The Writing on the Window: A Short Thought for the Day for Remembrance Sunday

Stained glass window in the Indian Army Memorial Room at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst (Picture source)

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Gathering of Mindful Meditation, Music & Conversation 

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

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In November 2007, I found myself at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, chairing a NATO-sponsored conference on religion and peace-building in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

We were gathered in the Indian Army Memorial Room, and the day began with a keynote speech by Lieutenant-General Graeme Lamb, then Commander of the Field Army. After introducing him, I sat down to listen — and promptly failed to hear a single word of his opening paragraphs.

Why? Well, to his right stood one of the hall’s large stained-glass memorial windows. And as a shaft of bright sunlight briefly pierced the grey November sky, a single word from that window was suddenly illuminated, shining down directly upon the General and me: Afghanistan.

It felt remarkably like the biblical story of King Belshazzar’s feast, where a mysterious hand suddenly writes ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin’ upon the palace wall, a message that was interpreted by Daniel as meaning ‘God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians’ (Daniel 5:25-28). 

I was, and am, no Daniel, but despite that, the light shining through that word Afghanistan at that precise moment was an event that demanded from me some kind of interpretation. But what might it mean?

Now, if — like me — you absolutely do not believe in a supernatural, interventionist, monotheistic God who can direct the sunbeams, you might be tempted to say it meant nothing at all. It was simply a coincidence of weather and architecture. Yet that hardly does justice to the experience, for when striking moments like this happen, there are no neutral facts and we are thrown willy-nilly into the role of interpreters. We seem to have no choice but to ask what this moment might be telling us about how the world is, and our place within it.

For me — as someone who had strongly opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for all sorts of religious and political reasons — the silent message of that sunlit word seemed crystal clear: ‘We have tried to subdue this region by military force since the 1830s and failed. Stop repeating history. Change our foreign policy now.’

Yet as I looked around the hall, it was immediately obvious that mine was not the only interpretation in play.

Had the Lieutenant-General noticed the light falling across him, what message would he have read? Almost certainly one of duty and fidelity — the deep need felt by every serving soldier to honour the sacrifice and memory of those predecessors who had lived and died in that harsh landscape, and to keep faith with comrades serving there at that very moment.

And what of the international audience — mostly military intelligence officers and analysts from think-tanks like Chatham House? To them, the word Afghanistan would have spoken of an urgent puzzle to solve: the need for sharper intelligence, better counter-insurgency strategies, and smarter ways to manage a volatile region.

One light. One word. One memorial window. Three different (albeit overlapping) headline meanings.

In the ancient world, the art of interpretation — what philosophers call hermeneutics — was playfully linked to the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. According to an old Roman myth, humans once spoke a single language and lived in peace until Hermes taught us our different languages and ways of speaking. From that moment on, whenever a message was delivered by him, everyone heard something slightly different — and discord arose among mortals.

Throughout that long, stressful day at Sandhurst, chairing the often heated exchanges between passionate, and often discordant, experts, I felt as though Hermes were standing at my shoulder, taking a mischievous delight in the chaos.

In the presence of such discord, our usual human instinct is to look around for some modern-day prophet Daniel — an ultimate expert or leader to step forward and declare the one, true, ‘correct’ meaning of the event, silencing all the others. We see this constantly in our religion and politics. Each group insists its reading is the only correct one. Yet this forceful approach often serves to create rival tribes of certainty, sowing fresh discord and keeping the spectre of conflict alive.

Looking back nearly twenty years on — long after the troops have returned from Afghanistan, leaving behind huge discord and raw questions — I continue to wonder if we are still looking in the wrong place for unity. We keep searching behind our messy human disagreements for a single, pure, eternal truth that will shine down upon us to which everyone must, can, and should bow.

But what if the message we actually need to hear from Hermes on Remembrance Sunday is that ambiguity in interpretation isn’t a mistake to be corrected, but the permanent condition of being human?

When we stand before a war memorial today, or simply together in this church, or as I did underneath that war memorial in that grand room in Sandhurst, the person beside us in the silence may be feeling patriotic pride, another may be feeling raw personal grief, and another may be feeling burning political anger at the sheer waste of human life. It depends — and the memorial, like our remembering itself, gathers all of it. Its refusal to give us a single, simple answer strikes me not as a failure, but as a summons.

And what is that summons? Well, if we accept that human beings will always interpret the world differently, then our destiny — if we are to survive — cannot lie in forcing everyone to agree, nor in fighting until one interpretation wins. Instead, it invites a gentler, humbler way of living together: committing ourselves to the patient, endless art of open conversation. It means allowing our differences not to be a trigger for violence, but a reason to keep talking, listening and interpreting.

Over a century ago, the pioneering American Universalist minister and suffragist Olympia Brown wrote words that still feel relevant today:

‘We can never make the world safe by fighting. Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God, and must share the wealth of the world. You may say this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must ever teach the great lesson.’  

Perhaps that is the great lesson the word Afghanistan was shining down upon me all those years ago. Since we cannot make the world safe by fighting, what other way is left to us than the patient, difficult way of conversation, of endless interpretation and reinterpretation, as we try to hear what message Hermes might be bringing us today?