Observing Remembrance Day: a personal reflection

This morning – ‘at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month’ of the 11^th year - many of us will pause for a moment’s quiet contemplation and reflect on the legacy of our forbears who sacrificed their lives in the service of their country and those they loved.

And later today my daughter and I will engage in another related, more personal ritual of remembrance and thanksgiving.

Both rituals share a common conviction, based on a notion of legacy articulated over 2000 years ago by Plato: ‘We should leave our children a legacy rich, not in gold, but in reverence.’ Each generation bequeaths to the next what it is most important to remember. And what we must never forget.

This quality of reverence was beautifully captured in the Manchester Guardian’s report of the first Two Minute Silence observed on the anniversary of the Armistice, marking the official time and date of the end of World War 1 in 1918:

‘The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition. Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still…The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain…And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.’

World War 1 was to be ‘the war to end all wars’. The admonition ‘Lest we forget’ was based on the hope that if we could only keep close in our collective memory the experience of horror then we would never go there again.

Of course, ‘the spirit of memory’ is always personal. Such a ritual can only survive if it lives in the hearts and minds of individuals. Many of us will have grandparents who died in or survived that appalling First World War, or other loved one’s affected by subsequent and equally devastating armed conflicts.

For me, Remembrance Day has always had a very special place in my life. My mother was born in Scotland on this day and she was named Poppy, after a flower that symbolises beauty, delicacy, suffering (grown from Flanders fields of blood) and resilience. It was a name given in remembrance and thanksgiving. Remembrance of the struggle, the courage, the solidarity in adversity, the death and destruction. Thanksgiving for coming through it alive. For this was a day of celebration of peace and joy and hope. A day to mark the end of one era and the possibility of a new beginning: symbolised, as always, in the birth of a child.

That legacy of faith and hope was renewed by my mother after the devastation of the Second World War, in which she served as a Wren, when she married my father, who was in the Australian Navy. He had been rescued from the Mediterranean Sea twice before being on the first ship into the unimaginable horror of Hiroshima after the bomb. I was another child of the outbreak of peace.

Regrettably, like so many marriages formed in that context, the relationship did not survive. My father left my mother and me when I was about seven and we never saw him again. His legacy was one of absence. However, unlike him, his father took an interest in me and in my education. My grandfather was a journalist and newspaper editor and lived through both World Wars and Vietnam. He had a deep suspicion of government and media lies about our involvement in war. Though not a pacifist, he was an anti-war activist in later life.  He spent his last years of retirement trying unsuccessfully to get his last work published, entitled ‘A Programme to Curb War’. Some of his legacy can be detected in my articles on the same subject published online during my retirement.

Remembrance Day has always tended to concentrate more on the suffering and waste than the glorification and heroism of our fallen. This used to be the primary focus of Anzac Day - and still is at the Dawn Service - before the holiday emerged to become more a symbol of nationalist pride and celebration, with all its jingoism and its heroic drinking and sporting rituals.

By contrast, Remembrance Day is observed in just one moment’s silent reflection, in the course of an otherwise ordinary day, in the belief that if done properly and reverentially this will be sufficient to the purpose.

Although the ritual is one of quiet contemplation, part of the legacy is a refusal to remain silent. ‘Lest we forget’ is not just keeping the memory alive but acting on it to bring about change for a more peaceful world. And such change, to be effective, has to be at both the personal and public levels.

This dual aspect is best expressed in an exhortation of the Dalai Lama, which always pricks my conscience.

Be compassionate.

Not just towards your friends but to everyone.

Work for peace,

in your heart

and in the world.

Work for peace.

And I say again -

never give up!

No matter what is happening.

No matter what is going on around you.

Never give up!

How might we act in this spirit? We could begin with the recognition that we all live in the shadow of war and are more or less complicit in its perpetuation. We need to keep the real impact of our involvement in terms of human suffering continually at the forefront of our consciousness, as our dominant moral concern.

We should become more questioning, of ourselves and others. The next time a politician, commentator or friend tries to justify our military intervention, why not ask them whether they would be willing to sacrifice their own or any of their loved one’s lives for any of the reasons they advance? If not, then ask them whether they think it’s OK to get others to sacrifice their lives and those of their loved ones on our behalf. We should also reflect on our own answers to these questions.

We need to re-commit ourselves to upholding the moral and legal principles adopted in our community and under international law, which are part of the legacy of our forefathers, designed to act as restraints on aggression. We should strengthen these safeguards and promote their universal application.

Of course, there may be circumstances in the future where the use of military force will be both necessary and legitimate. And where courage and self-sacrifice will again be required. But it should only be for the very best of reasons and as a last resort.

At 11.00 o’clock, however, when we reflect in silence, our thoughts will probably be of a more personal nature. For Remembrance Day is always about the loss of loved ones. The grieving for their death. The remembrance of their uniqueness and preciousness. A renewed appreciation of the sacrifices they made on our behalf. A sense of wonder at the life and love we shared. An acknowledgement of the incredible impact they had and continue to have on us, the inheritors of their legacy. And, then, a recognition that the personal (in my case, remembrance of my mother) is universal.

For it is the quality and depth of our personal attachments that ground our wider moral concerns.

And so, later today, my daughter and I will get together and lay out a Scottish tablecloth my mother and grandmother embroidered when I was a child. On it we will place a vase of freshly cut Flanders poppies grown for the purpose. We will eat some cheesecake made according to her recipe. And we will reflect on and celebrate the grief and joy of life. A simple ritual to honour a legacy ‘rich in reverence’.

Once again the ‘spirit of memory’ will ‘brood over’ our personal and collective histories, as it will for others who pause for a brief moment today to feel the presence of the past on their lives.

In this way, Remembrance Day will be kept alive. With small public and personal rituals,   inviting us to reflect on the big issues of War and Peace, Life and Death. To be reminded of the centrality of Love to all our deepest concerns. And to be moved by love’s power to unite the living and the dead.

In the end, I find myself reflecting (in faith and hope) on the following words of Oscar Wilde: “The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”

Lest we forget.