Hungarian with Tears

Revisiting Hungary after 34 years has brought poignant glints of recognition — So much was muttered behind hands in the Communist Era. When I was a boy I asked, for example, what was on the big saluting base in the Városliget. One relative replied “Stalin’s ghost.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “Stalin the Atheist is waiting for Christmas.” This gnomic comment refered to the fact that the 8 metre statue of Stalin atop the podium had been torn down by the crowd in 1956, and all that was left were his boots (Hungarian childen leave their boots out as present receptacles for St Nicholas). At the time I had no concrete idea what all this kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink was about. Now I know better.

Budapest is now capital of a democratic, progressive European nation. Especially when current urban renewal is complete, this will suit it well. I suspect it’s what the inhabitants wanted all along — only 7%, after all, voted Communist in 1945. Other votes were invalidated.

Hungarian history is essentially tragic. The nation has, unavoidably and often lethally, been the ham in other people’s sandwiches. 300,000 Hungarians died on the Eastern Front, and 80,000 civilians in the final year of World War II. Primo Levi noted that Hungarian was the predominant language in Auschwitz. 600,000 Hungarians perished there, and after 1945, 700,000 were deported to Soviet labour camps. The last returnee came home from the gulags in 2000. Around the fifties thousands died or were imprisoned at the hands of the ÁVO/ÁVH, often minority leftists. Don’t forget those who died as a result of forced land collectivisation, or the 200,000 who fled the country in 1956. Given there were only 10 million Hungarians in the first place, Left and right, rural or urban, whatever the race, all suffered.

My mother was cross that she was unable to return to Hungary in 1939, but it almost certainly saved her life. Many things said and unsaid in the family come to mind, but some facts of life emerge with hindsight:

• Even the most superficial contemplation of what people went through in the 20th century in Central Europe sets Western victim culture in a larger more vivid perspective.
  
  
• Every cultural subgroup, pretty well, had its victims and perpetrators at different times. There is no simple matrix of goodies and baddies, except simple humanity or lack of it. The priest who brought the Sacrament to Christine Arnothy’s cellar, recorded in her memoir of the Budapest Seige of 1944, put it like this: “As to the dead who are all about us here, don’t imagine that they accuse us; on the contrary they are sorry for us...” Thus the Jewish atheist who gave his dead son’s suit to a German soldier to help him escape, and was shot soon after by a Russian soldier, was as righteous as the priest who helped Arnothy’s family escape in 1948, because “Justice and Charity come before everything.”
  
  
• Many things were not said, and probably should not be. Others can now be heard and understood. There is a bizarre humour in every situation, and a high degree of randomness, both of which may elude people in more rational societies and ages. It says something about the resilience of the human spirit, after all people over a certain age have been through, to see souvenir shops selling Russian gas masks, and a CD of rousing party marches called The Best of Communism, available also as a Club Mix.

Most national anthems proclaim the glory, beauty, or prowess of the Nation. The Hungarian Himnusz doesn’t. Written in 1823, it’s a heartfelt prayer to God above to bless the Hungarian with grace and a good spirit, for all the suffering s/he has undergone at the hands of strangers. This can surely atone for the sins of past or future. That’s really all it says. It speaks of an essentially tragic national history.

The Communist régime, for all its robust, self-conscious Atheistic basis, could not replace the Himnusz. It was too truthful to experience to be replaced by a march. The Himnusz, and the context in which it has been sung aloud or in people’s hearts, is a haunting reminder that ideology is not enough. We are all human together. People may be liquidated, but humanity shines out, especially perhaps amidst acts of inhumanity. The priest was correct. In the final analysis, Charity and Justice alone are irreducible.

Bible and Culture 101

Back in the 1960’s school RE was boring and worthy but predictable, and largely based on the Bible. You might decide it was a load of old tosh, but at least you ended up able to understand Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Milton’s Paradise Lost. The past becomes a completely foreign country, however, when a society obsessed with the latest of everything loses touch with its own roots, and compromises its own corporate memory.

