Page 39 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 66

Jesus Christ’s question in our gospel reading is a haunting one for
everyone in this great church as we commemorate the martyrs in the presence
of so many of the descendants of those who survived the Metz Yeghern, the
Great Catastrophe of 1915. The baptism to which Jesus Christ refers is no
merely ecclesiastical rite. In the original Greek of the New Testament the verb
“baptizomai” was used of “being flooded with calamities”.
When taxed with his appalling crimes and asked whether he would not
be execrated by future generations Hitler dismissed the suggestion with the
sneering comment “who remembers the Armenians”. Historians debate
whether he used those precise words but like so many of the great criminals in
history, Hitler was confident that as the victors impose their version of history
on the vanquished, his crimes would be forgotten.
Forgetting the Armenian martyrs of 1915 would be yet another betrayal.
This service in the presence of the President of the Republic of independent
Armenia and His Holiness Karekin II, Catholicos of All Armenians is a
contribution to a year of events which have sought to do justice to the suffering
of the Armenian martyrs and to celebrate their legacy.
Remembering is a duty especially in our own day when the suffering of
Christians and other communities in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt and Libya
cries out for recognition and relief. Our act of remembrance this evening is a
sign that such crimes against humanity will not be forgotten.
The past cannot be changed but we are responsible for how we
remember it. What we extract and carry forward from what has gone before
creates possibilities for the future or closes them off. In a sense we remember
the future.
In this creative act of remembering, impartiality is not possible but
honesty is a duty. Remembering is not so much taking down a file from the
shelf containing some fixed representation of some past event as it about
recombining multiple sources of information and experience. That is why the
writing of history is always, in the end, an art rather than a science although it
is an art which must be practised with proper discipline.
Public remembering in the form of commemorations, saints days and
festivals have always contributed powerfully to the coherence and sense of
identity among groups or nations. What and who we remember as individuals
plays a vital role in forming our own identity. We are sad when with the onset
of dementia more and more of a person’s memories are lost until that most
painful point when someone we love cannot recognise us. Amnesia can undo

37