The unveiling by Prince William of the Football Remembers memorial is another reminder of the extraordinary events which took place in no man’s land on the western front between British and German soldiers on Christmas Day 1914.
10 year old Spencer Turner from Newcastle, who won the competition to design the memorial, told Mishal on this programme yesterday that he wanted to bridge the generations. Children in his school needed to know what happened and how they could learn from this remarkable story.
There’s a danger in sentimentalising the story - we have to preserve a sober balance between what General Walter Congreve, who witnessed the events for himself, described as “an extraordinary set of affairs” with the shocking reality (effectively represented in the Tower of London Poppy Memorial) of hundreds of thousands of lives lost and suffering on an unimaginable scale.
Nevertheless, as the Christian season of Advent gathers momentum and cathedrals and churches across the country light the third Advent candle tomorrow, the promise of hope against the odds is a strong a theme which many people [of all faiths] share.
Isn’t that what this new memorial surely represents? Hope against the odds? That even in the midst of one of the darkest and most bloody moments in world history there was a flicker of hope, a suspension of violence – a profound moment of peace marked and celebrated even in the midst of such shocking suffering.
Christians believe that the promise of hope against the odds is what Christmas is all about. But it cannot be realised or achieved without first dealing with the darkness and enmity present in the world. A starting point is acknowledging its immensity?
The spiritual writer Maria Boulding in The Coming of God, writes confidently of the promise of a new dawn. But she notes that all promises have inherent risks: which is where faith kicks in and, occasionally, unexpectedly, events happen which give us hope.
Every day until Christmas the Advent prayer asks that we “cast away the works of darkness” and instead “put on the armour of light”. That’s exactly what those young soldiers did on Christmas Day 1914 as they sang, smoked cigars, played football and against all the odds, give us hope.