ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

Good morning. For our tomorrow they gave their today. For all the words and pictures that commemorate the Great War and subsequent deaths in battle, what speaks most eloquently this weekend is the silence: standing together, head bowed, when there’s nothing you can say. Grief, dignity, courage; sadness, injury, victory; damage, death, silence. My father was in Africa, against Rommel. Then in Italy, Monte Cassino. Big guns, that left him partially deaf. His father was on the Western Front in the First War. That’s all I know. They never talked about it. The silence spoke more than any words. That silence reveals the complexity of remembrance. Because in truth almost all the actions that won those two wars, let alone the sacrifices of so many other campaigns and skirmishes, are unknown; stories never told, courage never honoured, hope and fear and love and loss that never became a film, a book, a museum display. And this leads us into a deeper truth: that for each one of us, our lives depend on a myriad of actions and relationships we seldom pause to recall. The parent who fed us when we were too young to feed ourselves. The teacher who plucked us out when we fell headlong into the deep end of the pool. The back-seat passenger who shouted when we were headed at top speed through a red light. In a thousand ways our stories could have been so different, so much shorter, so much more painful. And others, most of whom never knew us, made it not so. Those who laid down their lives for our security and freedom have an honoured place among those others. Once Jesus was approached by ten men suffering with leprosy. He sent them to the priests, and en route they became free of their condition. Nine went on their way; only one came back and laid himself down and humbly said thank you. Nine times out of ten we go our way as if our safety, our liberty, our well-being was of our own making – as if we didn’t need those who protect us, supply our food, make our clothes, build our homes, clean our streets. This weekend we keep two minutes’ silence, and in that silence perhaps recognise the countless unknown and forgotten people who today make our life possible and in days gone by gave their life for ours. We call it Remembrance Day. But perhaps it isn’t remembrance; we can’t remember something we never really knew. Maybe instead we should call it Gratitude Day.