Remembrance

Dear Friends

Memories form our lives – how we remember what went before, shapes how we move into our future. Our faith is all about remembering what happened in the past – the bible stories in the Old and New Testament inform how we live our lives now.

This weekend is particularly significant as Remembrance Sunday has been a feature for all of us, for all of our lives. We don’t “celebrate” it, we don’t “glorify” war – we mark it as a coming together of memory.

One of the few times I ever saw my parents cry was on Remembrance Sunday, they had first-hand experience of war, had lost close friends and relatives. They knew from personal experience, the horror of war. I remember standing with my mam in church when I was young and asking her what we were being quiet for:

Me: Why are we being quiet mam?
Mam: Shhh! we’re remembering.
Silence
Me: What are we remembering, mam?
Mam: Shush! We’re remembering not to do war any more.

She gave me one of her warning looks at this point – so I knew it was a very important thing to her. Looking around as a child I saw an emotion I didn’t understand on the faces of the adults around me, they shared a mutual understanding of loss, of grief, of suffering, of sacrifice, of hopes and prayers that it would never happen again.

Sadly, as we know, wars do still happen. Every day people die needlessly – and every day we pray for world peace. Our faith gives us something we can’t live without – it gives us hope – a hope that one day we will achieve world peace; that one day a solution to arguments about land or ideologies will be settled in a way that doesn’t involve violence; that one day lives will not be lost or damaged by war.

Jesus said “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you” – let us all hope and pray that peace will one day come to all.

Shalom

Ann