BBC Radio 4 2016-11-02

Good morning.

The Football Associations of England, Scotland and Wales are to have discussions with Fifa following Fifa’s ruling that players may not wear poppies during matches scheduled for 11 November, Armistice Day, and for the day after. Fifa bans political and religious messages on shirts and obviously thinks that the poppy falls foul of that principle; the Football Associations disagree.

But what meaning does the poppy have? The poppy achieved its prominence seemingly by chance - a poem by a Canadian army doctor from early May 1915, which told of ‘the poppies [that] blow between the crosses, row on row’, caught the imagination of those promoting remembrance. They took up the poppy as a memento of the dead, and it quickly caught on – by as soon as 1921, 9 million poppies were produced and sold in Britain, and the poppy spread to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The speed of the poppy’s adoption suggests, however, that it was not so much chance which led to its success, but rather its being almost perfectly fitted for its role. Flowers in general have commonly served as symbols of transient fragility, their blossoms here today and gone tomorrow – like so many of the young lives lost in the 1st War. But poppies, in addition, with their fabled narcotic properties, are associated with slumber and death, and with their deep red petals, cover the ground in the colour often assigned to martyrs. But flowers also point in another direction, as symbols of hope, appearing even in the dark days of winter, with a promise of new life – and poppies, in particular, have a striking ability to grow, and grow abundantly, in uNPRomising ground. They were, as that poem testified, the first flowers to colonise the graves and the battle-blasted fields of Flanders.

Poppies worked, just because they don’t carry a single or simple message, political, religious or otherwise, but instead evoke a host of thoughts pertinent to any recollection of war - thoughts of life and death, hope and despair, loss, grief, suffering and sacrifice. Hold these thoughts together, and you get the ambivalent attitude towards war which, I think, is the proper Christian sentiment. Christians have recognised that in this world, justice and peace, two very great goods, are often at odds. Sometimes we will only have peace if we are prepared to endure injustice, or conversely, we will only secure justice if we are prepared to sacrifice peace. But the sacrifice of peace always comes at a terrible cost, no matter how noble may be the aims of a war. Poppies, symbols of hope and of new life, but also of death and loss, evoke the mixed emotions surely appropriate to any remembrance, or prospect, of war.