The Pieta, The Death of Wolfe, and Remembrance.

     Christian theologians and artists have always been in love with Jesus’ mother, Mary, who they named, Theotokos, mother of God. Liturgies, music, and prayers especially focused on her purity and suffering.

     One of the suffering moments—not actually mentioned in scripture—was when Mary first held the body of Jesus after it was taken off of the cross. This moment is called The Pieta, which can be translated as “The Pity,” or “The Compassion.”

     Here is an early example, the Rottgen Pieta from the fourteenth century. It is graphic and gritty and moves me. Jesus’ wounds still flow. He is emaciated, ugly, broken, just as you would expect a crucified holy man to look. Mary is shocked, on the verge of disbelief.

     The medieval Germans peasants who saw this Pieta in their church knew this kind of suffering for themselves. Medieval life was, as Thomas Hobbes said, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The Rottgen Pieta offered those peasants both a Jesus and a Mary they could identify with.

     But there is another, darker side to this and similar devotional sculptures. The sculpture suggests that suffering is holy. Mary and Jesus’ suffering here justifies suffering as a reality of life peasants had to accept. The Rottgen Pieta—and many more like it--was used by the church to teach, nurture—and control—peasant believers.

     Not so Michelangelo’s Pietá. It served a very different purpose for a very different audience. This sculpture, found in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, is one of the most admired works of art of all time.

     The earthy realism of Rottgen is gone, replaced unearthly Platonic idealism. Mary, even as the mother of a 31-year old man, is still a beautiful virgin, the prototypical perfect woman. And Jesus, even in death, is Adonis-beautiful, too.

     The story here is that Michelangelo was hired by the French Cardinal Jean de Bilheres to create this sculpture for two reasons. It was to serve—and for a while, it did—as Bilheres’ tombstone. But more importantly, Bilhere was in Rome as a French ambassador after a disastrous war between France and most of the small Italian Republics. It was a war marked by the brutal sack of Mordano, about 250 kilometers north of Rome. The French army put all its citizens, including women and children, to death. 

      Now, after this inconclusive but brutal war, Bilhere was supposed to help smooth things over. And so, he tasked Michelangelo, an Italian artist, to use a notably French and German theme, The Pieta, to sculpt a work of Italian marble to place in the French chapel of the first St. Peter’s in Rome, Italy. A peace offering that bound the two peoples together.

     With Michelangelo’s Pieta, the suffering of Mary and Jesus is a passing whisper—as Bilhere hoped the suffering of Mordano and Italy might be soon forgotten, too. The ugliness of war is here swallowed up by the stunning beauty of national reconciliation symbolized by Jesus’ reconciliation of humans to God, through his death. The Pieta is a stunning piece of political theater.







     Which brings us to a modern pieta, Pablo Picasso's Guernica. You've seen this painting. I don't know how to speak to its beauty--it is striking and compelling and abstract, though.

     Here Picasso painted the suffering of the village of Guernica during the Spanish civil war, just before WWII. The Nazi Luftwaffe bombed that little Basque village on a market day. There was no military target. The purpose was simply to sow terror. Two hundred and fifty townspeople died. It was a modern Mordano.

     Thus, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, Guernica is very, very political. But instead of trying to smooth over a war, it puts Nazi war crimes front and center, condemning them.

     And if you look closely, you will see on the far left, a pieta—Mary holding Jesus in her lap. It’s Rottgenall over, but in Picasso’s cubist style. Do you see it? On the left?

     In case you can't, here is a reproduction, done as a sculpture, by well-known American artist
Arthur Lopez, in the Mexican-American Santero style.

     I have one more pieta to show you, Benjamin West’s, “The Death of Major-General James Wolfe.”

     You remember James Wolfe. He was the commanding British officer during the French-Indian war. The French were besieged at Quebec, and tried to break through British lines with a surprise attack on the Plains of Abraham, that failed. The battle only took an hour, but during it Wolfe was shot and died of his wounds.

     The battle led, soon after, to France’s exit from New France. Wolfe has, forever after, been seen as Canada’s first war hero, and the epitome of the British Empire’s fighting spirit and military prowess.




