nations dear. France, especially, had suffered unimaginably. Among elderly French people, bitter memories even of the earlier conflict were still alive in the 1960s when I started visiting France. To them, the second world war with its terrible destructiveness was an inevitable aftermath of those earlier wars, a continuation of a story of European conflict that would never come to an end.

Up to the time I was born, exactly half-way through the twentieth century, it was inconceivable that these two great European powers could ever be friends. Do young Europeans even realise what has been achieved? asked my middle-eastern Tweeter. Maybe even older Europeans like me haven't quite taken it in. To anyone with a feeling for modern history, it does seem like a miracle. Not that these two leaders should stand together at such an emblematic site, but that their meeting should be so genuine, their gestures so spontaneous, so deeply felt by them both. These are the kinds of events that define history, and that promise great hope for the future. Isn't this what those who fell in war went to their deaths for?

Secondly, as I tried to argue in my last blog, we need to understand what's made this difference. I don't think that reconciliation just happens, or that time is automatically a great healer. Many - maybe most? - of the conflicts of our time are caused precisely because of old wounds that are opened up afresh, unhealed memories that are allowed to fester. What's different on continental Europe is the intention not to allow historical injuries to blight the lives of succeeding generations. "Parents have eaten sour grapes" as the prophet Ezekiel says (18.2), but that's no reason for their children's teeth for ever to be set on edge.

You know what I'm going to say. It's the European project that has created an environment where relationships can be negotiated afresh. The European Union, as we now have it, has brought peoples together in a purposeful way. It has helped fashion a different kind of narrative and discourse where nation-states stop fracturing the continent and instead start living together in peaceful, collaborative relationships in a common European home. We mustn't forget how hard-won that achievement is. Monsieur Macron said today in Paris that "patriotism and nationalism are opposites", that "nationalism is treason" because it is driven by a nation's self-interest, not the welfare of others. This is what causes wars. How much better to affiliate to families of peoples that will protect us from the nationalisms that tear our world apart. It's not that we shouldn't love our country - only that we shouldn't think of it as somehow better than any other country. I don't hesitate to say that renouncing nationalism is one of the most urgent tasks facing our world today. If we don't succeed, I fear it may end up destroying us.

Remembrance means many things - gratitude, sadness and pride among them. But lament for the past needs to be part of it too, and this means a mental and spiritual toughness that is capable of thinking forward to a future that is different from our broken history. So to me, this Armistice centenary and Brexit are closely linked. The peace of 1918 and the peace of 1945 both point to the crying need for nations to reimagine their "belonging", to think beyond national self-interest to the common flourishing of humanity. During the referendum campaign, we heard endlessly about "what's best for Britain", and not nearly enough about what the UK has to contribute to Europe and the wider world. Europeanism is not the end of a process but a beginning, for if we are incapable of thinking globally, then it's likely that the globe itself doesn't have a future worth working for. Clearly, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron understood the profound political significance of the day. How we remember shapes us in the present and (for good or ill) sets directions for the future. The logic that connects the Armistice with the European project is inescapable. It says: choose a different way, a more excellent way. Cultivate love, reconciliation and all that makes for peace. It's all there in that photograph.

Thirdly, and as a bit of an afterthought, it seems to me that there someone is palpably absent from the photo. It's our Prime Minister. Now, there may be all sorts of good reasons why she couldn't be there just then. Maybe she needed to set off for London to be back in time for the evening's Festival of Remembrance. We would all understand that and support it. Maybe the Macron-Merkel photo was set up as "Europhiles only" and she would have been de trop. Perhaps she was asked and politely declined. Nevertheless, her absence is striking.  At Compiègne on 11 November 1918, there were not two signatory nations but three: France, Germany and Great Britain. In the light of that, how could the British not have been included in this powerful image of postwar reconciliation?

I don't know the answer. But what I read in the photo is a European future from which Britain is absent. And that distresses me beyond measure. Just think what a three-way embrace would have symbolised, how powerful its message would have been! But Brexit means Brexit. So while it's a wonderful photograph to treasure out of this weekend of commemorations, it's also a forlorn one, at least as far as Europeans in Britain are concerned. We could have been part of this true European entente cordiale, this tender reaching out of hands to those who have become firm friends and allies.

But while they are better together, we have turned away. We are on our own. And that is unbearably sad. 

Playing Politics with the Armistice?

