Remember, remember!

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot

November is a month for remembering, but it is not always helpful to remember. Remembering divisions in the Christian Church and burning effigies of the Pope or Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, and setting off Catherine wheels, a form of torture used in the martyrdom of St Catherine of Alexandria some 1500 years ago, is not a good idea.

At the end of the month our North American cousins will celebrate something far more positive, Thanksgiving, which commemorates the feast held by the Pilgrim colonists and members of the Wampanoag people at Plymouth in 1621. The fourth Thursday in the month of November is marked for this annual celebration. On Thanksgiving Day people express their gratitude to God for his blessings and give thanks to their family for their love and support. It is a day of communal celebration marked as a sense of the gratitude people feel for all the good things in life. This is done by offering prayers and giving gifts to your friends and family.

Yet for many of us it is the time of remembering in the middle of the month that is of most significance, Remembrance Day. This year we celebrate 90 years of remembering. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 the guns of Europe fell silent. After four years of the most bitter and devastating fighting, the Great War was finally over. The Armistice was signed at 5am in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiegne, France on November 11, 1918. Six hours later, at 11am, the war ended.

The first Remembrance Day was conducted in 1919 throughout Britain and the Commonwealth. Originally called Armistice Day, it commemorated the end of hostilities the previous year. It came to symbolise the end of the war and provided an opportunity to remember those who had died. After the end of the Second World War in 1945 Armistice Day became Remembrance Day to include all those who had fallen in the two World Wars and later conflicts. Millions of young men and women lost their lives in the First World War, 863 of them on the very last day. Millions more died in the Second World War.

The second Sunday of November is Remembrance Sunday. At 11am a two minute silence is observed at war memorials, cenotaphs, religious services and shopping centres throughout the country. The Royal Family, along with leading politicians and religious leaders (including the President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain) gather at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London for a service and all branches of the civilian and military services are represented in ceremonies throughout Britain and the Commonwealth.
In recent years there has been a return to the practice of celebrating the two minute silence at the 11th hour of the 11th day of November, with shops and offices pausing in the midst of their busy day to remember.

At a time when soldiers and citizens continue to die in various wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is important to stop, reflect, give thanks for lives lost in the search for peace, and pray for peace, trust and reconciliation between peoples and nations. It is also an opportunity to think about the meaning of life, death, and life beyond death. There are the familiar repeated words of remembrance:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

And there are the words of the Apostle Paul:

Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14)

John Weaver, October 2008