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The Word that causes death's defeat

Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 27 November 2005

Winter has come early this year, and with it a clutch of scare stories calculated to make us all anxious - a shortage of 'flu vaccine, a shortage of gas for industry, if not for domestic heating, a shortage even perhaps of grit for trunk roads in the South West of England. All of these worries, of course, infinitely pale by comparison with what is happening even now in Pakistan and India as winter tightens its grip on the earthquake-devastated valleys of Kashmir. Compared with that, the kind of anxieties we now have about winter, in Britain and much of the rest of Europe, are almost luxuries - unless perhaps you are homeless and sleeping rough, or someone who has finally come to the bitter end of your physical or financial or psychological resources. But unless or until that time comes for us as individuals, most of us are more like what doctors call 'the worried well': we may be anxious, and we may complain, but we also have the security blanket, however ragged, of the modern secular European welfare state to be properly grateful for.

It was not always so. A distant cousin of mine, working on the family tree, told me recently that he had traced our common ancestors back to a Wester Ross family, who during the Highland Clearances spent nights out on the heather after their croft was burnt down by their landlord. The words of our second reading today must have been very real to them: 'Pray that your flight may not be in winter'.

Then there are those words from our first reading this morning: 'Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.' Hearing those words, I was reminded of the 'large and beautiful houses' of St Petersburg, described by the historian Orlando Figes in Natasha's Dance, his 'cultural history' of Russia. After the Russian Revolution, those houses also became desolate, not as it happened 'without inhabitant', but with too many families crowded into single rooms. During the years of Stalinist Terror, and especially during the German siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, the terrible end-of-the-world days prophesied by Isaiah and by Jesus in our second reading, must have seemed to have arrived; 'Pray that your flight may not be in winter'.

Yet as Figes also records, unbearable human misery was not the only characteristic of that dreadful time. A turning point in the siege of Leningrad was marked, when the remnants of the only orchestra left in the city performed in a bombed-out concert hall, within and outside which the people gathered to listen and 'were brought together by music; they felt united by a sense of their city's spiritual strength, by a conviction that their city would be saved.'

Among the inhabitants of St Petersburg during the Stalinist terror and the Second World War, too, was a remarkable woman, the poet Anna Akhmatova. In the 1930s, during the worst years of the Stalinist Terror, her son was arrested, held and tortured in a Leningrad prison. For a year and a half, not knowing what had become of him, she went daily with many other women to join the long queues at the prison gates, waiting, as Figes puts it, 'to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window, and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive'. One day, in the queue, Akhmatova was recognised as the famous poet of whom the Soviet Government so disapproved, and a woman standing behind her whispered: 'Can you describe this?' 'Yes, I can.' Akhmatova replied, and then, as she wrote afterwards of that woman, 'something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face'.

Akhmatova was, Figes writes, 'to become the people's voice' in that dark time, defending the memory of the defeated and lost in language that will live on in European literature and the history of human heroism. Akhmatova had been brought up in the old aristocratic pre-revolutionary world, and could have escaped abroad as many others did. But she chose to stay, and during the Terror and the War lived in a corner of one of the now desolate, but once 'large and beautiful', St Petersburg palaces - the palace of a family whose motto was 'Deus conservat omnia' - 'God preserves everything'. And this was what she too, did for the Russian people in her poetry. As she wrote:

But here, as the dark fires blaze around
And our last youth burns out in their glow,
We don't ask where refuge can be found,
Don't try to avoid a single blow.
We know each hour's worth will be made clear
And justified at the end of days�

What gave this woman the vision and the strength to keep faith with her people in such memorable words? According to a recent translator of her work, Akhmatova's dedication to preserving the memory of the dead derived not only from her deep sense of communion with world culture, but also from her religious faith in the communion of the present with the past and the living with the dead as part of a seamless whole in which each person and event has eternal meaning and value. Akhmatova, indeed, called poetry 'our holy trade'� 'the Word that causes death's defeat.'

The Word that causes death's defeat. It is not difficult to catch an echo here of what we shall hear at the end of this Advent season: 'And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us'. In humanity's darkest days, that Word has been made flesh again and again in the damaged lives of countless ordinary people as they struggled to survive, and above all to love, against all the odds. And it is incarnate too in music that inspires and poetry that commemorates such lives, promising that 'the communion of the present with the past and the living with the dead' is 'part of a seamless whole in which each person and event has eternal meaning and value.' The Word that causes death's defeat.

Now for us, of course, all of this may seem very remote, and to many people, perhaps, irrelevant to our lives today, under what I called earlier the security blanket of the modern secular European welfare state. And for this security, as I said, we should be properly grateful. Fortunately for us, we do not live under the Stalinist Terror or in Leningrad under siege. But as I also said, we live in a world where, even now, countless people are suffering just as terribly in the winter of Kashmir, and in war-torn regions of Africa and the Middle East. And even here, in Britain and in Europe, many people are homeless and sleeping rough, or individually, 'soul by soul and silently', and often ignored by the rest of us, finally coming to the bitter end of their physical or financial or psychological resources. It does not take a large effort of the imagination to realise that the world as it is known to those of us under the security blanket of the modern secular European welfare state, is not the world as it has been, is, or ever may be known to innumerable other members of the human race.

If we want to understand the world aright, therefore, we need to keep on making this effort of the imagination, to get ourselves out of the habit of thinking that our relative security in secular modern European society, provides the best vantage point for understanding what life is all about. What characterises the vantage point of a secular society, someone has said, is not so much that it is not religious, as that it is geared to the immediate interests of the present generation, the generation politically and socially in power, or seeking to get into power, and that it is not much interested in the past or in more than the short term future. Perhaps this is why, in a secular society, so many political decisions are influenced less by long-term considerations, than by what the media will say tomorrow.

Now to say that, of course, is not to deny the many benefits of a modern secular welfare state, or to deny that others across the world ought to enjoy those benefits. Nor is it to say that we would be better off under the kind of theocracy that Europe has cast off - the rule by religious officials who think they alone know the will of God. But when we consider what the world is really like for most of humanity, the small-mindedness, even the selfishness, of a purely secular view of the world becomes only too apparent. To be true humanists indeed, means that we cannot ignore the dead, or the yet to be born, for whose memory and for whose future interests, we are responsible.

But what hope is there of our even beginning to fulfil this responsibility? Today, at the beginning of Advent, we are offered a possibility - the possibility, strange as it may seem to a secular view, that we are not on our own - the possibility that all the endeavours, trials and tribulations of the human race are, as Jesus says in our gospel reading, 'the birth-pangs' of a better world, where the deepest longings of humanity will be satisfied, and
each hour's worth will be made clear
And justified at the end of days�

Today, at the beginning of Advent, we are once again challenged by this larger vision of human history - challenged to wait again, in our hearts, in our relationships, and in our secular society, for the coming among us of 'the Word that causes death's defeat' - 'in the communion of the present with the past and the living with the dead' - 'as part of a seamless whole in which each person and event has eternal meaning and value.' Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

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