 In the summer of 2016, my mother lay dying in a North London hospital. Her long life had begun in Weimar Germany in the aftermath of the Great War. The rise of the Nazis from 1933 cast an increasingly dark shadow over her teenage years. It became clear that like every other Jewish family, hers was now gravely under threat. In 1937, her parents got her out of Germany and she came to England as a refugee. They meanwhile fled to the Netherlands for safety. When the Germans invaded, they were hidden underground by two evangelical sisters who believed it was their vocation to shelter Jews.

My mother's hospitalisation happened during the Referendum campaign. She was not much given to political debate, but the idea that Britain might leave the European Union exercised her deeply. "This country wouldn't do anything so stupid, would they?" she asked me more than once. I tried to reassure her, believing at the time that despite episodes of irrationality, the British people were on the whole pragmatic with an instinct for common sense, and that this flirtation with Brexit would pass. Then came the vote on 23 June. Afterwards, she simply commented, "What a terrible terrible shame". A month later, to the day, she died.

Why am I writing about her on Armistice weekend? It's prompted by the moving report of our Prime Minister's visit to war graves in Belgium and France. She said that it was "a time to reflect on our shared history". I tweeted about it, commenting: "The logic points to building a peaceable future in our common European home. To turn from Brexit would honour the centenary of the Armistice". A friend took me to task. "No, don't play politics with the Armistice. It doesn't belong to Remainers".

He's right in his last point of course. The Armistice is not the property of this or that faction, or even this or that nation. It is part of our common European history, indeed, of our history as a human race. Its solemn commemoration this weekend should unite us, just as it should unite us with both our allies and our former enemies. I'm heartened that this centenary has so engaged people across our nation and continent. Last night's news carried reports from schools where children have written poems and imaginary letters in honour of the war dead. To them, a centenary must seem incredibly remote. Yet they have caught the theme of "war and the pity of war" (as Wilfred Owen called it) with real imagination. One nine-year old said that the thought of leaving his family at home to go to the front and possibly be killed was unbearable. How could they do it? he asked.

But I bridled at the allegation that I was "playing politics". I replied that far from indulging in political games, I was entirely serious. If we don't learn to allow history to shine a light on our present predicaments and future destinies, I argued, we are just not learning from the past. And when we don't do this, as has been said so many times, we condemn ourselves to repeating its mistakes. Wars are not inevitable. They happen for reasons that need to be understood against the context of the time. History doesn't repeat itself. Every generation has to learn for itself how to navigate the events of its own day. But the twentieth century's two world wars with their shocking waste of life are a stark warning to all of us. We can sleep-walk into catastrophe because we are not interpreting the signs of the times. Remembrance Sunday is an annual reminder to do precisely this: remember, reflect, pay attention, resolve that never again - if humanly possible - will precious human lives be sacrificed on the altar of conflict and war.

For my mother, brought up in the shadow of one world war and living through another, the peace in Europe we have enjoyed for seventy years was, if not a miracle, a very great achievement. This was why she cherished our membership of the European Union. For underlying everything else it aspired to was a project that began with the need to find reconciliation and build a lasting peace in Europe. To her in the last weeks of her life, it seemed inconceivable that progress, so hard-won across the continent since the last war, could be sacrificed in such a casual way. Why throw it all away? she asked. Why indeed?

We heard far too little about this during the Referendum campaign. Since the vote, politicians on all sides of the debate have obsessed about the economy, trade deals and the financial implications of any Brexit deal that might be negotiated. I'm not going to say these things aren't important. But they may not be what matters most. To my mind, our place in the world and our relationship with our own continent are even more significant because they have so much to do with the flourishing of human life across the planet, social justice, the welfare of the most needy in our societies and our care of the environment. Our sights should be set so much higher than simply our own national wellbeing.

On Remembrance Sunday we recall how Britain entered both world wars to support nations that were threatened by aggressors. Not turning away from others in need was a powerful motivator. We are right to remember, with pride and gratitude, how our country responded so honourably when our continent was at risk. We presented our best selves to the world. The challenge now is, how to present our best selves to the world in this postwar era where we are beset by threats to world peace and stability beyond the imaginings of our parents and grandparents.

