D-Day Memories
A couple of weeks ago, while waiting to get my hair cut, I was reading Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. He described how he regretted never asking his father about D-Day. He had landed in Normandy the day after D-Day, but had never talked about it, like so many of his companions. Brown went on to explain: “His generation was, of course, naturally reticent, on their guard against both pride and self-pity.” That struck me for two reasons.
First, pride and self-pity are actually two sides of the same coin. Pride is thinking I have done better than others in some way. Self-pity is thinking I deserve better than I have got. They can feel very different – one more like self-love and the other more like self-loathing – but they both come down to thinking that I’m somehow better. As someone who is prone to feeling sorry for myself, I need to remember that and deal with it. Thankfully, in Christ I have the grace needed to do so.
Second, how different that generation was to our own day, where there isn’t the same fear of either pride or self-pity, where individuals shamelessly promote themselves or wallow in their misery. No doubt that is linked to the growing individualism in our culture, compared to the collectivism of war-time, the sense that ‘we’re in this together’. I cannot help feeling that it is not a good development, and a sign of further drift from the gospel.