VJ Service Highlights

VJ day 2020
Fr Peter asked me to speak this evening, having heard Archbishop Justin speak at my consecration
service in Lambeth Palace in July. Consecrations don’t normally happen in Lambeth Palace, – but
these aren’t normal times, are they, and so, a small number of us had the privilege of an intimate
service in that little chapel, instead of the normal grandeur of a cathedral consecration. And it turns
out that one of the last Bishops to have been consecrated there was back in 1941, when John
Leonard Wilson was made Bishop of Singapore, before returning to the city just before it
surrendered to the Japanese. He spent the rest of the war in Japanese prisoner of war camps,
where he endured horrible beatings and terrible deprivation.
At one point, Bishop Wilson was tied to a table, face up, with his head hanging over the edge while
he was beaten on the legs, ankles to thighs, with ropes, non-stop, for several hours. In a sermon
preached in 1946, he said:
“I remember Archbishop Temple in one of his books writing that if we pray for any particular virtue,
whether it be patience or courage or love, one of the answers that God gives to us is an opportunity for
expressing that virtue.
“After my first beating I was almost afraid to pray for courage lest I should have another opportunity of
exercising it, but my unspoken prayer was there, and without God’s help I doubt whether I should have
come through. Long hours of ignoble pain were a severe test. In the middle of that torture they asked me if
I still believed in God. When by God’s help I said, ‘I do,’ they asked me why God did not save me, and by the
help of His Holy Spirit I said, ‘God does save me. He does not save me by freeing me from pain or
punishment, but He saves me by giving me the spirit to bear it,’ and when they asked me why I did not
curse them I told them that it was because I was a follower of Jesus Christ, who taught us that we were all
brethren.”
His witness is an example to us all.
What Father Peter didn’t know, was that VJ day has a more personal meaning for me. My
grandfather was also captured at the fall of Singapore. He spent 3 years in the jungles, building the
railway made famous by the film, Bridge over the River Kwai, in horrendous circumstances,
brutalised by the prison guards, starved of food and riddled with tropical illnesses.
A few years ago, I was given a book of his. It’s called Miracle on the River Kwai. Written by Ernest
Gordon, who was a prisoner with him, it tells the story of what happened in those brutal jungles.
My grandfather always hated the Bridge over the River Kwai, which he considered Hollywood
nonsense, but this book, he said, this was how it really was.
The book tells the story of evil. But the reason my Grandfather loved it, wasn’t because it
described how bad things were. The book is called the The Miracle on the River Kwai and the miracle
it describes was one of faith. The author, like my grandfather, arrived in Singapore with a nominal
belief in God, but little more than that. But there in those grim jungles, surrounded by death, Ernest
Gordon discovered something life changing. There, in the least likely circumstances, he discovered
that God is alive and at work, even in the worst of places and and the most terrible of situations.
There in the jungle God remembered him and found him.
And that was also my grandfather’s experience. Like so many of those who fought, he rarely spoke
of his experiences, but he did talk often about God, and about love and faith. And he said that he
learnt about them on the River Kwai.
Just after the camps were liberated, the book’s author wrote this
‘I had seen at first hand the cruelty of a totalitarian regime. I knew something of suffering and what it
meant to look death in the face. I knew the depths to which men could sink and the heights to which they
could rise. I could speak knowledgeably of despair, but also of hope; of hatred, but also of love; of man
without God, but also of man sustained by God. I knew the power of the demonic, and I knew the greater
power of the Holy Spirit’
It is one of the great truths of faith isn’t it; that in the midst of darkness, the light shines brightest;
in the midst of the greatest terror, we hear the voice of God saying ‘peace’; in the middle of the
most terrible injustice, we find men and women stepping boldly forward armed only with faith and
a deep longing for a better world.
And my prayer is that we, inspired by these mighty saints, who have gone before us, those we know
about and those whose names are forgotten, might have the same faith to work for light, peace and
justice in a broken world.
Amen