Blog Archives
This weekend is rich and full
Sunwait begins tomorrow (our household celebrates on Fridays) and I’ll post more about that after our ritual, and of course, Saturday is Remembrance/Armistice/Veteran’s Day. I’ll be attending my local ceremony (I’d go to all of them in the surrounding towns, but they’re all held at 11am, because the Armistice was signed at 11/11 at 11am.
This is a weekend to remember our WWI dead, and to thank our living Veterans for what they have endured, for all that they do, and for their sacrifices. I often donate to military charities this month and I will be doing so again. I recommend Paralyzed Veterans of America, Fisher House, the American Legion, and the British Royal Legion.
Many of us wear red poppies to symbolize our respect for and remembrance of the dead. This symbolizes the blood our soldiers shed in battle. It became such a potent symbol following the publication of a poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae, a Canadian doctor who served and died in WWI.
How will you keep this day?
In Flanders Fields
BY JOHN MCCRAE
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Preparing for Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day
November 11 is Veteran’s Day– Armistice or Remembrance Day in Britain. This began as a day to remember those who served and died in World War I. In the US, it has become a day to remember our living veterans of all our wars, as well as those who died in WWI. This is a holy day as far as I’m concerned. We live in the tatters of a world shaped and defined by what happened from 1914-1918, though in the US at least, there isn’t even a national memorial for that particular war. We didn’t lose as many people, not even as close as Britain and France (though we did send an expeditionary force to Europe under General Pershing over in 1917. My 1stcousin twice removed private S. Wesley Heffner (30 April 1898-June 1918) died in France of injuries sustained in battle. I remember him every November). In Britain, entire villages were emptied of men. It cost the UK an entire generation and devastated Europe. Young men tended to enlist together, and villages were posted in the same battalions together so when those battalions fell in battle, they took the men of entire villages and towns with them.
America doesn’t do anything approaching enough to honor this day. The president may lay a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier at Arlington Cemetery. Individual towns may have small ceremonies at their local American Legion halls but we no longer have large, city wide parades, or events. We have chosen to forget, and this is shameful. Maybe if we remembered and honored a bit more assiduously, we wouldn’t be so quick to go to war, or so slow to intervene when it is right to do so.
The UK is also having problems this year. In London, numerous Pro-Palestinian groups have decided to hold marches on Remembrance Day. I’m sure we’ll see the same type of garbage here. In this, I don’t care if a march is Pro-Palestinian or Pro-Israeli, or Pro- anything else: it is inappropriate to hold such a thing on a day given to remember our honored dead, especially our WWI dead. Their ghosts still haunt London. You can sense them, feel them in the streets, right along with the ghosts of WWII holding us, their descendants accountable. To do this on Remembrance Day, to hold these pro-Palestinian marches (or any other kind of march that isn’t dedicated to remembrance) is disgusting and gross. Personally, if a group decides to march on Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day, I’d like to see forcible police action, arrest, and frankly, I’d strip the ingrates of their citizenship and remove them from the country. Or conscript them and send them to the front line of any pertinent war. Teach them a lesson about why we should be grateful to our military dead.
To insult the dead that gave their lives that we might live in freedom is …I don’t have words for how abhorrent that is, especially on Armistice Day. It’s utterly revolting and if the police won’t handle the ingrates, then I hope the people themselves do. That we allow any other type of march to occur on this day shows the utter lack of respect with which we hold our military dead.
I’ll close with a stanza from Binyon’s poignant tribute to the WWI fallen:
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
It is our privilege and our obligation to remember and with remembrance to carry in our hearts reverence. Always. If we can’t do that, what a pathetic generation of human beings we are.
Books, Books, Books!!
Six people have asked me over the span of the past week what I’m reading so here you go. Most of this has been influenced by an event at my school two weeks ago. We got to hear the permanent Ukrainian ambassador to the UN speak and some of us got to meet him. One of the questions he was asked involved the best way to prepare for diplomatic service – keep in mind the bulk of the attendees were undergraduates. His advice was to learn languages and study history, and then he launched into a breathtaking answer to another audience member’s question, an answer that spanned from WWI, the League of Nations, the Yalta Conference, to Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus” and farther. It was beautiful, truly beautiful. It also reignited in me an interest in catching up on my historical reading. I have training as an historian and I’m an historical theologian but lately I’ve been mostly reading theology books (I have some amazing ones that I’m working my way through most notably “Three Powers in Heaven” by Emanuel Fiano). Since I’m shortly to be guest teaching a class on WWI, my current reading is largely about the late 19th c., WWI and a little bit of WWII. Here’s my current list:
“The Thin Red Line: The Eyewitness History of the Crimean War” by Julian Spilsbury
“Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China” by F. Dikotter, Zhou Xun, Lars Laamann
“Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” by T. Snyder
“Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914-1918” by Aimee Fox
“Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya” by Caroline Elkins
“The First World War” by Michael Howard (this is an absolutely brilliant book!)
