Acknowledging the Unquiet Dead

The time aorund All Souls Day can be disturbing. This year I went to our local RC Church with my friend and colleague Bishop Peter Doyle of Northmapton and the Archbishop of Ljubljana for a Mass of Reparation for the victims of Slovene atrocities in May and June of 1945. This was all put together by Keith Miles of the Anglo-Slovene society. The Slovene Ambassador attended, and we all ended up on Slovene TV, an unusual experience. The story behind this event does not reflect well on anyone, but it’s important to acknowledge its significance and learn from it.

It concerns 12,000 Slovenian troops who had fought for Nazi Germany and surrendered in Austria. Those who knew they might not fare well in Stalin’s hands rushed to surrender to the Americans and British, hoping to save their lives from the gulags. It appears they were promised humane treatment and a home in Italy, then packed by the British into cattle trucks that took them “home”. Who knew how much when, and how these actions relate to the scramble among the Allies as the future iron curtain was forming up in 1945 is still unclear.

The cattle trucks took them to a place now known as Huda Jama, where they were herded through a 320 metre tunnel to pits where they were stripped and systematically slaughtered. Their bodies were walled in to avoid future detection, and the whole affair tactfully forgotten. You need make no value judgment about these peoples’ politics or why they fought on the side they did in World War II to see it does nobody any credit to pretend about such an atrocity.

Brits and Americans like to believe we were always the good guys. In the main we were, perhaps, but we have our own dirty little secrets, too, and it does no harm to be reminded of our own capacity to be complicit in evil, just like everybody else. The murderers were home grown, but they would never have been able to murder without British troops herding prisoners of war into cattle trucks, some like the Michael Palin character handing out crosses in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, courteously and perhaps even with a few twinges of regret that they might be sending those poor devils to their deaths. Well, they were. Even (especially?) the British need reminding that sometimes the interests of the Great Game, courtesy and administrative efficiency, are not enough.

These were not the only nor the latest tunnels full of of dead bodies, not even in the former Yugoslavia. Only by encoding the past in a truthful way can we hope to understand our own capacity for evil, complicit or instrumental. Only by acknowledging that can we truly resolve to act differently, should our turn ever come to make the kind of fundamental moral choice, life or death, that most home counties Pelagian English obfuscate about and avoid. The unquiet dead should not go away without some formal acknowledgment, and act of reparation.

Anglican Schism — Righteous Salami

Ages before the words had quite today’s meaning, they used to say in Yorkshire, “The whole world’s queer save thee and me, and I’ve been wondering about thee recently...” People in every Church have said it, from the Great Papal Schism (1378-1417) to the Marcel Lefebvre movement, or the salami slicing of the Kirk since the Great Disruption of 1843. It happens. Always the righteous minority walk away, claiming that everyone else has constructively dismissed them.

Actually this behaviour transcends religion. The extreme Right Swinton Circle does it. “It’s not the party I joined,” wailed old Labourites in flat caps through the 90’s. And, of course, they were right. Things change, and righteous remnant attitudes lie crouching at all our doors, awaiting their day.

For fun, Bosco Peters has started up his own Real Anglican Communion. Salami slice your way to True Orthodoxy with Mickey Mouse, and you are actually heading towards vanishing point. Bosco’s pulling our legs, but the guy who got consecrated in Kalispell Montana as Pope Pius XIII is deadly serious about being the “true Catholic Church,” following the liberal defection of the other billion odd Roman Catholics in the world. It’s hard to tell where Mickey taking shades into reality. The whole process of rancorous straining at gnats and swallowing camels seems to Bonsai people’s self awareness, as various ecclesiastical costumiers ring up the dollars, to illustrate the grandiose websites.

