Sermons

July 29th, 2007
Why Roncesvalles?

Rev. Bill Bruce

Why Roncesvalles?

Roncesvalles was the main street out the sanctuary back door, with streetcars rumbling by. Since moving back into the neighbourhood this summer, I’ve been realizing I didn’t know why it had this name: Roncesvalles. I read and discovered that in the mountains where Spain meets France, there is a pass called Roncesvalles. In 770, Charlemagne pushing Saracens back into Spain was stopped by Basques from going further. In 1100, Roland the knight led a crusade against Muslims at the same pass. But that’s not why this street in Toronto is called this name.

Why Roncesvalles?

It turns out that a Colonel O’Hara owned the land from John Howard’s park to the original city of Toronto in the rebellious 1830’s. He had fought under General Wellesley, later made Lord Wellington, in the Peninsular Wars. Both officers came from Ireland: O’Hara from Fermanaugh. They had wintered in the Alhambra, before driving Napoleon’s French armies out of the peninsula, culminating in battles at Roncesvalles and Sorauren, on July 28 and 30, 1813. Our street names reflect those places – plus O’Hara’s wife Constance, and family Marion and Geoffrey. But this main drag in our community remembers the bloody mountain pass of 1813.

I live on Sunnyside, one block over. Why not call all the streets by nice names like Fairview, and Mount Pleasant? Are we glorifying war mongering imperialism by living in Roncesvalles?
Not at all, I argued. Remembering can be rueful and regretful, or respectful of the costs of warfare still fresh in the minds of the survivors. That’s who named these streets. The stories behind these names are hardly as triumphant as Nelson’s Trafalgar, or Wellington’s Waterloo. They involved thousands more casualties than our local Niagara, Queenston, or Lundy’s Lane.
At Roncesvalles, the British actually retreated in late July 1813, falling back before the French, hoping for backup from more British, Spanish and Portuguese allied troops. The reinforcements were late arriving at Sorauren ridge, but Wellington rode about with bravado, and made the French pause on July 27. When battle was joined at Sorauren on the 28th, the sides were more equal, and the French were stopped. On the 30th, the French retreated with more thousands of casualties inflicted by Wellington and O’Hara and their troops. Thousands of casualties resulted.
O’Hara and many fellow officers were rewarded with land in the colonies – and in turn, brought many soldiers and their families over to settle. Were they all swaggering belligerents? Hardly. People like my ancestors, dispossessed in Scotland or resettled in Ulster, were ill used by empire, but joining up got you a rum ration and cash pay – better than militia service. And as recently as 1798, the Irish Rising had resulted in 30,000 dead, with far less glamour, and worse pay.

Byron the poet was in Ireland for the Rising, in Spain for the wars, and never went home, writing in cynical disillusionment in “Don Juan” about how one ambitious Wesley added a syllable to his name and became Wellesley, then Wellington, a tale preferred to those of a deadly Rising:

Read your own hearts,
and Ireland’s present story
Then feed her famine fat
with Wellesley’s story.

A century later, closer to the time these streets were paved in Toronto, but with a memory as sharp in Ireland as it was here, Yeats wrote in “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”:

Out of Ireland we have come
Great hatred, little room
Maimed us at the start
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic’s heart.

Why Roncesvalles?

Perhaps for O’Hara it was a memory of glory. Perhaps he wanted to focus on this tipping point of the Napoleonic wars, as British empire drove the French empire back inside it’s original borders, and beyond. For many soldiers and citizens of this colony, the memories were of blood, then snow: the pioneers where shoveling the troops out of their tents in the Roncesvalles pass each morning before they finally headed north into France. It’s not all Sunnyside – real people from the real world with memories and rueful regrets built this place.
Not just nice guys and good girls, we built separate churches around here for English, Scots or Irish accents, Methodist or Presbyterian or Anglican. It was tough to get over our ethnic and class grudges, of Derry, or Glencoe, or Culloden. We were part of an imperial colonial system, citizens and soldiers, and we made our mark and chose our names to remind us not only of the good, but of the costs and regrets. Empires come and go, and we are always called to analysis of what side of the fence we are on, and who’s with us.

That ramble through Upper Canadian and Muddy York historic names was meant to resonate with the lesson from Hosea. Who names a girl Gomer or Lo-ruhamah, or Jezebel? Who names a boy Jezreel or L-ammi or Ahaz? Check the baby books! These are Roncesvalles and Sorauren to my Sunnyside and Fairview. They evoke rueful and regretful memories, not to be forgotten, but also not to be repeated, by those with ears to hear.