“Hitler: A Biography” by Ian Kershaw
“The Real Odessa” by Uki Goni
“The Romanov Sisters” by Helen Rappaport
“The Crimean War” by Orlando Figes
“The Opium War” by Julia Lovell
“The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine” by Serhii Plokhy
“Julian: Rome’s Last Pagan Emperor by Philip Freeman
Then, I’m also reading Emily Wilson’s new translation of the “Iliad.”
So that’s on my list, my pleasure reading for the next couple of weeks – what are y’all reading and what history books would you recommend? I’m always looking for good recommendations. ^_^
Affiliate Advertising Disclosure
An Interesting Find for my Ancestor Shrine
So, I’m gallery sitting today (the show ends tomorrow) and right next to the gallery is a book store/antique store. This is my happy place and when I take lunch, I usually go over there for a half hour and browse. Today, I think my military dead were with me because I scored most unexpectedly.
I’d been in the store last week and this item was not there. Tucked into a corner in the back room was a sword. I like weapons. I have quite a collection of weapons. I studied sword work (Japanese and western fencing though very little of the latter). I had to check this out. No one was there so I unsheathed and studied it. It turned out to be a WWI Italian Cavalry sword. I deal quite a bit veneratively (is that a word? I’m using it anyway regardless) with WWI dead, partly because I have a cousin who went over with Pershing’s forces and didn’t come home. In the part of my shrine given to the military dead, there’s a ton of WWI tokens (I have, for instance, an extensive collection of WWI knives. I’m very tactile and stuff like this really helps me to connected with the dead in question, plus in this case, I like blades).
Now this is one more addition to the shrine. It’s in excellent condition, has great balance, and feels really nice in the hand. I’ll hang it in that section of the ancestor shrine and call it a day but what a lucky find. Hail to our military dead, to those who suffered and laid down their lives, or suffered and soldiered on so that their children wouldn’t have to (we’re not so good at living up to that sacrifice are we?).
Here’s a pic of my find.
Movie Monday: 1917
I had put off watching this movie since it came out because I knew it was going to tear me up (it did) and also because I knew that as I watched it, my military dead would be all over me (they were). I honor the military dead as part of my calling as an ancestor worker and I have a passel of WWI dead in my spiritual cadre. When they come around me, I often experience powerful physical sensations. Last night, as I was watching this movie, when there was smoke and gas, my chest closed up and I began to choke. I could taste it, and the bitterness lingered on my tongue until the movie ended; and oh, it was a wrenching movie to watch, beautiful, achingly so, especially the filmmaker’s use of tone and color. The performances, particularly that by George MacKay were outstanding. As an aside, one extended scene included a Sikh infantryman and I liked that, because a lot of people don’t realize that many Sikh and Indian troops served with distinction in WWI. Also, this movie was an homage to the writer (with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) and director’s grandfather, Alfred H. Mendes, who served with British forces in WWI and whose stories formed the inspiration for the film itself.
It’s a searing film and the way it was shot brings the viewer right into the action. It’s very stylized, but condemns the stupid, prideful futility of this war more than any other war movie I have seen, at last amongst those that come directly to mind as I write this (there are many, after all, that I have not viewed). It’s visually stunning. The framing and the use of color: the green of the grass, the sepia and orange tones of the fire, even the Payne’s grey of the helmets occasionally as they caught the sun is especially evocative. It’s one of those movies where any scene that you pause it at will look like a piece of art, and some of the background actually looked like photos of no-man’s land that I’ve seen in historical archives. Also, one particular scene has a man singing to his troop right before they are about to make a surely suicidal charge against the enemy, and he’s singing “wayfaring stranger” because they know they’re about to die. They don’t, but it’s close and his voice is hauntingly beautiful. Also, one thing that hits like a fist to the gut is the age of the majority of infantrymen: they were (accurately in many cases) staggeringly young. But, it also showed that we should never assume that just because someone is young, they cannot demonstrate heroism and self-sacrifice. Just because someone is young, we shouldn’t think that they can’t change their world.
The only negative, if negative it be, occurred precisely because my WWI military dead were so strongly about me. Linking in as I was to their sensory memory and experiences of the war, I was having ongoing cognitive disconnect. They liked the movie but the men were taller, broader, more well fed, and overall healthier than any infantryman would have been at that time. Also, and they really kept going on about this, everything was too clean. The lice, the mud, the piss and shit, the stench of fear, the smell of rotting horse carcasses, rotting human bodies, unwashed living bodies, gunpowder, the lingering of the chemicals used in mustard gas, the vermin (rats, mice, etc.), the blood didn’t come through in the film. Of course, there’s no way it could since we cannot smell a movie, but still, it was very strange on this count what I was experiencing from them, especially combined with my own emotional response to the film.