Let me illustrate. As a sixth former I learnt that after the death of Palmerston, in 1866, a group of anti-Reformists called the “Adullamites” forced the resignation of Lord John Russell as Prime Minister. This interesting bit of Lib/Con coalition building has much contemporary resonance. John Bright, leading political commentator of the day, coined the term to draw attention to Lowe and Elcho’s unwillingness to be led by either Gladstone, whose reformism they had consistently opposed, or Disraeli. The meaning was plain to anyone who knew I Kings 22. Trouble is, not many of today’s students know I Samuel 22. We even have students who have never read Genesis 1 or Matthew 5, let alone I Samuel 22.

Enter Maggi Dawn, and her new book The Writing on the Wall. It’s a trip through the Bible for the biblically ignorant but otherwise educated reader, giving some basic info and background on the stories that have shaped our literature and history. She doesn’t just tell the story, but gives enough background to it to help you understand its meaning, and why it may have been used as it has been. So she turns on a light bulb to illuminate a range of cultural basics — Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Senser, Jacob Epstein, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, yea even Monty Python... and hundreds of others.

So, here is an ideal present for the sixth former in your life who seeks some background to our culture. Its clarity and sense of perspective may also help the busy preacher. No cave of Adullam, though. Now someone’s done Literature, could it be History next for this treatment?

Dunkirk: Home Front recollections

Something of the scale of Dunkirk becomes apprent from the fact no fewer than four friends turn out to have parents who were evacuated or otherwise involved at the sharp end. The Wilsons being avid scribblers, who threw nothing out, we have boxes of World War II at home. In May 1940 my Father was in Kent, not France. His mother, however, an invalid with Parkinson’s Disease, supplies an interesting old lady’s eye view of the unfolding history:

I’ve got in such a muddle over this war you’ll really need leave soon to tell me whether we’re going or coming, who we’re protecting next? when Hitler’s going to heaven & if statesmen shouldn’t be abolished! I feel I shall never wake up without “Dunkirk” being the first thought. What a ghastly history! Which all the heroic adjectives of the language can never disguise for the relatives of those for whom there is no return. Are they lucky or we I wonder?

Her letters record interesting incidents — the crash of a German Bomber in the Bishop of Chelmsford’s garden in June with four airmen burned to death — amidst more reflective thoughts. This, for example, from Chelmsford (where her cousin lived) on the day before Paris fell:

I came here by car and we were stopped about Margrettng for identity cards & with all place names removed we felt quite foreign. Expect you will be glad it's cooler especially if there’s more digging to do. What ghastly news again — nearly another Dunkirk — what blue pencil luck we have had everywhere — surely it must be our turn soon. I have to ration myself to news but there seems always some horror to listen to and for the men you have met and passed on [my Father was serving in a training unit in Kent] just to be wiped out in thousands — such a tragedy of useless waste. What a life! so much beyond our control. It’s no use trying to write about it & yet one cannot keep from thinking about it. Just our destiny to go one road or the other so it’s only courage is any good. I hope you are beginning to feel as tough as a gangster. Meanwhile I still dream of a real miracle & Hitler into little pieces...

Good news in Gerrards Cross

Delighted to be in Gerrard's Cross for their 150th anniversary celebrations yesterday. It’s one of our very few large UK churches that have broken through what one could call the 400 barrier, with two or three times that number of regulars. It remains very much a parish Church, serving its locality more than hoovering in people from far and wide.

The Crown jewels of St James’ parish, are

1. enabling servant leadership at all levels, rather than fat controller indoor games. Martin Williams, ministry team and lay leaders are very mutual and focussed.
   
2. passion to foster people in varying styles of discipleship, traditional, Charismatic, Conservative and open (to use current jargon). The characteristic virtues of these expressions of faith become cumulative and shared, rather than being played off against each other, wittingly or unwittingly.
   
3. Commitment to clear and charitable attitudes that are good news across the board. Evangelical values are very much more important than -isms — politics or labels.
   
