Pilgrimage of Rememberance to St. James'

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 06 August 2009 15:40:56

There is a sea of shirts, all with poignant messages scrawled upon them, covering the seats of one end of St. James' Park at the moment. Intermingled with the shirts are: scarves, flags, flowers, pendants and pictures. The goal infront is covered in bunches of flowers. Most of the tributes are black and white, but occassionally you find a splash of colour; the blue of Ipswich or the red or green from other teams whose supporters who wanted to pay tribute.

It is an odd mixture of celebration and rememberance. Those of us there to make our offerings, mine a small pot of white flowers I picked up on the way, lay them in the upper rows - adding to the layers which have been gathered over the past week. Then we sit and remember. As I gave thanks for Sir Bobby's life I also remembered and gave thanks for my childhood and for the town I grew up in and for all the happy memories which football has given me / us.

After giving thanks I turned into reverential sightseer. I took a few pictures to preserve the scene and then gazed at the messages the others paying tribute had written. I smiled at the children, being bought by their parents and grandparents, who were too young to truly have know who Sir Bobby was. They would have heard the stories from their relatives who had followed the Blue or Toon Armies and those who had remembered when he was the England manager. These childrens memories, if they had them, would have been of his final battles; the ones which had led, as one tribute proclaimed, to a final score of Sir Bobby 4 Cancer 1.

Before leaving St. James' Park a final act of respect was the signing of the book of rememberance. Something a steady flow of us were still doing.

The whole event described above raises a whole lot of questions and issues I know. As a sociologist I am aware of the whole raft of issues this ties in with: the nature of crowd behaviour, the cult of celebrity, identity formation, expressions of spirituality in late modern societies and more. As a Christian I am aware of other issues raised particularly regarding the subject of false idols (in this case, arguably,of celebrity and football). Yet having experienced it all today, when I went to honour a man who I never knew but whose achievements had honestly influenced my sense of identity and personal history, I want to lay all those things aside. The fact is that in our society sport is important and in Christianity we are called to mourn with those who mourn. Alot of people at the moment are mourning the loss of a truly great gentleman and today I joined with them in that mourning.