     Wolfe’s painting, of course, is yet another version of The Pieta. West knew Michelangelo’s Pieta well from when he lived in Rome as an art student. Here, West lays out Wolfe as Michelangelo laid out Jesus. General James Wolfe is a sacrificial lamb who died to establish true civilization in the New World jungle. One commentator writes, “This deliberate visual association between the dying General Wolfe and the dead Christ underscores the British officer’s admirable qualities. If Christ was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause—that is, the salvation of mankind—then Wolfe too was innocent, pure, and died for a worthwhile cause; the advancement of the British position in North America.”

     In contrast to other paintings of Wolfe’s death from the same era, West filled his painting not with regular soldiers, but with military dignitaries. In fact, none of these men were actually there. West added them to add dignity to the scene. One of those watching is a First Nations warrior, looking on Wolfe adoringly—in stark contrast to how most First Nations would have felt about these European wars that kept dragging them in.

     But West has no time for such objections. He is making myths that justify the violence, greed, and visions of world domination that are at the root of all empires, including the British Empire. West here is an evangelist for wars on behalf of the crown and for territorial expansion.

     All of which brings me near to the end of what I want to say this morning. All of these works of art that I’ve shown you this morning served propagandistic ends. In each of them, the story of Mary holding Jesus’ body, a religious theme—was used to score political points.

     The Rottgen Pieta served the churches need to tell the story of Jesus to illiterate peasants who needed comfort, assurance—and who needed to be kept in line. It said, “shut up and embrace your suffering, like Mary and Jesus did.”

     Michelangelo’s Pieta was meant to paper over war crimes. It was an offer of arm’s length, platonic friendship as a substitute for war.

     Picasso’s pieta was exactly the opposite. It served as a condemnation of war by including a very Rottgen-like Pieta that represents the evil of war.

     And the question for us, of course, is this. Will we let Remembrance Day, as well as its rituals and music, use us in a similar way? Or will we see through some of the myths to the fact of war’s evil? To the actual pain and suffering of both soldiers and civilians? Will we, perhaps, use Remembrance Day to organize for no more wars?

     This week, we ought to remember the heroism of our boys; but we also remember Flanders Fields and the poppies their bodies fed. We remember the WWI sacrifices of Vimy Ridge and the Somme and Passchendaele, but we also now understand that ultimately, these battles were fought for the elites of a British Empire against the elites of a German Empire, rather than for any common good or high moral principle.

     We have fought other morally ambivalent wars. The Royal Mounted Police against the Metis. The first overseas deaths of Canadian soldiers in a totally useless Anglo-Boer war that mostly served to make the British Empire richer while brutally erasing Africans. But our boys also died fighting the horrific reality of Nazism in what is sometimes called the twentieth century’s only just war. Our boys liberated extermination camps and liberated my ancestors in Holland. In any case, whether the cause was just or not or just middling—our men were always true and valiant.

     And now I wonder, how will history judge our time in Afghanistan, after the Taliban is back in control, as they seem destined to be? Or our material support for Saudi Arabia and its ruthless war in Somalia?

     I do not know.

     But today, we nevertheless remember the Christ-like suffering of all our military martyrs. In their memory, and to prevent the need for remembering more soldiers in the future, we commit our Remembrance Day not merely to making glorious national myths, but to learning the hard lessons of history, history as objective as we can make it.

     Even good wars are hell. We must do all within our power to avoid falling for heroic myths that want to use us, and instead, as a nation, build lasting peace wherever we can lend a hand.

     I am not naïve. I know that hating war cannot end war. But I plead with you, as followers of Jesus, who gave his own life as a protest against both religious bigotry and Roman military occupation, I ask you, as followers of Jesus to use your social and political and economic gifts and powers to make peace.

     This is the most fitting Remembrance of all.

Patriotism

         Patriotism is a good word that also throws dark shadows.

         For starters, “patriotism” is derived from Latin and Greek words that mean “father,” as in “fatherland.” As if there are no mothers or daughters or sons. Patriotism has, historically, been about patriarchy, androcentrism and phallocentrism (a polite word that means “thinking with your penis”). Patriotic stories are invariably violent. We are most patriotic when the news is an unending and breathless series of updates about the murders and funerals of Corporal Nathan Cirillo and Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent.

