DEVOTIONAL

This past weekend we marked a unique moment: Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday coincided on the 100th Anniversary of the close of WW1.

Our local community services of remembrance were much busier than usual. The whole occasion was given a high profile and fitting and thoughtful tribute nationally too.

There were the striking, poignant images of faces from WW1 etched in the sand of Britain’s beaches and a thousand beacons across the UK.

There was the People’s March past the London Cenotaph. There was the intensely moving and sensitive re-mastering and colouring of footage from WW1, adjusted in pace and with sound added, which put flesh and blood on our history and let our forbears live and breathe again.

It all added to a powerful moment of pause and reflection across the land. We will remember them.

The philosopher George Santayana, writing in 1905, famously said that“those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

It’s a statement that has often been adapted and re-quoted and reused. Because it’s true. We must make sure that this – our history – is not forgotten.

The weekend is in the past and the Centenary has been observed. So is it time now, as some suggest, to move on? To pack away the medals and the poppies? To live in the future and not in the past?

After all, some whisper, those generations are gone and now we live in a new world.

But Santayana’s profound truth and prescient warning remind us that we dare not choose to forget.

Last week I had a worrying conversation with a nine year old girl as we sat in a Children’s Club where the children were colouring in stencils of poppies to add to a church display as one activity that night.

I quote her exact words, spoken in a matter-of-fact tone:“i don’t believe all this anyway. It never really happened. It’s just fake. They make us learn this at school, but I don’t believe it happened. It’s just made up.”

Where on earth did she form this view? Where did this come from? This was beyond ignorance and beyond poor awareness or lack of education.

If you don’t know your history then the risk is you are condemned to repeat it. If you choose to rewrite or to deny your history then the risk becomes a certainty: you are condemned to repeat it.

So we will remember. We must remember. Or the Holocaust-deniers will lead us into repetitions.

We must remember. Or the pogroms and persecutions will begin again.

We must remember. Or old prejudices and new dictatorships will rise again.

We must remember. Or propaganda will be our‘truth’once more.

We must remember. Or the next generation will accept fake as fact.

We must remember. Or one day we will find ourselves building whole new chains of Memorials across our country.

We must remember. We will remember.

If we remember then we will not repeat the past. If we remember then we can build a better future.

Remember the words of Jesus, “Greater love has no-one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)?

The words were meant as a spur to greater love not as a call to reckless sacrifice. They were meant to foster love, not hatred.

They were meant to place the highest value on peace-makers and peace-keepers.

They were meant to create a new world that would have better memories and memorials.