Hosea lived in 8th century Israel. 750 years before Jesus were prosperous times in the region. Assyria in the north and Egypt in the south were empires briefly in balance, and profiteering and making hay while the sun shone was easy pickings for the rich of Israel under a series of rules like Ahaz and Jezebel, stealing Naboth’s vineyard in Jezreel and playing international trade partners against each other. Hosea lived at a tipping point, with Assyria soon to rise and exile Israel, scattering them, as Babylon would exile scatter southern Judah nearly 200 years later.

People remembered Hosea after the two exiles by two empires, just as we remember Roncesvalles several empires and wars later. Hosea’s warnings to affluent times rings true. Hosea hears God say: “You want to know what it’s like to be God? You want to experience what I get from Israel? Go marry a spouse from whoredom. Get ready for children the same.” Whether Gomer is real, and whoever the fathers of the three children were, if they were real, Hosea is demonstrating what it’s like to be God, given human nature and politics.
Some people read a violent authoritarian patriarchal God shaming and punishing a woman and abusing a family. I read a political fable, a bit of street theatre. Hosea does marry Gomer, taking a risk and becoming vulnerable to her. As each child is born and named for evil, he doesn’t divorce or abandon her, but takes another chance. What was sown in Jezreel will be reaped in defeat, and God will not be on our side in that war. This generation is not pitied, not my people. Your want to know what it’s like to be God, loving Israel? It’s like this dysfunctional family!
The sins of affluent times are remembered in hard times. The wars of the last empires are remembered in the clamour of the empires of the day. Roncesvalles, Sorauren, Alhambra and Fermanaugh remind us of our imperial colonial past, to measure and judge our imperial present. Know what it’s like to be God? Humans: can’t live with them, can’t live without them, mortal and fallible – and lovable and forgivable. Try it – take a chance in relationship. Get hurt!

We were never only nice guys and god girls. We were human, fallible, real people caught up in a real world of choices between empires, of good or better, or bad or worse. God love us:

There’s so much good in the worst of us
And so much bad in the best of us
It’s often hard to tell which of us
Should be reforming the rest of us.

So, why are we worshiping? Why do we pray? Why share, or ask and offer, give and get? Surely it can’t just be about just deserts – none of us are worthy, or all of us are. I’ve never had much of a feel for that glib liberal gospel of love. I have too much respect for our full humanity. The gospel text this morning seems to me to have Jesus taking a similarly clear eyed view:

“Suppose one of you has a friend,
and you go to him at midnight and say to him,
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;
for a friend of mine has arrived,
and I have nothing to set before him.’

The friend says ‘Go away! Don’t bother me! I just got the kids to sleep!’ But Jesus points out that if you keep banging on the door and demanding, the friend will deliver. Not because they love you, God knows. Not for money. But because of your persistence, to make you shut up. Are you worthy to ask God for whatever you want, whenever you want it? Of course not. However, you’re going to do it anyhow. And it may work, if not for love, then for persistence.
You’re not so great as to deserve it all or be worth what you get from God. God knows that best! But you’re not so bad, either. If your kid asks you for a fish, you wouldn’t give her a snake. If your kid asks you for an egg, you won’t give her a scorpion. Would you? Of course not! So now really, if we fallible mortal humans can care for kids, why can’t God care for you? You’re not that great, but you’re not such total washouts as you make of yourself too often.

You’re not just nice guys and good girls, but full fledged human beings. God knows that best!
In that context, Jesus says go ahead and worship and pray. Do it as if you were that guy banging on the door at midnight asking for bread for company. It might work, not for love as much as to shut you up. Do it as if you were that child asking for a fish or an egg. Surely you won’t get snakes and scorpions, even if you don’t get what you demand in your way and in your time. Religion can’t be left only to nice guys and good girls. We have to claim it too. Risk living. Take chances in relationships, like Hosea does with Gomer. God knows what it’s like!
God of love and mercy, some people gathered at your table here today. We were seeking to share, to give and to get, to ask and to offer. You keep calling, and today we were who came, to be reminded who we are, and whose we are, and to try to act as if that were so.

God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, and loves us better than we love ourselves, you know our gifts and opportunities, and what we’ve made of them. We’ve been trying to be somebody else, less than you made us, or more. We’ve been trying to belong to somebody else, giving in to others, bending too far. Remind us again who we are and whose we are, and help us imagine what we might do if that were so.

God, who waits, and watches, and weeps: grant us empathy for what it must be like to be God in relation to human nature and politics, to take a risk again, to trust the other against all odds. After all we’re back, and known and loved: why can’t we give as good as we get? Assure us of your grace and favour towards us. Lift up our hearts, to try to make it real in our world.

Amen