What kind of world did the glorious dead lay down their lives for? Is it playing politics to conjecture that for them, a kinder, more compassionate world, more sensitised to human suffering and need was somewhere in their minds? Should we not go on aspiring to build this kind of world as we keep the Armistice centenary? And shouldn't we honour all the global, continental and national institutions, however flawed, whose purposes include friendship, stability and peace? The EU is not perfect - far from it. But it has played an important role in contributing to the peace of Europe for the lifetimes of most of us. I've heard veterans of the last war speak with dismay about Brexit as a kind of betrayal of so much that they fought for. That makes sense to me, born as many years after the end of the war in 1945 as my parents were after the Armistice of 1918.

That's why the war graves of Europe are emblematic for all who care about peace. This centenary is indeed "a time to reflect on our shared history" as Mrs May says. But a shared history leads naturally to thoughts about and hopes for a shared future that would be so much better together rather than apart. How we remember the past shapes us, and shapes the future. Yesterday at Thiepval in the Somme where she was laying a wreath, someone called out from the watching crowd, "Please don't leave us". That person too made the connection between Armistice and the future of our continent. Our nations went through so much during two world wars. Former enemies are now firm friends. The European Union has sealed that friendship in so many important ways. We are all the better for it.

Not to walk away from our friends is a lesson I draw from the Armistice. We didn't in 1914 and 1939. We shouldn't now. That's not playing politics. It's trying to learn from the events we commemorate this weekend. It's asking how, a hundred years later, we go on building on the hopes and dreams of those we remember who laid down their lives for the sake of a better world, and for whose sacrifice we remain for ever thankful.

This image says it all. It was taken yesterday at Compiègne where the Armistice was signed in 1918. It has added poignancy because it was here in 1940 that Adolph Hitler insisted on receiving the surrender of France out of revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. Here's what someone who had seen it posted on Twitter last night. I'm from the Middle East. This picture moves me nearly to tears - curiously, more than I find it moves young Europeans. Do young Europeans even realize what has been achieved? It's nothing less than sacred, because peace is sacred, because human life is sacred.

There is nothing left to say. Except to be thankful.
 

 

The Centenary of the Great War: Thoughts on Good Remembrance

“This is without doubt the saddest story I have ever heard.’  That’s the first line of Ford Maddox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier published just as the Great War began.  It captures the dying of an era, the end of innocence.  You read it knowing, as the protagonists did not, that the lights were going out all over Europe.  I have heard it said that the war that was declared in the summer of 1914 did not truly come to an end until 1989.   Perhaps, with the hindsight of another thirty years, we might say that it has still to come to an end. The red horseman of the Apocalypse with his bloodied sword who takes away peace rides this earth yet.  Wilfred Owen called it ‘the pity of war’. 

In a week’s time we shall keep Remembrance Sunday and commemorate the centenary of the 1918 Armistice. It is one of the last truly national rituals left to us. Whoever you are, you are aware of poppies and war memorials, of the Royal Albert Hall, the Cenotaph and the Chelsea Pensioners.  You are drawn into the ceremonies that symbolise the remembrance, the gratitude and the care of a nation.  Every society, every people needs a day such as this both to remember and to think.

I once thought that we should have to work harder in the future to keep the collective memory alive of what it is like when nations go to war, and civilisations are nearly destroyed, and so many have their futures taken away from them or carry their physical and emotional injuries with them for the rest of their lives.  But in the last twenty years we have seen attendances at Remembrance ceremonies soar, especially among the young. For the landscape of war remains only too well known to us.  Our world is as precarious today as it has ever been, more so in some ways with the pressure on liberal democracies and the rise of nationalisms and the far right.  I shall never forget that on the very day of my installation as Dean of Durham the Iraq War began. Its aftermath lingers on. The unfinished business of war casts a long shadow. Its victims, like the poor, are always with us. 

The trouble is that all this is so big in its scope. We look back to 1914 and 1939, and the other conflicts of our age - lesser maybe in scale, but not lesser to those who were its victims. How do you begin to take it in?  A few years ago I was in Russia, in what was once Stalingrad, now Volgograd. There is a vast war memorial there, a colossal sculpture in the tradition of socialist realism that dominates the skyline for miles around. The eternal flame that burns beneath it, the perpetual guard that is kept there, - the need never to forget is everywhere. Yet the hugeness of it didn’t move me as much as something I saw in the museum dedicated to the terrible Battle of Stalingrad of 1942/43: a helmet that had lain frozen for months alongside the body of its owner in that terrible winter, a sweetheart’s letter that was the last thing a dying soldier pressed to his face as he bled in the snow, a battered, forlorn tin mug, a torn photograph of a mother and father who were not to know they would never see their son again. It spoke of unbearable sadness, of the tears in things. 

