Today is a day that we all approach differently. I was in Brussels for a meeting on 11th November one year and remember talking about it during a break in a meeting with colleagues from around Europe. Remembrance inspires emotions ranging from the extremes of anger through to a passive thirst for knowledge, with a rage of reactions in between.
Our families, even if we are not aware of it, were all affected differently by the wars remembered on 11th November. My Grandfathers were both in the army in the first world war, one at Gallipoli and the other at Passchendaele; if I reflect I realise I am fortunate to be here to write this. My Father was too young for the second world war, narrowly missed National Service and when he did think of joining up, the post war food crisis was so serious that farmers were discouraged from doing so. I am of the Falklands generation. All those are facts that move me and are largely irrelevant to you.
Several years ago a few of us from our family visited Ypres as many people do. I was not prepared, emotionally, for what I saw. It was not the recreated trenches or the massive cemeteries that moved me, stark though they are, but the scale of the Menin Gate War Memorial and specifically the catalogue of names, recorded in stone in a place where, before 1914 there was a pleasant road into the town. Not the Menin Gate itself, but the connection to War Memorials in towns and Villages outside Belgium shook me because of the enormity of what had changed, physically in town and country, emotionally in communities, spiritually in millions of people.
Every lost life marks another tear stained speck of the limitless love of God.
Viewed like that everyone can remember something today without the need to argue over the big issues of cause and effect; the politics of conflict. Each of us can remember that humans make mistakes and lives are changed, generations may be affected and may remember, but the love of God will not change for it was never absent. Our problem is failing to notice and feel it.
A Prayer
Lord, whether we shy from the challenges of remembrance or engage fully with it, grant us the grace to keep telling our stories that refocus us on your eternal love in Jesus, resistant to all devastation, even that of death on the cross, for the sake of humankind. We thank you that you died that we might live. Amen.