4. A general culture of excellence in all things. People work as hard, and in as focussed a way, as a commercial concern would at its operation.
   

Using Ephesians 3, we explored the uncertainties of the world around, in 1859 as much as today, and what it means to be called by a faithful God to be rooted and grounded in love.

The height, depth and breadth of that reality inspires not optimism, but a firm hope. Just for the record, and because some asked, the Credit Cruncher of 1859 I quoted was a gentleman called D. Morier Evans, and this was what he learnt from the string of financial crises in his day:

Each separate panic has its own distinctive features, but all have resembled each other in occurring immediately after a period of apparent prosperity, the hollowness of which it has exposed.

So, what goes around comes around. It’s a standing invitation not to take ourselves, or the news of the moment too seriously, and to fix our hearts where true joys are to be found.

Taking the Long View?

Panning in and out can make things look different. Take, for example, current fear that we are saddling our children and grandchildren with public debt on an unprecedented scale. Here’s a graph from the Telegraph, entirely accurate, portraying the problem of balooning public debt as a percentage of GDP: Dire times, you may say, and a real problem for us all.

But, you may wonder, what about the bigger picture? As public sector requirement has risen down the years, we’ve always funded it by borrowing. We never did, for example, save up in a Jam Jar until the nation could afford, say, an army and navy for the Napoleonic Wars. How does our present apocalyptic orgy of public debt sit within a historical range?

OK. Here is UK Public Debt as a percentage of GDP going back to, er, 1700. Hmm. Lies, damned lies and statistics, you may say. But it does indicate that statistics need to be placed in context.
By all means let’s not saddle our grandchildren with unnecessary debt — but let’s try and do so on rational grounds.

A. Hitler: Brad’s part in his downfall

aka Inglorious Basterds, is Quentin Tarantino’s latest outing. It’s a rumbustuous but finely engineered send-up, not of World War Two, but World War Two movies with their ludicrous pig-dogs, dirty dozens, and Gestapo dentists. Everybody in the film parodies his or her character all the time, pretty superbly. Young Brad Pitt maintains an Alamo toughguy chipmunk sneer throughout — a considerable achievement.

The film includes historical personages, but, history, Ranke’s “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“What actually happened”) is merely the sandbox in which Tarantino plays. His chosen idiom is crude Spaghetti Western, with a ton of wry filmic homage thrown in, and playfulness with the film plane as well as the actors.
The rabbit that works the controls in Tarantino’s brain is one sick bunny, but functioning at the height of his game.

By way of health warning, If you find Tarantino unwatchable, this will not disappoint you — ditto if you find his films unmissable. Should you have ever have been tempted to write to the BBC complaining that last night's Sergeant Musgrave of the Buffs was portrayed with eight buttons on his tunic whereas any fool knows the Buffs wore nine buttons on their tunics during the peninsilar war, every second of this movie will really annoy you — Not one for military history buffs, then.

The violence is nasty and brutish, but mercifully short for Tarantino, whose Spaghetti Western spends more time building up tension than shooting it out. After years of believing the Americans won the war single handed, it turns out to have been the Jews. There’s a lot of play on languages — subtitles used or not to draw you into lead characters’ awareness of what‘s going on. If you speak French, German and Italian, you will really be in the know, but even if not there are plenty of subtitles. Anyway, a pistol shot in the cujones is pretty much the same in any language.

Sorry to mention the war, but what might Germans think of this movie? Could breaking the mould of WW2 movies be rather refreshing, in fact? Everyone in this movie is equally nasty and amoral, and I imagine many Germans will be up there cheering along the final reel’s magnificently silly carnivalistic Götterdämmerung, along with everyone else still left in the Cinema. Characteristically for Tarantino, Five out of five Stars — or Zero. Additional proof that there’s no such thing as typical Tarantino...

A Case for God?

