In November 2018, I led a week of assemblies reflecting on each year of World War 1 as we prepared for the 100th Remembrance Day. I recalled different battles I had learnt in GCSE History but it was very sobering learning about them with younger children. Their questions were thoughtful and honest. About the Christmas Armistice: How could someone play football with someone one day and go back to fighting them the next? About Gallipoli: Why did people have to do what their commanding officer asked, even though it caused so much pain? About Ypres: How could they do that to the horses? It brought home to me that studying History is like watching a stage performance of the human heart. We see how the human heart responds to success, weakness, power, fear, otherness. If you want to see the capacity of the human heart for both good and evil, look at History.
But History should challenge us personally because we are not neutral observers of it. We are players in its current ‘act’ on stage with wills inclined to act like those who went before us. In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.
There’s always been a tendency to ‘hallow’ History and view it through rose tinted spectacles. 2000 years ago the Roman poet Horace was lamenting that his parents’ age was worse than his grandparents’ and his own worse than both. We’re not immune to this response too, believing our times to be the worst iteration of a particular evil than any other. There’s also a tendency to have a horror of History, to distance ourselves from the deeds of the past as if we would never be capable of such acts. But if History is the stage of the human heart, and we are in the current act of History, History demands that we humbly learn from it, rather than sit in judgement on it. Just because we can see more acts of the story than past ages, does not make us immune to the same mistakes and flaws. ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme’ holds true because human nature has not fundamentally changed and familiar patterns of behaviour find their root in the constant character of the human heart.
In the context of our Christian school, History serves at least three purposes. It offers us the opportunity to understand our heritage, good, bad and ugly, recognising that we are inescapably shaped by our story. History, in the light of the great story of redemption, reminds that however dark circumstances can become, there is hope. At the end of our series in 2018 we burned a paper boot in the playground. As we remembered the 1918 Armistice, we looked forward to a day when peace will be final because the ultimate course of History lies in the hands of a Prince of Peace:
Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Because of this hope, History encourages us, in the moment of time we have been placed in, to humbly pursue a better story of justice and mercy, not because we are superior to those who went before us, but because they have given us the benefit of learning from their failures and building on their strengths.
