Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good Morning. Today at 11 o clock we will mark the anniversary of the armistice at the end of the war that was meant to ‘end all wars’ with silence. Silence is counter cultural – increasingly so. It’s necessarily unstable in its meaning and ungovernable in its observance. But its importance persists even, perhaps especially, in such a noisy world. Even the word Armistice points to this, linked as it is to the meaning of solstice, which is the moment when even the sun stands still….. Today’s and Sunday’s silences will offer a moment to face the reality and horror of war: the bravery it demands, the calamity it leaves behind, the incalculable suffering generated by humanity’s persistent inability to resolve our differences any other way. Most religions have a commitment somewhere in their practice to silence. In the Christian tradition, it’s an enduring strand of teaching: that keeping silence by consent is an important commitment in a noisy and distracted world. As a Church of England priest, I have invited people to keep silence in many different contexts for different reasons. But over those years I have seen this particular observance increase, not the other way round. UK armed forces have deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan for some of that time, of course, and these young people’s stories together with a greater ability to hear the voices of Afghan and Iraqi civilians in real time, make the contemporary loss powerful for this generation, not just for those whose memories go back to the Second World War. There are different kinds of silence of course, including the deafening silence of the killed. But today’s silence is held by the living, by consent. And is able to hold, as one journalist wrote after the first Cenotaph ceremony in 1919, a huge variety of emotions; "thanksgiving, rejoicing, pity, lifelong pride and grief". Just because some people at some sports matches don’t want to keep silence, or because some congregations at some funerals would rather applaud than keep silent, doesn’t mean that we as society should abandon the practice of what is an increasingly rare moment of collective peace. For me, it is a chance not only to honour the dead; but also to beg God in the name of all who suffer in war; that one day, we frightened, violent, yes courageous but also heartbroken human beings, will come to our senses in the silence. And pledge together that we shall not learn war any more.