Autumn is a time for remembrance, a sweetly melancholic time at its best, when the fading light and the turning, falling leaves display a special beauty that reminds us of transience and mortality as part of nature’s eternal cycle. It is a time to remember those we have lost, those who played their part in our own lives and in the life of our community, our country and our world. It is a time when ancient festivals and special days speak to us of ancestors and forbears and of what we owe them.
The Christian calendar brings us All Saints and All Souls, and although we may take a different view of souls and sainthood than some other Christian denominations, these days can still have meaning for us. All Saints, on November 1st, is a time to remember and to celebrate the great souls of humankind, regardless of their faith tradition, those recognised for their exemplary contribution to human welfare, be they Christian or otherwise. Even we Unitarians have our ‘saints’, including people who witnessed to their faith even when it cost them their lives. We remember, for example, the pioneer theologian, Michael Servetus – burned to death in Geneva as a ‘heretic’ on 27th October 1553. We remember the founder of the Czech Unitarian Church, Norbert Capek – imprisoned by the Nazis in the Dachau concentration camp and murdered there sometime between the 12th and 30th October 1942. They were not alone. And although we remember their suffering with sorrow, we do so without bitterness, as I remember from services of memorial which I attended both in Dachau and at the site of Servetus’s execution.
All Souls may be more comfortable for us, though, as it is the day to remember everyone else, people like us, the spiritual ‘also-rans’ if you like, the countless men and women of all faiths and none who lived their flawed lives as best they could, both blessing the world with their love and goodness, but also ‘missing the mark’ at times. They are our focus on All Souls’ Day, November 2nd.
And what about Hallowe’en, October 31st, which is probably more celebrated nowadays than at any time since it was, for our Celtic forbears, the festival of Samain. This marked the transition to winter with bonfires in defiance of the growing darkness. And although it was an agricultural marker, when livestock were either slaughtered for winter consumption or selected for breeding come spring, it was also a time not only to remember the dead but to interact with them. This was a time, it was believed, when the barriers between the living and the dead became thin – hence the negative association of Hallowe’en with ghosts and ghouls and mischievous spirits! It is this superstitious hangover that probably gave rise to the anarchic tradition of ‘mischief night’ which I knew as a boy in Yorkshire. It may also have fed into the more anti-social ways with which the Fifth of November sometimes came to be celebrated. The bonfires and fireworks of bonfire night may also be a survival of Samain, but they also relate to something more recent.
This was the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. If successful it would have been one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history, and it is an example of how we can be poisoned by sectarianism and by history. The Gunpowder Plotters were motivated by both: by rejection of the Protestant Reformation in England and by the subsequent persecution of Roman Catholics which they saw as flowing from it. But their act, born of religious hatred, bred yet more religious hatred and the result was nearly three centuries of anti-Catholic discrimination. And the burning of the Guy – Guy Fawkes in effigy – on bonfire night lasted a lot longer than that. Its sectarian origins may be largely forgotten, but that poisonous heritage is not without its effect even today.
In Northern Ireland the so-called ‘Troubles’, with all their misery and bloodshed, were deeply rooted in a history I can’t rehearse now but which included the ‘plantation’ of the province with Protestant settlers from Scotland and England and the displacement of native Roman Catholics from their land. The poisonous effects of that, although lessened, are not yet a thing of the past and keep alive sentiments that should have no business in the 21st century.
It is coincidental that this season of Remembrance also includes the day in November that marks the anniversary of the end of the First World War, a day when now we commemorate the dead of all wars and resolve not to repeat them. Tragically, though, in that – as a world – we have failed, even if we have succeeded in keeping vengefulness and triumphalism out of Remembrance Day itself.
Since 7th October and its utterly inhuman acts of murderous terrorism in Israel, and all that has followed, our focus has been on that disputed land that has been called ‘Holy’ or, maybe more accurately, ‘too Holy for its own good’. The seat of the sacred shrines of three great religions it is the homeland of two peoples who show little sign of being able to share it or to live peacefully together. There are, of course, those in both communities who wish they could and who try to make it so, but they are constantly forestalled by religious and political extremism and a variety of other powerful factors. One of these is geography. The land in question is simply too small for all the people who claim it. Another is history, for there are few – if any – more egregious examples of the poisonous influence of the past.