Cue Dr Ephraim Radner — a deeply grounded and spiritually aware Conservative theologian from Wycliffe College, Toronto. He’s posted his Advent thoughts, What I have learned these past five years, and I commend them to the house as a supremely wise, humble and hopeful resource to everyone on all sides, a blast of human and spiritual reality for us all:

The last few years of struggle within the Episcopal Church (TEC) and within the Anglican Communion have taken their toll on many persons and congregations, and on our common life in a larger way. Every day brings some new report on the impending or already achieved “break-up” of Anglicanism and on the spectacle of “global schism”, even while Anglican leaders insist that this hasn’t happened yet. Many congregations in the United States, and some in Canada, have left their denominations for other forms of Anglican relationship. Even more congregations, including many that have left TEC, have been torn by conflict or bled by tension and malaise, and TEC’s membership has shown a steady and alarming drop in the past three or four years. Declarations affirming something “new” about to begin or demanding something “old” be restored are issued from various groups, and the project of developing “adequate structures” or even canons for this or that ministry, mission, and witness is seen by many as a necessity, even if understood in contradictory ways.

How does one navigate this time as an Anglican Christian? I have a number of friends and colleagues who have decided simply that it is not possible to do so. For various reasons, they have left Anglicanism altogether – becoming Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox (less common), non-denominational evangelical Christians (often) or finally (most frequently) “church drop-outs” altogether. A common theme among these persons has been a sense of exhaustion and spiritual depletion, even as they have discerned elements of doctrine and ecclesial life that they believe, in different ways, are best embodied in other Christian traditions. The ache of inner ailment has stirred up a theological ferment whose outcome has opened up the press for a new direction altogether....

More importantly than the substance of the issue in question, however, I have had to face quite simply the fact that my own views, however carefully constructed and believed in, are not the measure of the church’s life or of anybody else’s. They cannot displace, in time, a whole range of other imperatives to action, relationship, reflection and counsel, witness, and prayer. And once I allow them to do this, I have given way, not to God’s sovereign power and love, but to my own self-regard. I might well ask, “why do the wicked prosper?” and find God staying my heart (cf. Psalm 37); I might remember Paul’s exhortation not to insist on one’s own ways (1 cor. 13:5; Rom. 15:1f.), not for the sake of giving up convictions or of compromise, but simply to give oneself over to God the just judge (1 Pet.2:23); I might also, finally and even better, plead, “I am a worm and no man, have mercy on me” (Ps. 22:6, 19).

In a world of inceasing individualism and single issue fanaticism, the gentleman is right, and his point, of course, cuts all ways. He draws attention to eleven particular action learning points:

1. You can’t always get what you want, even if you are right
2. Parishes are mixed, and require building up by non-conflictive teaching, not transformation into battlegrounds
3. So is the whole Communion, and it has the same need
4. Legal complexity cuts both ways
5. The impact of global culture on Christian life needs to be understood carefully and accurately
6. We cannot avoid repeating the mistakes of the past
7. There is no magic bullet solution, to be brought about by cataclysmic change
8. No one person or group is in a position to bring about such a solution
9. There is no credit in failing to defend the integrity of adversaries, or remaining silent in the face of indefensible behaviour by allies
10. Spiritual Malice remains Spiritual Malice, to be avoided at all costs
11. Israel, wait on the Lord
    What I seek to do – through God’s mercy and grace — is to retain the faith, hope, and love that will permit constancy in testimony, perseverance in learning, willingness in encounter, and the wisdom through such persistence to persuade in trust and service. The great gifts of Anglicanism have always turned in this direction – for we were ever sinful, were we not? — so that our mission has triumphed over our internal tensions...

I spent Tuesday in a day’s personal growth, learning and reflection with senior Christian leaders in Buckinghamshire, Baptist, Methodist, Savation Army, United Reformed, Roman Catholic. As we shared openly together what God has been showing us, very much in the spirit of Dr Radner, a tremendous sense emerged of the importance for our common life of integrating the ways God sees us, and the ways the world sees us, and the ways we see each other and ourselves. Ditto at yesterday’s wonderful Diocesan senior staff meeting. We only get one Advent this year, during which we pray

O wisdom that proceeds from the mouth of the most high, reaching powerfully from end to end, sweetly (elegantly, smoothly, gently) ordering everything: Come teach us the way of good judgment.

Let’s not waste it this year...