There’s a popular narrative some atheists trip out on that seems to think everybody alive before about 1960, certainly 1860, was simply a complete and utter bloody fool. They just believed in a big interventionist sky pixie called God on the basis of a completely literal reading of the Bible because they were too naïve and thick to know any better. Really? Did they not have brains?

New model atheists also sometimes play off soundbites from one religious tradition against another to prove they’re all rubbish. If there were anything in any of them, they would all say the same thing. To test this approach, you need someone who has actually studied more than one religion historically to find out what they actually have or haven’t said, and how, and why, as a matter of fact, they have developed.

Enter Karen Armstrong. You might agree or not with her conclusions, but she is unquestionably one of the most learned and perceptive historians of comparative religion in the world. She knows a bucketful of languages, history, philosophy and poetry. She is not particularly orthodox or signed up to anything, but she undoubtedly knows her stuff, and has a real knack for getting ideas across.

This is what she says:

We are talking far too much about God these days and what we say is often facile... In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody... There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept.

She goes on to map out historically those images of God, old and new, that have developed within the world’s major religious traditions over the past 12,000 years. It’s a briliant compact work of historical description — I managed to read it in an 8 hour flight.

The basic idea is that all kinds of sophisticated visions, practises and subtleties flourished in the pre-modern world with a surprisingly high degree of mutual respect, understanding and flashes of emergent coherence. During the early modern period tooled up renaissance people fell in love with the idea of absolute certainty. When they couldn't quite attain it, they over compensated by constructing various formulations of provisional truth to be peddled as absolutes.

Thereby they lost much of the directness, openness, discipline, poetry and praxis of religion. All meanings were narrowed and noddied up for use as polemical rocks. Selective ignorance and paranoia bred fundamentalisms various, including atheistic ones. These are increasingly angry and desperate means of licensing the self to wallow in one, defined over and against all the others.

Taking this narrowed rationalistic approach is very limiting; like playing opera on tinny little speakers. We need to learn how to learn again and wake up to the possibilities for unlocking truth that is not intellectually reductionist and ultimately fascistic. It’s a plea for the recovery of something that wouldn't have needed saying until comparatively recently — that God’s a big lad, and he can look after himself, and we can enjoy the sutlety, poetry and joy of discovering him for ourselves best in communities that are logged in and logged on, not fundamentalist blockhouses.

Harry Patch: Last of the Old Brigade

The death yesterday of Harry Patch, last Britisih veteran serviceman of the First World War, is a milestone which can’t fail to move anyone with any historical imagination. I rather sympathise, in principle, with Damian Thompson’s suggestion of a state funeral in the Abbey, family willing.

Some five and three quarter million British War Medals 1914-20 were issued. The death of Mr Patch the plumber marks the end of all that, as living memory. My father, 28 years a soldier, took us to beatings of retreat in the sixties where anyone over 70 had seen service in the First World War. Thank goodness the voices of that generation have been increasingly recorded since the groundbreaking 1964 BBC Documentary The Great War.

Some 30 years ago I had a close personal encounter with Harold Macmillan at a St Catherine’s Day dinner in Balliol. With utter simplicity and a painfully clear memory Mr Macmillan, who had been shot up as a guardsman during the retreat from Mons, described the lives, hopes and characters of fellow students from the lost class of 1914, under half of whom survived, pinpointing who had lived on which staircase, and what talents had been lost by their deaths.

One of the great experiences of my ten years in Reading was meeting, eventually officiating at the funeral of, Charlie Evans, like Harry Patch a survivor of Passchendaele. He returned passionate to do something for his mates who hadn’t made it (three quarters of his platoon); joined the Post Office Union and the Labour Party, and ended up as a much loved mayor of Reading — there’s a road on the Amersham Road estate named after him.

