If the experience of war always, for nearly everybody involved, will bring some experience
of trauma, fragmentation, things splitting apart, disintegration.
So we lose a sense of continuity, of form.
What the arts are doing, whatever else they're doing, is they're giving form to our experience
and to our feelings.
I'm a theologian, and I see myself as a biblical theologian, so I suppose I always look first
to scripture in thinking about how to address any issue, but certainly the issue of trauma
after war.
I'm also a musician and very interested in the arts, and especially in the way that the
arts can be vehicles of healing and reintegration in people's lives.
And when it comes to war, of course, and the victims of war and those who have fought in
war and returned home very often, their experience will be one of bewilderment, a certain sense
of isolation, emotional isolation, perhaps, and fragmentation, things falling apart.
The arts are a way of reintegrating us, reshaping us.
And then we've got to also remember, of course, the arts are basically creative.
That is, you are making something, you are not leaving wreckage.
Indeed, you can make something out of even the wreckage, and that's an extraordinarily
powerful experience as well, out of broken things, out of ugly things.
You could make something that speaks of your emotion or of beauty or of something you feel
strongly about.
In that connection, I often think of the poet Wilfred Owen.
Wilfred Owen is probably the greatest of the First World War poets, and he had shell shock
and he had some shell exploded nearby many, and he had to be taken home.
And in a convalescent home in Edinburgh, he wrote not all but most of his famous poetry.
He's not only just telling the world of what's going on out there, back home in Britain,
of course, so many were unaware of the sheer horror of what was actually happening to these
young men.
So he's not only telling them about that, he's giving form to his experience, giving
form to his trauma, so that he can be clear about what he's angry about, about what he's
really feeling, and perhaps even what he should be feeling or not feeling.
And poetry, I think, can do that.
One ever hangs where shelled roads apart.
In this war, he too lost a limb, but his disciples hide apart.
And now the soldiers bear with him.
The neologopher strolls many a priest, and in their faces there is pride, that they were
flesh marked by the beast by whom the gentle Christ's denied.
The scribes on all the people shove and brawl allegiance to the state, but they who love
the greater love lay down their lives.
They do not hate.
