A sermon given by the Archbishop of Canterbury in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 2009, following the deaths of the last remaining UK veterans of World War One. An extract from the sermon:
In all his work, in his sermons, his meditations, his astonishing poems, so many of them cast in the voice of the ordinary soldier in the trenches, full of protest and apparent blasphemy, Studdert-Kennedy argues against the bland problem-solving God. His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the heart of your own endurance and pain – not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who holds your deepest self and makes it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair.
Shocking and stark as it was, the way Studdert-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only religious response that was at all credible to those who were living through the daily nightmare. And this may explain just a little how those who did come through were able to find some deep foundation for surviving the rest of the century with courage and a kind of faith. In the heart of the terror and butchery, they had found that they were still there – they were real to themselves and each other; and if there was any God, he was what helped them be real in that darkness. Maybe the simple fact of being real was what kept that generation faithful and more than faithful, creative and brave in a century of yet more darkness.
And perhaps what made the spreading effect of the war so lethal and corrosive, what helped the rising tide of scepticism and the sense of the absence of value and meaning throughout the century, was that the sort of question Studdert-Kennedy asked was rapidly forgotten. Too many religious people went back to a comfortable God. Too many people in general dusted off the clichés of the pre-war period – and too many simply reacted with anger and contempt against all of that. The sad standoff between despairing selfishness and superficiality on the one hand and inhuman new political philosophies on the other (communism and fascism) was fostered by a readiness to forget the hard lessons learned by those who’d been on the front line. In the darkest places, you discover you are real to yourself and one another. And if you’re not called – mercifully – to such places, you will need disciplines of thinking and imagination to keep yourself real: to fight off easy answers, false gods, stifling systems. Prayer is one such discipline, essential and focal for people of faith; but there are others. We can still choose honesty or dishonesty. We can still choose what Chesterton called the ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men’; or we can choose to face how vulnerable we all are and how much we need to fight against our fear of one other if trust and hope and love are to prevail when all is done. The challenge is how we stay awake to how the world is – and to how it can yet be changed.
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Read or listen to the full sermon.