The world I grew up in may well have been a more respectful, safer, more decent place because pretty much everyone a certain age, soldier or civilian, male or female, from plumbers to politicians, had undergone the experience of real danger and gut-wrenching fear; of doing without and having to make the best of things. Nobody would wish that on a dog, but this experience generaly gave most of them a particular perspective on life and people. Unlike our politicians, they did not acquire knowledge of war primarily from movies. Large numbers of young men were abruptly brought to an awareness of their own limitations, the need to look out for others, tolerance of different people they would never have met in a month of Sundays had they not been drafted into the Services. Some lost God, and some found God, but many found something of themselves we struggle to understand.

This whole stream of our culture is now almost extinguished, although there may be a few civilians who lived through it left. I am not sure where this leaves us in our own Great War for Civilisation. I am optimistic enough to believe young people have a great underlying spirit and capacity for altruism, that comes out when really necessary. I love the way our children’s generation network and care for each other. Plainly the ravages of ego, selfishness and materialism come much more easily to us, and them, than to Mr Patch’s generation — another reason to respect our young people, who have so much more confused and confusing a world of which to make sense.

Living in a society which generally idolises the latest and trivialises the past, we all have an amnesia problem. It’s hard to think Mr Patch’s death will help with that, but I hope some strand of corporate memory and respect will transmit forward, and increase our chances of recovering some greater measure of our core values — corporate understanding, fellow feeling, dignity, and self-respect — before it’s too late. Just pray it doesn't take a disaster like the wars of the 20th Century to get us there...

Yom haShoah: Living Memory

International Holocaust Memorial Day has in recent years been observed on January 27, the date troops entered the camps. In Israel, Yom haShoah is timed around the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, but its closeness to Pesach can lead to some variation. I was immensely honoured and moved to be a guest at the Council of Christians and Jews celebration of Yom haShoah yesterday in Oxford. The Oxford Jewish Congregation is a vibrant and extrordinary outfit which encompasses a wide range of expressions of Jewish practice under one roof.

Proceedings began with the simple but compelling voice of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played on the cello by Lynton Appel — music reflecting traditional chant from the eve of the Day of Atonement. Another unforgettable part of the evening was an address by Ruth Shire, a refugee from Nazi Germany, evacuated with other children in 1937. Ruth put everything in historical perspective, briefly, then told her story — of living with a family near Oxford, of the internment of her father during the war, and of the life she had built in this country.

Ruth’s story reminded us that amidst evil, the kindness of strangers and the resilience of the human spirit make for an everlasting remembrance. Her simple words reminded us that we all have stories that can bless us or curse us, by informing the decisions we make and the attitudes we take. Worst of all is to travel in ignorance of one’s own story. This being a Jewish community, there was, of course, a prodigious family party afterwards.

The memorial included the recitation together of the Kaddish, two minutes silence and the lighting of candles around which we placed stones. In Bible times graves were marked by cairns. Placing stones on them was a way of making them more permanent. Stones do not fade like flowers, and bear witness that others have visited and not forgotten. It was immensely significant to leave stones for those millions who were denied the basic dignity of a grave — an expression of the respect they were denied by their persecutors.

It is important to focus on the historical aspect of this, all the more as time passes. However it added a very special additional dimension to be a guest within a resonant community, in which memory is not a museum piece, but living consciousness. The evening was not simply about feeling sad, but also about identifying with those who died and those who suffer injustice and genocide in the world today:

We remember those who died in the Holocaust,
when madness ruled and evil dwelt on earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those whose very names are lost.

We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror.

We mourn for all that died with them; their goodness and their wisdom, which could have done so much to enoble and enrich humanity. We mourn for the genius and the wit that died, the learning and the laughter that were lost.

We stand in gratitude for their simple, decent lives. Their spiritual resistance remains an enduring testimony to a community where light persisted in darkness. Each person was unique, and we remember them all in love and compassion.

We salute those who had the courage to stand outside the mob, to save us, and to suffer with us. They too are God’s witnesses, and a source of hope when we are tempted to despair.

Because of the suffering, may such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength.

In silence we remember those who sanctified God’s name.

Many thanks to Alison Ryde for the picture of candles and stones afterwards, and to the community of the Oxford Jewish Centre for their generosity and hard work.