蜜芽传媒

Remembrance Sundays, for me, meant marching as a cub-scout up the high street, behind veterans from both world wars, whose medals dazzled me. As their ranks dwindled over the coming years, however, so it seemed did those of the watching public, and Remembrance Day felt a bit forgotten, perhaps quite naturally with the passing of time.

But now, a groundswell, a surge! Laurence Binyon wrote his famous lines - 鈥楢t the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them鈥� - from the cliffs of Cornwall in 1914. Could he ever have imagined they would resonate so powerfully, a century on? Or that more than four million souls would visit an installation of poppies at the Tower of London?

For the first Armistice Day in 1919, King George V asked the nation to observe two minutes鈥� of silence in which 鈥淎ll locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated ...鈥�

Those thoughts will have been quite different to ours today - with the pain, as well as some of its relief, so vivid just after the war. But a hundred years on, what are we thinking, and what do we do with this touching contemplative pause that has opened up for us afresh?

Certainly at the Tower, I heard many people discussing longer-lost relatives. My own mind reached for my great-grandfather Archie, who was too old to enlist but who did so anyway - fool? hero? He killed a man in hand-to-hand combat, and would often wake screaming, even into old age.

And to my wife鈥檚 grand-father Mick, a miracle of a Northern Irishman who was aboard HMS Glorious when it was torpedoed in the Norwegian Sea in 1940 - and who was one of only 38 survivors from 1,200 sailors, rescued having spent three days clinging to a raft in perishing waters.

We will remember them.

Their stories seem more precious than ever. My son adored writing up Mick鈥檚 account for school, and so it lives on. But remembrance is more than keeping memories - or even traditions - alive just for the sake of it.

When Jesus instigated his own act of remembrance, it was dynamic: Do this, he said, at the Last Supper, to remember me: break bread together, share wine, wash each other鈥檚 feet, act in selfless love. Don鈥檛 waste this sacrifice.

We will remember, this Sunday, perhaps more poignantly than for a long time ... but from out of the perfect stillness of this great and moving anniversary, I wonder: What can we do in remembrance of them?

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