The month of remembrance is a time to celebrate and reflect.
by Canon Eric Woods.

We’ve nearly reached November, and November is the month of Remembrance. On the first there is All Saints’ Day, when we celebrate the men and women of faith who have gone before us. I always think, not of the great and famous saints, but of people like a parishioner in the Wiltshire village of which I used to be Vicar. John Duck was his name, and according to his little headstone he died in 1665, the year of the Great Plague. And his fellow villagers, who saw into every detail of everyone’s life – as people in villages still do – recorded there that he ‘lived well to die never, and died well to live ever’. And I cannot think of a better epitaph.

And then there is All Souls’ Day, usually commemorated on 2 November. All Souls is a time for remembering those whom you have loved but see no longer. It’s important to have a season like this in which we can remember them, and say our ‘thank yous’ for them, and for all that they meant and mean to us still. Try to find a little time soon to say – each in your own way – your own thank you to God for those who in their lives were near and dear to you.

And then it will soon be time ‘Please to remember the Fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot’. I don’t much like back garden fireworks – our cats hate them – but am still excited by well-organised public displays. Apart from anything else, they’re safer. If you are going to one this year, I hope you have good weather – but no, I can’t help there. I’m in sales, not in management!

I suppose Guy Fawkes’ Day is not very ‘PC’ or ‘woke’ anymore. Yet the day still has a role if it can increase our determination not to surrender to irrational and dangerous fears, or to the repression of innocent men and women, or to the suppression of our traditional liberties in the supposed interest of religion, law or order.

Armistice Day is on Friday 11 November, when we remember the guns falling silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. Then on Sunday 13 November we observe Remembrance Sunday. I am sure our churches will be as packed as ever for services of remembrance, and the crowds will turn out for the laying of wreaths at the Vale’s many War Memorials, and to observe the Two Minutes’ Silence. Two minutes: not much to ask to remember those “that fought for England, following a falling star.” [G K Chesterton].

We must remember, in order to be renewed and re-inspired by the stories which are our foundation history: the stories of our nation and – more important still – the stories of our Faith. If we forget them – worse still, if we never bother to learn them – we beggar no-one but ourselves.