         I checked a thesaurus to see if I could find any kinder and gentler synonyms for patriotism. The thesaurus offered “loyalty,” and “devotion,” as possibilities. But other synonyms included nationalism, jingoism, chauvinism, and worst of all, “xenophobia.” That means, “fear of the other” but is widely used to mean “hatred of anyone who isn’t like me.” Patriotism is perhaps the best word for the quality I want to write about, but it throws long shadows.

         No wonder then, that in England, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “patriotic” was understood to be a slur. To be a patriot then was pretty much the same as being called a “Tea Partier” now—only worse.

         “Patriotism” is also an “ism.” Such words insist that you are either a true believer or badly mistaken. “Ism” words like “Marxism,” “fundamentalism,” and even “liberalism” are used to draw lines in the sand. These are words for ideologies that take over the minutes, days, and sometimes the souls of our lives.

                 

         Patriotism might be a good word but it casts dark shadows. For example, Irene and I have a large charcoal drawing of a statue that stands in the center of the Dutch City of Rotterdam. The statue is entitled, Stad Zonder Hart," which means, "city without a heart."

         The statue is of a person who seems contorted in pain. The body is twisted in unnatural ways, arms all akimbo. And the torso is cratered by a huge hole where the heart belongs. City without a heart.

         The statue commemorates the destruction of Rotterdam, on May 14, 1940. In the space of a few hours, Nazis dropped nearly 2000 bombs on the city center. The blitzkrieg ignited a firestorm. More than 1000 people died, 85,000 more were homeless, and nearly three square kilometers of the centrum was pulverized into dust.

         Stad Zondar Hart is a monument to the devotion—the patriotism—that the surviving Dutch have for their nation.

         But the Stad Zonder Hart inevitably casts a terrible shadow, too. See it and you are confronted with another group of patriots: the generals who launched those bombers against Rotterdam, the pilots who flew them, and the ruthless SS who came in their wake to round up Jews and send them to death camps. Nazi patriots stole Rotterdam’s heart.

         And that is one of the problems with patriotism, isn’t it? Tie patriotism too strongly to country and suddenly few are asking what is right or wrong.

         I’m reading Karen Armstrong’s new Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence for review. Along the way she reminds readers that Jerusalem has been destroyed several times. And she points to a remarkable passage that Isaiah writes in response to the destruction of Jerusalem.

         Of course, Isaiah describes the pain of Jerusalem’s destruction. He does so, for example, in a passage Christians would later use to describe Jesus. Israel, says Isaiah, was despised and rejected, afflicted, wounded for our transgressions, and led like a lamb to the slaughter. In many ways, Isaiah’s book is a written Stad Zonder Hart, a patriotic, anguished monument to the horror of a nation’s utter defeat. Isaiah is a book with lots of shadow in it.

         But then, surprisingly, in a passage Armstrong highlights, Isaiah 60—among other similar passages—Isaiah writes: “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” And that light is dawning on a New Jerusalem. A parade of nations—including many of Israel’s past enemies—comes to New Jerusalem’s gates to honor her. “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

         The light in New Jerusalem, of course, is God. So, at first, reading Isaiah 60, I’m a bit anxious because patriotism mixed with religion tends to be very scary. Consider those fight for Allah or who died for the Divine Hirohito of Japan. Consider the crusades or The Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda.

         But leaving aside, for a moment, the difficulties of mixing religion and patriotism, there is something else in this passage that is at least a partial antidote to the many shadow sides of patriotism. The author says that in New Jerusalem, God “will appoint peace as your overseer, and righteousness as your taskmaster. Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders.”

         So Isaiah 60 hints at patriotism rooted not in aching sadness about the destruction of Jerusalem, or in memories of war dead, or even in a volatile mix of nationalism and God. It hints at a patriotism based on ideals.

         Listen, patriotism has always been a good word wrapped in dark shadow. We ought never forget the sacrifices so many made to preserve freedom at home, or to liberate our friends abroad. But if patriotism is based only on the memory of sacrifices made, it will not necessarily have a moral heart. Memory, after all, is fickle. The past—from Pax Romana to the American Revolution, is always subject to pragmatic revision by the state for its own ends.

