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Good Morning. We are in a year of remembering. A century after the outbreak of World War I, today, Australia & New Zealand fall silent on ANZAC Day. Britain falls silent too, the Queen visiting the Cenotaph this morning.

I had to remind myself of how the Allies had planned to capture Gallipoli… retreating in defeat after eight months.

I asked my kids about Anzac Day, about Gallipoli. There was a vague recollection from school history lessons.

I asked a neighbour: Wasn’t that the film with Mel Gibson? No, wait, the new one, The Water Diviner. Russell Crowe.

Popular culture keeps some of our memories alive but still … our memories often let us down. Reminded of the plain truth of our history of conflict we’re often left speechless.

An educated person is said to know 20,000 words & to use 2,000 in a week. Sometimes none of them are any good.

Contemplating the desperate reality of war, we often have nowhere to go but to silence.

A church is a good place to take your silence… unless there’s a service going on.

But silence can arrive in unlikely places. The loudest silences I’ve known have been those that descend on a packed football stadium, on a weekend near Remembrance Day.

Everyone stilled. Serious. Suddenly aware of your own breathing, of being alive, of how fragile this life is.

To notice life like this is rare. It becomes a kind of prayer. A freeze-framed wordlessness where you stop to imagine those whose lives were silenced by war.

We know them by absence - by people not sitting next to us because they were never born, because their father or mother, grandfather or grandmother lost their lives in war.

In this stillness we fill up our present with the past to remember those whose futures were taken away.

And below the surface this silence can hold a longing for a future we can barely articulate.

One that only poetry hints at - like the poet in the Bible who remembered a future where,

‘The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion together; and a little child shall lead them.’

Summoning the past into the present we try to remember another kind of future.

‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ said Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’

And in the silence, looking backwards, we can find a little understanding.

We remember people like those who lost their lives at Gallipoli and try to remember a future where it could never happen again.

Try to remember what we can do about that.

In the stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, there’s a setting of a beautiful old folk song.

‘Only remembered, only remembered,
Only remembered by what we have done;
Thus would we pass from the earth and its toiling,
Only remembered by what we have done.’

First broadcast 25 April 2015

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