A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation
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As most of you will know, Friday 24th February, saw the first anniversary of the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It struck me that it might be helpful to use this moment to reflect, not upon its start a year ago (really nine years ago), nor the current state of the conflict but, instead, on how it might end and, indeed, on how most wars so far have ended.
It is well known, or at least it was once well known, that at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) immediately following the First World War, a British staff office called Archibald Wavell — who was later to become both a Field Marshal and Viceroy of India — despairingly said: “After the ‘war to end war,’ they seem to have been pretty successful . . . at making the ‘Peace to end Peace.’” He was, of course, proved disturbingly correct and, today, many historians see the terms of the Treaty of Versailles as playing a key role in creating the conditions for the beginnings of the Nazi Party and the Second World War.
Wavell’s observation helps me make the basic point that I wish to bring before you today, namely, that the way we have all too often ended wars is far from good and, therefore, perhaps we should all spend some time thinking about this fact long before the war in Ukraine is even close to ending.
I’d like to do this with the help of a poem by the Polish poet and Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (1923-2012), called “The End and the Beginning” (trans. by Joanna Trzeciak) which she wrote following the ending of the Second World War.
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
(From “Miracle Fair: selected poems of Wisława Szymborska”, W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2001, pp. 48-49)
Re-reading this poem last summer as the war in Ukraine began fully to rage I was reminded that, both in London and in various towns and cities in France and Germany, I have many times been that person Szymborska mentions at the end of her poem, stretched out in a park that was on a former bomb site, blade of grass in my mouth, gazing at the clouds.
I don’t think Szymborska is saying that I, or anyone else who was fortunate enough to be born after the end of the Second World War, should feel guilty about these moments of repose per se — not least of all because those who cleared up the mess would, for the most part, I think, be pleased to know that someone like me is now able to do this — but I do think her poem is an attempt to alert us to the fact that these grassy places can only be true places of lasting peace if in them, through some embodied practice of conscious remembrance, some lasting knowledge about both the roots and cost of war gets into our very bones. As a student of Socrates might have said: “Something is truly known only when it can no longer be forgotten. Something is truly understood only when it is known inside the soul” (Rob Rieman, Nobility of the Spirit, Yale UP, 2008, p. 91).
But, alas, this is almost never the case. You will often have to do quite a bit of homework to find out if this or that grassy park in which you are currently reclining was, once upon a time, a bomb site, passed by with corpse-filled wagons and was strewn with rubble, scum, ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, girders and bloody rags. The memory of the roots and cost of war is nearly always entirely erased in these places and too many people are left knowing little, then less than little and, finally, as little as nothing. Indeed, our culture’s all too easy enjoyment of such peaceful places once strewn with the bloody evidence of violence, has always seemed to me to be an example of the situation Jeremiah (8:11) had in mind when two and a half millennia ago he proclaimed:
They have treated the wound of my people carelessly,
saying, “Peace, peace,”
when there is no peace.
Given this, as I have been stretched out in a park that was on a former bomb site, blade of grass in my mouth, gazing at the clouds I have, on occasions, daydreamed that in such public, restorative and now, peaceful, places, somewhere in their precincts a modest little shrine or altar could be set up where we could go, just for a moment, to remember the roots and cost of war, to give quiet thanks for this peaceful place and, at the same time, to rededicate ourselves to maintaining this peace in the days, weeks, months and years ahead. In my free religious and humanist, cosmopolitan daydream, in order to ensure it was standing as a placeholder for all the gods, goddesses and highest philosophical and moral ideals and principles venerated by humankind, this shrine or altar was dedicated to the ancient “agnostos theos”, the so-called unknown god or goddess.
Just to be clear, of course I really don’t expect anyone to take my daydream seriously. It’s simply a thought-experiment had whilst reclining in a park, blade of grass in my mouth, gazing at the clouds.
But of one thing I am sure, namely, that if, following this war, we choose to walk once again down a path which simply leads to us knowing little, then less than little and, finally, as little as nothing about the roots and cost of war, then the lasting peace we claim we are seeking will never be known by us.
So, very inadequately to conclude: For what it’s worth, this week, when I light a candle during the Sunday Morning Service of Mindful Meditation, I will quietly honour my daydream and, in the name of the agnostos theos, offer up a prayer for a lasting peace in Ukraine that never forgets the roots of the conflict nor the corpse-filled wagons, the rubble, scum, ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, girders and bloody rags.