Remembrance Sunday is today really more an opportunity to learn about the two great world wars rather than a time for those who did not experience them to remember what happened.
“Remembrance in general and poppies in particular have lost their bearings,” declared Marlborough’s Rector, the Rev Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, in his sermon at the civic service held in St Mary’s Church.
“Remembrance Sunday is a national occasion,” he pointed out. “An occasion when different regions of the country, different generations and different faiths are united in a common attempt to pay tribute to part of our past.
“Yet it is hard to think of any other national occasion which is perceived so differently by those who participate in it. It has a single name, but it is a single name that covers a multitude of different emotions and anxieties.
“And chief amongst those anxieties, perhaps, is simply the wish to make sure that we really do remember – remember the horror of war and the price that it continues to exact.”
But how do we ‘remember’ when the great majority of the nation has no experience of war and only a limited connection with today’s armed services? he asked.
“In many ways, it’s not really a time of remembering, it’s an opportunity to learn,” he answered his own question. “And for that we have to be prompted.
“This is something the British Legion has been very conscious of. For the past fifteen years or so, it has deployed a variety of methods and people to help launch each year’s Poppy Appeal. From Dame Vera Lynn and the Spice Girls in 1997 to this year a Girl Band, The Poppy Girls, well known figures and popular culture have been enlisted to ensure we remember.
“Such promotions have had the desired effect, for Remembrance seems to be observed more fully each succeeding year. Yet such devices, necessary as they might be, are not without hazard.
“On Radio 4’s Moral Maze last week, a former SAS soldier bemoaned the way that such campaigns can serve to hide the horror of war rather than remind us of it. He cited giant poppies at King’s Cross station and the wearing of diamante poppies as ways in which Remembrance in general and poppies in particular have lost their bearings.
“In the discussion that ensued, as the different panellists shared what the wearing of poppies meant to them, it became clear just how individual are people’s understandings of Remembrance-tide and its associations.
“Common ground seemed to be in short supply in the BBC studio!”
And the Rector added: “But, gathered here this morning, can we find some common ground amidst our varied and individual responses?
“For this seems to me to be one of the special functions of Remembrance Sunday, to hold together the universal and the particular. We need to honour the particular people or memories that come to our minds and yet do so aware that they are part of a much bigger, national, indeed global, picture.
“Death happens one by one, yet in war it also happens on a scale we cannot comprehend. But we cannot make sense of this on our own.
“Imagine if you were the only person wearing a poppy, or the only person keeping quiet for two minutes — both would lose any meaning or significance. Hence the need for a set time for silence and a set day of remembering – together.
“The value of doing this together is inestimable. Far from diluting the significance of the individual response, joining together enhances it.
“But if gathering together is one of the ways justice is done to Remembrance Day, another is to think of where we gather — beside public war memorials and in church buildings such as this.
“This is because we gather to give thanks for those who have lost their lives in conflict and we also gather to express sorrow that such conflicts came about and sorrow at the terrible loss and waste that ensued.”
A morning of memories in the Sunday sun as a two minute silence pays tribute to sacrifice
