remembrance

There's always an act of remembrance along at the Royal High - the local secondary school.

That's how my day began today. They ask me along to share in the simple ceremony and then to lead the closing prayer.

It's not an easy thing for any school to do these days, I guess. There's such a massive distance now between the pupils growing up and those whom they remember in this way.

A distance in time - and a distance in culture as well.

But the school is steeped in history. And part of that visual history is a large commemorative door and a three-fold set of stained glass, commemorative windows, all down one side of the hall.

The simple act of laying a wreath beside the door and then beside the windows, too, at least provides a striking pause amidst the bustle of our daily lives enabling all to think.

The 'thinking' bit was led by two of the pupils. Their own, heartfelt reflections on the price of war. It was powerful stuff. Well-written, well-read and well-received.

Some of those remembered would be ages with the pupils there today. Their lives so early ended. Before they'd almost started.

It makes you think. About life. How short it always is. How quick it always flies. How soon it's always gone.

Maybe I thought that all the more with my Mum's death still so fresh. And her whole life now gone. And how her older brother had been not long out of school when he had died towards the end of World War II. And how she always missed him more than words could tell.

I think that's part of the silence we observe. There aren't any words to express the horror and pain, the sorrow and grief, the cost and the price that is borne.

It's too easy, I guess, to forget.

Too easy not to think about these things. Too easy to ignore the basic questions as to how we live our lives: and what this life's about: and why there is such conflict and the dreadful sort of carnage that it always leaves behind it in its wake.

I suppose those sort of thoughts kept hanging in the air above my day in all that I was doing after that.

There was preparation to be done for the services coming up. I found that hard.

Struggling, I think, because of the dark and sombre mental clouds 'remembrance' at the Royal High had brought. Sunday's 'Remembrance Sunday' and I never find that easy. So many conflicting perspectives.

Some for whom the pain of their remembrance is still so fresh and so acute. Others who believe this widespread emphasis on those who gave their lives in war is too much of a contrast with the One we seek to follow as the Prince of Peace.

So preparing for this coming Sunday's service wasn't easy. Not at all.

I had a break in the middle of the day to go and meet with others in relation to a venture that's been on the go for two or three years now.

A venture which excites me as I see how it creates a very different context for the followers of Jesus to be his church.

I suppose in some ways it gave me the sort of balance I needed. Remembrance takes me back across the past. This meeting took me forward to the future God is shaping even now.

Maybe that's the key to it. Standing in the present, the act of our 'remembering' inspires us to be bold and full of confidence in God in shaping out, with him, the future of his world.