         So, ultimately, patriotism must be informed by enduring ideals if it to avoid walking the fence between jingoism and disaster. Unless the Canadian—and American—way is all about finding and making peace rather than being dragged off into one war after another; unless we believe in reconciliation and equal opportunity as means to short-circuit violence at the fringes of our domestic society; unless we embrace righteousness—that is, justice and equity for neighbors both near and far—unless we embrace righteousness rather than mere health and wealth for ourselves; unless we root our patriotism in a future worth bequeathing to our children, rather than in memories of past battles won or lost patriotism will merely continue to be a good word that casts a long shadow.

         But when patriotism is informed by the light of Isaiah’s kind of ideals: peace, nonviolence, righteousness and reconciliation, it will go far to cast our national shadows away.

Remembering My Boer Relative's Execution

            This past Sunday my church commemorated Remembrance Day, and that brought a story to mind.

            Many years ago, a relative of mine—my grandfather’s cousin, and so my first cousin three times removed—enlisted to fight in the Boer War, in Southern Africa. The Boer War was the first war that Canadians went overseas to fight. They did so for patriotism, for Empire, and for King, though probably not so much for Sir Wilfred Laurier, the Canadian Prime Minister at the time. Laurier would only send volunteers to South Africa because he didn’t want to offend Quebecers who thought fighting a war for England halfway around the world was just plain stupid. Maybe my fellow Canadians were right.

            The thing is, my grandfather’s cousin didn’t fight for the Canadians or the British. Pieter Schuil was a Dutchman who volunteered to fight for the Boers in a fit of righteous indignation at what the British were doing to the Boers. Tragically, Pieter was ultimately executed by firing squad. I have a letter written to Pieter’s parents, in Dutch, by the English Chaplain who prayed with Pieter on that last day, both on bended knee, Pieter with a Bible in his hands.

            There is more to Pieter’s story. It seems that he may have been unjustly executed, though this is disputed. The British claimed that while carrying a white flag, he came toward the British lines, and then suddenly lowered the gun and started shooting. At his court marshal hearing, Pieter claimed that it was no flag of truce, but just a hankie tied to his gun for no reason in particular, and that he never approached the English lines. He had been unhorsed, and was simply caught up in the British advance.

            And there is more yet to the story. This was a war for empire in its worst sense. The Boers had set up two small independent countries to get away from British rule in the Cape. What is more, they didn’t ask the Africans, whose land they conquered, for permission to set up those countries. After gold and diamonds were discovered in the one of little Boer states--which had made peace with Britain earlier--the British attacked in order to add the Boer territory to their own. It was an imperialistic land grab for the empire. Again, no one asked any Africans for their permission.

            When the British regulars defeated the Boer armies, the Boers refused to surrender and engaged in guerrilla warfare. The British responded by pretty much burning down every Boer farm they could find, inventing concentration camps, and then filling them not merely with soldiers but with women and children from the burned out farms. At least 20,000 Boers and an equal number of Africans charged with feeding the Boers died of hunger and disease in the camps. Pictures from the camps look eerily like pictures from Nazi concentration camps 40 years later. It was a dirty war that brought no honor to England, the Boers, or Canada.

            An interesting personal footnote is that forty years later, after the Second World War, my Shona daughter-in-law’s grandfather, a wealthy African cattle rancher, had all his land expropriated by the British so that they could give it to returning war veterans. Without land to range and feed his cattle, he sold most of his heard at a huge loss and became a refugee in what was then Rhodesia. No one ever asked him what he thought of the Boer War or the two World Wars. His descendants mostly grew up poor and landless and angry that white invaders had dispossessed them of everything they owned.

            War is an ugly business. So what do I do on Remembrance Day? Should I remember my family members who died at war, even if they fought on the losing side? Or when they fought for mistaken ideals? Or should I remember only Canada’s heroes, young men and women who fought with honor and courage, even if the wars they fought were sometimes unjust? Or should I have preached a sermon on how all war is hell and how we all ought to work like angels to make sure we don’t fall into another? After all, as Jesus once said, those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and “Love your enemies,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

            And, by the way, who exactly is calling Christians children of God these days, anyway?