The Sound of Silence
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Micah 4.1-5, Romans 8.31-end, John 15.9-17
"Fools, " said I, "you do not know
Silence, like a cancer, grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.
Lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’. Silence here is a sinister silence; an inability to communicate leading to an inability to love. A silence you have known; when you want, you need to say something, but the words don’t come. You can’t communicate what you feel. There's a growing distance, a great abyss, between you and another, words falter before they’re able to bridge the gap between you. We experience this at the end of romantic entanglements, when friends or family let us down. in great suffering, bereavements and news of terrible sickness. It’s a noisy silence, like white noise, drowning out the sounds of everyday.
But there’s a very different silence. A silence that’s attentive, focussed, full of meaning, and if it’s shared, a silence that communicates; a silence of plenitude that goes further than words. The shared look on a perfect day when you want nothing more than to stay, soaking up this moment. The moment when joy or grief are total and beyond words, but you are with the person that understands, that shares and carries the burden or the ecstasy with you.
England no longer stops at 11 o’clock so you will hear tomorrow the traffic, engines, car horns, the noise of oblivious people. But till recently I’ve spent the two minutes of Armistice Day in a silent, unmoving congregation, on army camps or in the field, where every person will be thinking of people they have known, the wash of many memories, but with a common purpose; a rich silence, communicating solidarity and understanding across generations and between people, who might not otherwise share the most precious and guarded moments of their history.
But of course, that was only my experience. Some there may have found the two minutes unbearable; full of unresolved memories, shared by, understood by, nobody.
This year I took a funeral at Sandhurst for a suicide the same age as me, who served in the same regiment. His rowing club, the regiment, family, friends, hundreds of people were there. The silence of death, the silence of a funeral; loneliness, grief, anger. Silence can be communication. It can be isolation. There is silence in both heaven and hell.
And if we return to the 11th November 1918, we discover something more and less than the silence of the guns. The Armistice was signed at 5.20am and agreed to come into force at 11 o’clock on that day. In full knowledge of this both sides vented furious assaults across the trenches, perhaps out of final anger and resentment; or simply to lighten the load of ammunition that would have to be carried away. It’s said that the guns fell silent at 11 o’clock but, despite the French government’s backdating of deaths to the 10th November, even though the war was over, there were 11,000 casualties and 3000 killed on that short final day of war. That’s more than on D-Day.
This year we remember the 75th anniversaries of D-Day and Arnhem. I’m still in touch with some veterans of those great and terrible events and went to Normandy in June to commemorate D-Day. Corporal Hartigan of the Canadian PARA battalion recounted: ‘We stood to at 0600 hours in England on 5 June and did not stand down until the afternoon of 9 June – over 100 hours of continuous wakeful duty. We learned that lack of sleep was the worst of all deprivations.’ Brigadier James Hill remarked that these first days in Normandy were the hardest fought of the whole war. In typical British understatement he wrote that ‘it was no picnic’. It’s a charming aspect of that generation that heroism could be taken so lightly.
The Times recently wrote up a piece on Tommy Flowers who broke the Lorenz code used by Hitler to communicate with his senior commanders. He named his machine, the world’s first semi-programmable electronic computer, “Colossus”. According to historians it shortened the war by years, as well as making a huge advance in computer science. He recorded the achievement in his diary: ‘Colossus worked. Car broke down on way home.” A mixed day then.
What we see here is a profound example of humility. It is perhaps the knowledge that so many of their friends, and countrymen had given their lives, that taught these men to take success so lightly, but we see in them the embodiment of service and a disregard of self that is very foreign to our world today. But neither is it an abstract idea of service to King and Country. When a veteran of Arnhem was asked what kept him going when the battalion had been largely destroyed, the cause lost, and defeat inevitable, he replied simply: ‘they were my friends’.
Christ in today’s Gospel summarises his central message: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ It is central to the ethos of Christianity to see love, especially fraternal love forged through suffering, as redemptive: ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?’ One Bishop in the First World War famously remarked: ‘The soldier has got religion, I am not sure that he has got Christianity’. But who could not forgive doctrinal error for the man, or woman, who laid down their life for their friends?
And as we remember the cost of so many lives lost we should not forget the difficulties endured, as ever, by army wives and families. The Commanding Officer of 8PARA on D-Day, Col Pearson, described what must have been a somewhat confusing experience of an engagement for his wife: ‘I then had a mental aberration and got engaged. My wife-to-be said that as it was wartime we should have a short engagement and get married on 8 June. This, of course, coincided with D-Day, but I couldn’t tell her that, so a lot of surprised officers of the 6th Airborne received invitations to our wedding. Joan had no idea what was happening and was not told until D-Day that she would not be getting married on the Tuesday.’ I’ll bet there was an awkward moment when he got home to the lucky Mrs Pearson.
I was caught off-guard earlier this year, hearing the familiar words: ‘At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.’ We have heard them so many times, but in the way that is often true of things heard many times, the meaning of them have brushed past me. The words speak of the reality of grief. To lose someone so close is to be reminded of their absence at every waking hour, at the going down of the sun and in the morning. To endure that silence perpetually.
This was the reality for an entire generation following the two Wars. A people whose lives were dominated by loss, and the remembrance of profound sacrifice. A century on that loss is at a greater remove from us, but this is where the task of remembrance takes on a greater meaning and importance. People may feel that with 100 years gone by, Remembrance Sunday has had it’s day. We must not forget the sacrifice, the threat the world faced, and which these men overcame.
How then do we approach this coming two minutes silence? We can come at it with simple grief at the waste of human life and the horrendous suffering that the twentieth and twenty-first century have conceived. Or we can approach it with hope and meaning. That there remains a bond between that generation and ours. That nothing is wasted because all is gathered in by God. That there is an unspoken communication; that though we may not understand, still less be able to find the words, for some of the horrors of the last hundred years; the silence offers us space to share our grief, our thanksgiving, our memories and our hope; that brings them into the presence of God, of forgiveness and peace.
To remember only the chaos and suffering of war is to enter into a hopeless, abject silence: ‘The dead do not praise the Lord, nor those gone down into silence.’ But to remember those we love, our forebears and to recognise the sacrifice of those who have gone before us, is to enter the silence of prayer:
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
No noise, nor silence, but one equal music.