I wanted to share a piece in the bulletin from church service that I enjoyed reading. Being from a military background, some of the words resonated with me on a personal level. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it as well.
Neville Smith reflects on Remembrance Sunday
I am old enough for my father to have fought in World War I. There is a photograph of him as a new young second lieutenant, bright and proud to serve. There is another, taken later, after he had been in the trenches. There is no light in his eyes. His expression is dead and tells of the death he has seen. He survived, but those two photographs speak of the cost of war. So do the memorials on the battlefields of northern France, bearing the names of thousands killed in battle with no known grave. So do teh coffins passing through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett.
"At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them," the poet Laurence Binyon confidently affirmed, but we may not, unless we have been personally bereaved. For their sake we must work for peace, we are often told at this time of the year, but that is difficult unless we are political activists.
But warfare, confrontation, hostility, enmity, belong not only "out there" on the world stage, but also "in here", in our own lives as well. We may not be able to influence international affairs and bring about the peace we so much long and pray for. But we can make peace and seek to live in peace with those who are closest to us. This much at least we owe to those whom we remember this day.
Although not entirely the same, I rather liken the tone of a passage from Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy Adonais originally written for his dear friend John Yeats after his untimely death
''Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
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