A Song in a Strange Land

Sermon Preached at The Edington Festival of Music with the Liturgy
19th-26th August 2018, Beauty Came as the Setting Sun

In response to The Volunteer, by Ivor Gurney. Readings: Ezekiel 36:23-28, Matthew 22:1-14
Music: Lament, Francis Pott, Super flumina Babylonis, Philippe de Monte

A Song in a strange land

It’s hard to imagine that there was any singing in the trenches. In the mud and slush and among the damp spirits of war-weary soldiers.
It’s hard to imagine that there was any singing in the trenches, as day after day the reality of another loss, or a life-changing wound ate away at any sliver of hope that homesick hearts could muster.

But singing there was. Singing there was.

Music rose like incense; like prayers into heaven from the dark, desperate earth. Most accounts suggest that the Christmas Truce of 1914 began with singing. Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade described it so:
“First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing ­– two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”
Singing there was.

Song bubbled up like a spring, song of all kinds. Songs which brought enemies together. Rowdy drinking songs which numbed the singer to the stench of war and bound men together as brothers- strong as kin. Songs of lament, longing for sweethearts far away. Songs which dreamt of home, of greenness, meadows, flowers, blue skies, sunlight. Songs of peace, songs of love come again.

That songs could be sung in such a strange landscape is perhaps to use Gurney’s words one of God’s secret ways. Perhaps God began to smile, as from the dead, cold, wintry earth, shoots of life emerged, fragile yet defiant, songs resistant to destruction, to mans violence wreaking havoc upon fields, flesh and bone.

Harps were hung up on lifeless trees as men wept bitterly across Northern France, but the flickering flame of song was not quite extinguished, hearts had not been turned to stone, and in their flesh they cried, and hoped and sang.

Did those same hearts pray? Perhaps prayers of anger raging against the enemy, against superiors, against politicians, against God.
Gurney, as many did, struggled to understand what God’s purposes were in all this bloodshed. Did God have a purpose? Could God in his love and mercy only weep as hatred held sway over Europe? But God could take the punches, the anger, the challenge from those who raged against the machine of war, God was an easy target. God had taken the punches before as his own Son cried out Why have you forsaken me? With nails hammered into his hands and feet.

I would test God’s purposes, says Gurney in his Poem, The Volunteer. I will go up and see what fate he’ll give, what destiny his hand holds for me. I’ll prove him, go up against the mouth of naked hell. Gurney perhaps must have known, in his heart of hearts, from his years as a Chorister imbibing the scriptures in Gloucester cathedral, that there is no purpose in putting God to the test. God can only look on in silence from the wood of the cross or from the eyes of a dying soldier.

Gurney volunteered for all this, he enlisted. He was turned down the first time on health grounds. Could he have had an easier war? He went back a second time, perhaps by then there was a realisation that no-one could be turned away, no willing body, voluntarily offered would be without use. That body, Gurney’s body, was shot, and gassed and shipped back to Blighty- to his ‘hereafter’ which was to be no less harrowing than his time in the Somme.

The wounds he carried into the war, his well-documented fragmenting mind, he also carried home as a greater burden.
Again he found himself being tested to the limit- from the frontline- to medical incarceration – he was a soul in agony for much of his life, but in his beating, pumping heart of flesh there was spirit. From his heart, song was born, from his heart there was poetry and music so sweet and sincere it was like honey. It was like the tender song of a minstrel at a wedding banquet, searching, whimsical, delicate, intricate. Looking on from the sidelines, never a guest.

His songs lilted with melancholy- he was not to have a wedding banquet of his own, how he would have loved to have been invited, how he would have dressed in the fine robes of the bridegroom, but his love for Annie Drummond the VAD nurse did not blossom to fruition. Perhaps the wounds he carried were just too much.

The words of the Good Friday liturgy seem to speak for Gurney- By virtue of the cross, joy has come into the world. Because from his own whirlwind of pain, from his own passion, emerged more songs, more poetry, more beauty. Gurney’s creativity, was as fragile as the paper thin poppies which wavered in Flanders fields, and yet also ruggedly defiant emerging from the war, pushing up through the earth to face the sun… This was beauty against the odds.

It is hard to imagine singing in the trenches, it is even harder to imagine that Gurney, in his troubled and complex life, could write so much poetry, so much music, or that, after the war anyone would ever be able to sing, or dance, laugh again. But sing and dance and laugh they did.
It is hard to imagine that anyone sang from the corridors of the institutions in which Gurney spent the last 15years of his life. But even there- beauty emerged.

He said his brighter visions brought music, the lesser brought poetry or mere pleasurable emotion- music was the high offering of this soul in the strange land of conflict and in the challenging landscape of mental ill health.

On his original gravestone it was written that Ivor Gurney was a lover and maker of beauty. In him God was at work, as we believe God is at work in the lives of all the broken-hearted, secret, smiling, the light of his countenance shining upon the darkest corners of our lives, revealing the hope that is set before us, even though often we cannot see it.
In God alone, beauty can come from tragedy, hearts of stone can be transformed into hearts of flesh, harps can be taken down from the trees and music will be heard again in a place called home. Flowers will emerge from the mud, there will be a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert, the mountains and the fields will burst into song, love will come again like wheat that springeth green, life will emerge from a stone cold tomb.

Did Gurney understand all this in his spirit filled heart? Amidst all his suffering, the tiny poem, The songs I had, suggests that he did.

The songs I had are withered,
Or vanished clean,
Yet there are bright tracks,
Where I have been,

And there grow flowers,
For other’s delight.
Think well, O singer,
Soon comes night.

Think well, O Singers-

When we look back on the bright tracks where we have been, do flowers grow there -for others’ delight?

As Christians, enfolded in the love of God, are we not called and chosen to forge beauty from all that is tarnished and difficult and see hope where others see impossibility? Are we not called and chosen to live each moment in the light of Christ, living each day as if it were the first and last? For our time is precious- soon comes the night.

In Jesus Christ, we are able imagine singing in the trenches- a distant song of lost tomorrows for our today. In Jesus Christ, who sang from the cross-our hope is made real, love is renewed, peace is born, and in his wake- there grow flowers.

Amen.