Limping Towards the Sunrise
The blog containing the random musings of David Campbell, a long time Irish exile and currently serving as the Chaplain of Fettes College – a boarding school in Edinburgh, Scotland.They shall grow not old
Today the tradition here is that our whole school community gathers at our war memorial after the service of remembrance to remember the lives of hundreds of Old Fettesians who have died in conflicts and full-scale wars near and long ago.
It is always particularly poignant to think of the young who happily know virtually nothing of war standing beside those whose chests are adorned with medals won for service and gallantry in the far flung and sometimes forgotten corners of the world.
Remembrance
This is it – the beginning of our school’s big weekend of remembrance, although, if truth be told we have been ‘remembering’ since the commemoration of All Saints Day last Sunday.
This is partcularly the case this year as one of my colleagues from the History Department has been speaking to the troops every morning in chapel about aspects of the war history of the school and especially about those men (it was all men in those days) who left the north western corner of Edinburgh and went off to the most remote and forbidding places on the planet to serve in the armed forces.
Yesterday we heard how the Headmaster at the time was driven to his grave by the constant inflow of information about boys he had guided and inspired dying in conflict. His poem in memory of one of the fallen was particularly moving.
Tomorrow it is the turn of our Prep School to remember those men and on Sunday a big part of the current and the former Fettes community will gather at our war memorial to remember in a poignant silence.
Meantime, among the living, I’m hoping and praying for a miracle or two for two people who are undergoing medical care and attention.
Hoping against hope in one case, but hoping all the same.
Surfacing
In any close and tight-knit community like ours here, rumours and counter-rumours, no matter what about, spread very quickly.
It’s the old thing that happens when people are not possessed of enough of the solid information about any situation and so, what they don’t know for sure they have the propensity to make up.
Part of this ‘making up’ includes embroidering what knowledge they do have with all kinds of other speculations, half-truths and hopes.
When the rumours are to do with sad or bad news however, the imagination and other thought processes can go even more quickly into overdrive and the news becomes all the more lurid, clear, and of course, almost truth-like.
And, sticking with bad news for a moment, I have been thinking here of the very simple thing that it has that predictable habit of raising in the hearts and minds of those who hear it a really deep sympathy, but also a deep and often moving consideration of incidents in our own lives, which seem to us in some way to be related to the bad news being spoken about or rumoured. This surfacing of incidents is often painful to watch.
It’s at such times that many people need their friends close by and a sense of the truth beyond the pain of emotions.
The War Poets
Another Wednesday, another night at home for the troops.
And this week we will be reading and discussing the war poets.
The ones I know best are from the First World War and of those my favourite, and surely the best known, is Wilfred Owen’s masterpiece:
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 tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped 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.
The Review and Development Verdict
I’ve been writing occasionally (and thinking much more) over these last six weeks about the process of appraisal here which we call Review and Development, or simply R+D.
Last night the first and by far the most substantial part of my second appraisal in my time here came to an end in the lovely surroundings of the Balmoral Hotel where, over a good dinner, the Boss (our Deputy Head, with yet another unenviable task to do) and I pored over the many, many comments and points of view that pupils and colleagues had sent in to her about just how I am doing in the different parts of the job.
By and large I think it wasn’t a bad or unfair set of comments at all and many people, especially the students, were overly kind and generous in what they had to say. If only they knew the reality..!!!
I must say that I’ve never been a great one for being told that things in the workplace garden are rosy, and that kind of reticence has marked my particular approach to this as well, looking for the points for development rather than those matters of review of past progress. So, in a way that in itself is a point for development, I guess: learn to accept praise, David!
By the time the last mouthful of chocolate cheesecake and passion fruit ice cream was going down just before 11pm, I pretty much felt that it had been a particularly thorough-going examination and that is to the great credit of all those who took time and energy to share their thoughts, and to the Boss who, despite the many other more interesting things she has to do in her life, had obviously put so much into the whole process.
So, with it looking unlikely that I will get the sack just yet, it’s onwards and upwards.
All Souls Day
A cemetery alight with candles on All Souls Day
The one helpful thing I learned early on about working as a chaplain in a teaching envoronment is to avoid religious chichés of all kinds, is to assume knowledge where in fact none exists.
The world of Christianity, and of all other religions for that matter, is full of clichés, full of language, phrases and terminology, which may well be familiar coinage to the adherents of those religions but to the average 15 year old, let alone 8 year old, is a complete mystery. Whereas someone who has been brought up in a Christian environment might know the meaning of these clichés and take the veracity of them for granted, that cannot and in fact should not be said here.
When speaking of life after death (as we must on All Souls Day), there is a whole range of clichés which are usually employed, but which require careful thinking through, careful explanation and careful compassionate use.
All Souls, for me at any rate, has been a Chrstian festival day for over 1000 years and began in one of my favourite abbeys – Cluny, by St Odilo before the turn of the first Christian millennium.
Its purpose is to provide a day when we may recall and pray for those men and women, boys and girls, with whom our lives were linked and who have died. Together this group of people is called in Christian language, “the faithful departed.” When added to the company of all God’s holy people in every age they are called “the Church Triumphant” or “the Communion of Saints.”
And by praying for members of our own family and circle of friends on such a day, we recall them to our minds, we help the grieving process for their loss continue and we make ourselves aware that there is more to this life than flesh and blood, that there is a supernatural life as well as a material one. For that reason alone, it is a precious day.
Amy Duncan RIP
It’s a bouncy old time at work with lots of different things going on here just now.
Tonight I suppose was like going back in time for me as I led something that one way or another for a long period in my life was the kind of bread and butter of some of what I did.
We had a memorial service in our chapel for Amy Duncan – an Old Fettesian who died at a shockingly premature age.
A big crowd had gathered and they sang well and listened well to a moving tribute to her life from the one who knew her best.
In a way when it comes to death, being a chaplain in a school is like being one in the armed forces. When compared to some busy parishes, you don’t do much of this sort of end of life thing, but when you do it’s often against the backdrop of desperate, tragic or at the least very unhappy circumstances. And the struggle can be to find a word of hope, of comfort – never to fix the unfixable situation with easy words – but to allow individuals to begin to aspire to a brighter tomorrow while living intensely through the pain of a ghastly today.
And the emotions expressed at such times are invariably strong and sometimes unfocussed. And the innocent can get hurt in the crossfire.
Breakthrough Breast Cancer
We’re having our first own clothes day of the new session today and it’s in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer, a charity very local to us which is based at the Western General Hospital.
Like some of the other breast cancer charities, its distinctive colour is pink and so I have suggested to our troops that they might like to wear something pink.
Naturally enough it will be something of a struggle for some of them, particularly our alpha males, to find anything pink to wear, a difficulty which, upon delving deeper into my own wardrobe, is not one I myself am likely to have.
All work and no play
Happily the trip to Dartmouth over half term wasn’t all hard graft as Sally’s lovely photos so clearly indicate.
And aren’t non-colour photos great? In a world of bright colours they are just so atmospheric.
Brightening an evening
It was such a dreich evening after I came in from hearing a Scottish Nationalist MSP speaking at our Political Society last night that I took refuge in some Facebook photos of our last day of the academic year which we call Founder’s Day to cheer me up.
I looked somewhat brighter back in June, I must confess, even though it was just as rainy as it was yesterday!
