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Good Morning.  VJ Day: the 70th anniversary of the conclusion of the World War in the Far East, this day in 1945.  There have been many war anniversaries this year, each with their own identity, each speaking to us today, each asking me to reflect upon my own ministry as a military chaplain.  We had chaplains at Waterloo, in the Gallipoli campaign, throughout the First and Second wars in every theatre, but I think today of the ministry of Eric Cordingly, a predecessor in the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department, who cared for prisoners-of-war on the Thai-Burma railway.

In Changi, in Singapore, over 50,000 Allied prisoners were held in a transit camp, and it was there that Eric Cordingly began his ministry of care in conditions that would become dreadful.  His daughter, Louise Cordingly, has reconstructed the story from her father’s diaries, and has published the account   of how the prisoners’ lives became focussed on a simple altar cross, made from a brass shell.  The Changi Cross is now in Changi Museum, but for those who laboured on the railway in appalling conditions, overwhelmed by exhaustion and hunger and thirst and a brutality that must at times have eroded their sense of what it means to be human, that simple cross was with them always, travelling with them, sharing their journey, articulating their experience.  It was not about collective worship, but rather about a place where prayers could be said, where hope could be imagined, and where humanity could be restored.  And on this day of recollection, I pray:  Let me understand what it means to be human, that I may forget my own trivial concerns and may live in the light of the cross and the love of my neighbour.    Amen.