The Day of Pentecost: D-Day and HMS Glamorgan
The Revd Canon Jo Spreadbury
“Let thy Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth, this earth!” Those were the words of Pope John Paul II on his first visit as Pope to his native Poland, arriving in 1979 to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. It was a hugely dramatic and provocative moment, intended to go round the world on television and to make the deeply unpopular communist authorities quail. With the repeated words ‘this earth’ he drove his papal staff into the ground – claiming Poland once again for the Holy Spirit and reclaiming, as it were, the territory for God. Poland was then part of the Soviet bloc, so the Pope’s striking of Polish ground was like the establishment of a Catholic bridgehead into an atheist regime. It was a bridgehead that led the way to the return of Polish independence, undoing thirty seven years of repression of its Christian heritage.
Pentecost - when we remember the Holy Spirit, promised by Christ to his followers, being poured out on the disciples - is something of a bridgehead moment in the earliest days of the Christian faith. From that upper room where the Spirit was manifested in tongues of fire and wind, the Christian Gospel was proclaimed across continents and down the centuries to us. As Luke tells the story in the book of Acts, the apostles were transformed from the dejected and demoralised group who had run away and deserted Jesus at his crucifixion, to an inspired and courageous band of comrades. They went out to witness bravely to God’s power at work - in the face of Roman imperial ideology, careful not to break the law and to pray for their rulers, while all the time spreading the Gospel of Christ. Luke’s list of those languages in which the Pentecost message was heard anticipates the lands and countries that the Apostles went to. It was the whole world of their time, around the Mediterranean, and they spread the Christian faith even at the cost of their lives. The tradition is that the majority of Jesus’ group of twelve would end up dying for their faith in him. Yet in the years after Pentecost the Gospel of Jesus Christ would transform the mighty Roman empire from a regime based on sheer force of will to a civilisation grounded in self-sacrifice, freedom and respect.
Perhaps it was no co-incidence that it was just a week after Pentecost, in June 1944, that the D-Day forces set out from here in Portsmouth, and their landings established a bridgehead on the Normandy beaches. Operation Overlord forged together the 12 nations commemorated here in our D-Day window: again, perhaps we can see the work of the Holy Spirit enabling understanding across such a variety of languages. The bridgehead was secured and became the base for the liberation of Normandy, and then, France and finally Europe.
The Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982 came just before Holy Week, on the Friday before Palm Sunday. No one thought the invasion could be reversed. Chances appeared to be slim that the occupation of the islands could be reversed. News reports spoke of: “the sun having set on another corner of the British Empire”, and American strategists declared it was “a military impossibility” that any counter-invasion would succeed. Yet Operation Corporate against the odds and at such a distance succeeded in establishing a bridgehead at San Carlos. And two weeks after Pentecost, on the 14th June 1982, the Argentinians surrendered.
Just two days before the surrender, HMS Glamorgan endured a direct Exocet strike. Glamorgan had been one of the first navy ships to arrive in the Falklands to begin the liberation, and she was supporting land forces in the final advance to regain Port Stanley (now wonderfully given the status of a City in the recent Jubilee honours). In that Exocet strike, a number of the ship’s company were injured, 13 members of the ship’s company lost their lives and were buried at sea that same day, and one later died from wounds. They are commemorated on our Glamorgan Memorial in the Nave of the Cathedral where we will pay our respects later.
This Cathedral, this house of prayer, commemorates so many triumphs and tragedies, gathering the memories of centuries into the presence of God. Our windows, our memorials, the names inscribed here and elsewhere of those who died on active service are witnesses to our belief that those who fought the good fight are not forgotten to God, they are known and named and loved and called onward into eternal life. We will remember them.
And it is particularly appropriate that in the Church calendar today is Pentecost, the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit. It is the work of the Spirit to sift through our hopes and memories and traditions, bringing to light new insights, new sparks of inspiration, new faith in the future. It is by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we have a vision a justice and fairness in society and dream dreams of liberty from oppression; through the Spirit we seek a proper balance between the rights of individuals and the needs of the whole community. This is a work that is never finished this side of heaven. There is a constant interplay between the claims of Christ’s kingdom and the aspirations of human societies – which are sometimes worthy and sometimes not. On a world scale it is the Holy Spirit who helps us in our human striving – we do not always know what it is best to ask for, to pray for, but, as St Paul says in the letter to the Romans, ‘the Spirit helps in our weakness’ so that God’s longing for our salvation and the principles of human flourishing are constantly being worked and reworked, woven and rewoven.
The Christian writer C.S Lewis, broadcasting soon after the Second World War described this world as ‘enemy-occupied territory’. And he went on to say: ‘Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.’ Our task, in the Church and in society, is to establish a bridgehead, a point of conviction, calm and clarity from which God can reach into the darkest places of the world and of our lives; to challenge the bullies and the liars and the greedy who think they have the world at their feet, to support the gentle, the merciful and the humble; to give courage to the despairing and faith to those who cannot yet believe.
The risks for our so often over-sheltered, over-indulgent little egos are enormous. There is so much at stake if we are to be a bridgehead for truth and right to prevail. Sacrifice and struggle are inevitable. There will be defeats and setbacks. We will lose much that we hold dear – as the Glamorgans lost comrades and families lost loved ones - even though we trust we will find our deepest and most enduring loves again on the other side of death.
Today we affirm that the resources of the Holy Spirit are infinite, the well of hope does not run dry, the fire of faith is never quenched. All of us are called to make a stand. As the Pope beat the ground in Poland in 1979 so we pray today on this ground:
Come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the earth: this earth, this land, this nation,
this community, this human heart of mine, this human heart of each one of us. Amen.