Some will point to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, some to the Six Day War of 1967, some to the war of 1948 that accompanied modern Israel’s independence and which also saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the land they regarded as theirs. Is that was when the problems started? Of course not! Just before that there was the Holocaust and then the desire to find the Jewish people a homeland where they would be safe after, not just twelve years of Nazi persecution and murder but after centuries of anti-Semitism, with its appalling pogroms stretching back at least to the middle-ages. Much of this can be laid to the charge, not of Christianity as the Way taught by Jesus and his true disciples, but of Christianity as a corrupt, arrogant and intolerant institution, which all too often it has become.
One of medieval Christianity’s greatest errors was the Crusades, which unleashed war and bloodshed against not just Muslims in the ‘Holy Land’ but against Jews too, who were quite falsely accused of responsibility for the death of Christ – an appalling lie that I have even heard repeated here in Ipswich. But the poison of the past doesn’t stop there. The spread of the Islamic empire may have saved the Jews from persecution by Christians in the ‘Holy Land’, but Jews and Muslims had their issues too, dating back to the time of Muhammad. Like Christians, Jews living under Muslim rule often did so on sufferance. They may have enjoyed greater tolerance than Jews did in most of Christian Europe, but it had its limits.
It was, though, the collapse of the Muslim Ottoman Empire after the First World War, when the ‘Holy Land’ came under British administration, that triggered more recent problems. The Palestinians hoped for independence like other former Ottoman territories, but Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, offered what it called, “a national home for the Jewish people”. For reasons of history and religion, Palestine was chosen. On the strength of this, Jewish people – mainly from Europe - began to settle there even before the Second World War, something which Palestinians, given little say in the matter, feared and resented even then.
So is this when the trouble started? Well, not really. It all depends on how far back you go. With the Romans, who crucified a Jewish teacher from Galilee sometime around AD 30? Who brutally crushed a Jewish revolt and destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple in AD 70? With the Greeks, under Alexander’s successors, who, having conquered the ‘Holy Land’ and desecrated the Temple, tried to replace the Jewish religion with worship of their king, so provoking the Maccabean revolt? With the Babylonians who defeated the successors of King David and reduced the people of Israel and Judah to exile or servitude? With King David himself and his defeat of the Israelites’ enemies, rival claimants to the land he made his own? With the wars of the Judges, like Samson, against the Philistines and all who resisted the claims of the invading Israelites to the ‘Promised Land’ - as the followers of Moses, fleeing slavery in Egypt, believed it to be? It is a long tale involving a great deal of war and violence.
And that claim to a God-given ‘Promised Land’ is what, for many, to this day, underlies the modern state of Israel. It drives the policies of those who want to re-create King David’s empire by annexing more territory within its ancient borders. And with some Palestinian organisations – notably Hamas – and their allies still denying Israel’s right to exist at all, the prospects for compromise are increasingly bleak.
Many shifting empires have cast their shadows over this land for three thousand years, creating an awful lot of history. And it is out of that history that the poison seeps into the present, as we have recently seen. It is not only in the disputed land of Israel/Palestine that we see the poison of the past at work. We see it too in such a phenomenon as the legacy of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, which continue to exert their toxic influence today.
So what do we do about our poisoned past? Try and forget it? Not teach history any more? Of course not! If we don’t attempt to teach and to learn history as critically and as honestly as we can then the way is clear for those who would – and do – substitute lies and propaganda. Forgetting history, it has been said, means being fated to repeat it. But besides being honest with history we must also beware of the poison it contains. There are things which are more important than history. One of those is the present, when the human duty is to see history for what it is – the past: to be remembered, learned from but, in its negative aspects, acknowledged and left behind. Another is the future, when humanity must learn to put aside the poison of the past – the nationalism, the sectarianism and all those other baleful –isms – and make common cause in saving ourselves and our successors from war and oppression, and our societies from the destruction that our abuse of the planet is bringing about. May it be so.
Cliff Reed (CMR161023)