It’s unfortunate, and I think very, very dangerous that WWI has passed out of living memory. The consequences of this war have been felt through the entirety of the 20thcentury. This war destroyed a world and we’re living in the echoes of what was left.
As an aside, I also recommend the series Anzac Girls, available on amazon prime. It focuses, at least as much as I’ve seen, on a group of Australian and New Zealand nurses during WWI and I think we forget that world war meant world war. NZ and Australia served as well. Then, there’s one of my favorite historical series Crimson Field. It’s one of the best WWI series I’ve ever seen. It was cancelled after one season, probably because it showed the incompetence of the leadership far too honestly. Still, that one season is worth watching. It also focuses on a group of (this time British) nurses. Sadly, and to our lasting shame, the “War to End All Wars” didn’t. It only prepared us for worse.
Dulce et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen, who died in the trenches right before Armistice.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(Affiliate advertising disclaimer)
WWI Dead or What It’s Like to Be A Spirit-Worker
Today is so bad. I woke with a migraine bad enough to make me vomit. Too much spirit contact and unexpected at that. Last night, I already wasn’t feeling great. I had a bit of a migraine mostly from the weather so I took migraine medication and settled in to watch some tv with my housemate and my husband. I wanted to show them a WWI show that I like: The Crimson Field. It’s all about VAD nurses in WWI (got cancelled after one season, probably because it showed how fucking incompetent military leadership was). I didn’t think to first make offerings to the military dead, even though they are one of my primary group of spirits, especially the WWI dead.
I’ve since decided that whenever I watch anything having to do with WWI, I’m just going to make offerings to that family of the dead as a matter of course. That’s my new protocol now and forever a-fucking-men.
As we were watching the series last night, I started getting enraged and wanting to grind my teeth and at one point the man who had risen up with his brothers-in-arms behind me actually used my voice to hiss bitter at the story being portrayed and that’s when we all realized the dead were around us. An ancestor worker carries the dead always. We carry them with us and whether it is men who sing like angels or men and women who plodded through mud and piss and shit and hell they are with us always. I realize the story being depicted was so very close to what had happened to the spirit behind me and he was still so very angry so we gave him voice and gave him and the others there offerings and the room grew crystalline bright and I saw the spirits of the dead ringing us misty and pale and that is how we spent out night and today I feel as though I have been beaten. My head is not large enough for the multitude that wanted to pour their stories and their pain into it. The honeycombed halls of my heart are willing to receive their stories, to carry their pain but oh I feel as though someone clubbed the back of my head hard.
Sannion: “the spirits take everything.”
Me in response: “OMG that’s absolutely the truth. They so do, but they give everything too.”
And he and my housemate concurred. They take and they give and we are stretched thin in between.
Shrouds of the Somme
What a powerful act of remembrance. If i were in the UK, I’d definitely see this. Let us remember our dead, let us remember our dead, let us carry them with us always in heart, mind, and spirit. May our fallen warriors be honored and may they find peace.
(my image of the WWI memorial statue in Rhinebeck, NY)
A Neat Ancestor Find
Part of my work spiritually, as an ancestor worker, involves honoring not just my own ancestors but several specific groups of the dead. One of those is the military dead. I maintain an extensive shrine to them at which I make regular offerings and I’ve gone on pilgrimage to honor them several times. I also keep an eye out for things that they may like, at flea markets, at antique stores, and so forth. While I was at Villanova last week participating in a theology conference, I took some time out to do a bit of antiquing. I was traveling with my friend Allen, who has a real gift for finding just the right thing that one might want or need (he’s really amazing at it). As we were hunting around one store, he picked up this bright, brass box and showed it to me. I was quite taken with it immediately and thought it might be Trench Art from WWI. When I spoke with the proprietor I found out that it wasn’t, instead it was a Mary Box.
In the last year of WWI, Britain’s princess Mary raised money on her own to create and send these boxes to every single soldier serving in the British forces, from highest to lowest (officers received silver boxes, enlisted brass). They were typically filled with tobacco or sometimes, if the soldier wasn’t a smoker, candy and sweets. They’re rarely in such good condition, because they were carried and used by these men. I was really, really lucky to find one – thanks to my friend Allen – in pristine condition. Of course, I bought it.
I decided that I would dedicate it to the military dead and use it as my cigarette case. That way, every time I smoke, I would be making an offering to them. So far, it’s been working beautifully and every time I hold it or open it, I’m reminded to give thanks for them, and to reach out to them, pray to and for them. Such a small thing has made me more intensely mindful and I am grateful. Most of all, I’m grateful that the Gods have guided me wisely in this practice of honoring this group of dead. May I learn from them and may I honor them well.
Gangleri's Grove 