This for me put a human face on war, because the huge was brought down to the level of individuals.  If you talk to me about the slaughter of millions, my mind seizes up. But talk to me about the suffering and the dying and the bereavement of individual people with names and homes and loved ones, and I begin to know what you mean. Tell me the stories of men, women and children with faces I can picture, and voices I can imagine, and the words become flesh and the reality of it all begins to dawn.

Today’s news has told us that a bugle carried by the poet Wilfred Owen will be sounded at his grave tomorrow, 4 November, exactly 100 years since he was killed in action in France. It was one week, almost to the hour, before the Armistice. He took the bugle from a dead German soldier. Perhaps he wondered who that German was, where he had come from, what family he had left behind at home. “Bugles calling for them from sad shires” says his “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. Calling for them both, on opposite sides of a conflict neither of them wanted, yet united in death by a musical instrument. “Strange Meeting” indeed.

Our Armistice ceremonies and traditions are a way of holding and handing on raw memories of pride and shame, bravery and cowardice, outrage and fear, comradeship and sacrifice. We find our own meanings in them, we think our own thoughts and pray our own prayers during the two-minute silence. The risk is that the rhetoric of remembrance becomes too broad, too elegiac, too generalised for us to make sense of it. I’m reading a rather wonderful book by Rachel Mann, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory and God. Her writing originates in her memories of her Grandad Sam and Grandad Bert, both of whom fought in the Great War. They survived it, yet remained its victims all their lives. Her reflections range far and wide across the landscape of conflict and how we remember it, yet she constantly comes back to these two men who anchor her writing in what is specific to them and their families. Particulars matter.

What does Christianity have to say about all this? 

Every Sunday is a remembrance Sunday, for every Sunday we remember a dying and a death. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. It is individual and specific: one man's pain and darkness, one man's broken body and shed blood, one man's mother and best friend looking on in grief as his life ebbed away on the cross. ‘Long years ago, as earth lay dark and still/Rose a loud cry upon a lonely hill/While in the frailty of our human clay/Christ our Redeemer passed the self-same way’ says the much-maligned yet (to me, anyway) moving ‘O valiant hearts’. That hymn from the Great War comes straight out of the struggle to make sense of the new experience of mechanised warfare and death on a scale never known before. It’s moving because it interprets those deaths in the light of the death of Jesus; it asks God to “look down and bless our lesser Calvaries” where God suffers in every human soul, each one cherished by God, each death mattering to him, or might we dare to say diminishing him just as it diminishes us?  The cross ties our human suffering to God’s for eternity. We remember. God remembers.

A rabbi was asked whether a garment that had been symbolically torn in grief could be sown up and used again. Yes, he replied, but you mustn’t disguise the tear.  The scar must always show.  In other words, we always carry our collective and individual memories around with us. Time gives a perspective from which meanings can become clearer, the picture comes into focus.  However we must learn in the ceremonies of remembrance not to make it better by easy speeches that gloss over the particularities of suffering, loss and grief with the language of willing self-offering and the glorious dead.

In particular, we mustn't elide our piety as essentially sympathetic bystanders with the raw experiences of those who have served in conflict. Rachel Mann comments on the last line of Siegfried Sassoon's poem "The Attack": “O Jesus, make it stop”. She observes that the difference between prayer and blasphemy is hard to draw. Could we hear the final cry from the cross in Matthew and Mark in that way, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” The experience of wondering where God is, the outrage at a God who does not come to rescue us is familiar to human experience. And the resurrection, especially in Mark’s short ending, does not make it “all right”.

At least, not yet. We glimpse a future that could be different, indeed, will be different according to our Christian hope. In the eucharist, we "remember forward" to what will dawn one day, that other country whose “ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”. It seems as far away as ever for now, further away, I think, even than it seemed earlier in the lives of my post-war generation. Our world is not in a good place as we mark this centenary. All the more reason, then, to make sure remembrance leads us into prayer for the future of humanity. And into reflection, so that we ask ourselves what we have learned from the past and how we intend to act on it. Memory, prayer, wisdom and resolve are the antidote to despair.

These are among the things that will make for "good remembrance".