Sacrifice, sacred awe, and Remembrance-tide

When someone enters the moment of sacrifice, throwing away what is most precious, even life itself, then we encounter the supreme moment of gift.  This is an act in which the I appears completely.  It is also a revelation.  In sacrifice and renunciation the I makes of its own being a gift, and thereby shows us that being is a gift.  In the moment of sacrifice people come face to face with God, who is present too in those places where sorrow has left its mark or 'prayer has been valid'.

We should not be so surprised, therefore, if God is so rarely encountered now.  The consumer culture is one without sacrifices; easy entertainment distracts us from our metaphysical loneliness ... It is inevitable, therefore, that moments of sacred awe should be rare among us - Roger Scruton, The Face of God (2012).

Scruton's words come to mind as we prepare for Remembrance Sunday.  Throughout the United Kingdom, a culture now routinely described as thoroughly secular approaches the ceremonies, silence, and memories associated with Remembrance Sunday with a reverence that is religious.  It is a moment of "sacred awe".

The analysis of sacrifice offered by Scruton helps us to understand why this is so.  The immensity of the sacrifice in two World Wars pierces the secular assumptions of a consumer culture.  The Good; the True; death; life; duty; liberty; 'we'.  All these are revealed by sacrifice to have a weighty meaning, a weight and meaning which cannot be borne by a consumer culture defined by the emptiness of 'choice'.

As Rowan Williams has stated, "the moral world is not very satisfactorily defined" is terms of individual choice.  Remembrance Sunday then comes as judgement, exposing the banalities of 'choice', of the consumer culture.

If the weight of Remembrance Sunday cannot be borne by secularism and consumerism, it similarly cannot be held by a false nationalism.  A nationalism of blood and soil, invoking other gods, speaking darker stories, cannot meaningfully hold the pain of death nor the sorrow of loss.  Such false nationalism may use the discourse of sacrifice, but it cannot comprehend sacrifice that is for peace rather than for subjugation, sacrifice in the service of war without end rather than, as Augustine asserted, to protect "the tranquillity of the commonwealth", "in order that peace may be obtained".

It is against both the emptiness of the consumer culture and the darkness of a false nationalism that the Church historically has shaped Remembrance Sunday.  And so the sign of the Cross marks war graves and memorials in cities, towns, and villages; parish churches hold memorials bearing the names of those who fell; and prayer enfolds the country's acts of solemn of remembrance.  The Church understands sacrifice in a manner that cannot be comprehended either by consumer culture or false nationalism.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

The Church understands sacrifice ordered towards peace not subjugation, flowing from love not hatred.  Through Remembrance Sunday, what Alison Milbank terms "the Christian imaginary" holds the national memories and emotions of the sacrifices of two World Wars, and does so because sacrifice is neither alien concept nor triumph of the will for the Church.  The pain and loss of sacrifice is recalled, the fruit of peace cherished, the love of neighbour expressed in patriotism and military service recognised, and the polity ordered towards peace and justice.

It is right and proper, then, that the Church addresses a culture which experiences what Scruton terms "sacred awe" in the face of the memory of sacrifice.  It is a witness which orders our remembrance towards the author of peace and the lover of concord.  The Church's Remembrance-tide presence and prayer seeks to enable the culture to perceive the meaning of sacrifice in the Cross of the Crucified, of how our earthly loves and sacrifices, and our desires for peace, flow from and are to return to the One who "having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself ... whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven".