November is a month of Remembering, we will be holding an All Souls service on 3rd November at St Lawrence, Gnosall, an opportunity for loved one's names to be read out and remember those we have lost in the Benefice.

I’m sure we all know the rhyme Remember, remember the 5th November, the date we remember the failure of the gunpowder plot.

On the 10th November Remembrance Sunday services will be held across the Benefice and then at 11am on the 11 November each year, we will join with many countries around the world in two minutes silence to remember all who have been killed, wounded or affected by war.

In 1914, Edward Grey, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, uttered these words on the eve of Britain officially entering the First World War: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Since then however, the United Kingdom has been involved in many more wars and conflicts.

At Remembrance services all around the globe the words of the Kohima Epitaph are read:

When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow
we gave our today.

However, it is based on something much older. It was Simonides who wrote the famous lines about the Spartan action under King Leonidas who held the pass of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BC. One translation of Simonides' epitaph reads as follows:

Tell it in Sparta, thou that passes by, here, faithful to her charge, her soldiers lie

These moments in human history and the experiences and memories that we each personally have show us that the lamps do not go out, that the hope of peace and justice in the actions of our service men and women keep the lamps lit.

This is the promise of God that although we may try, we cannot extinguish what is good in humanity and God’s creation. In the Gospel of St John, we read “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it”.

So, as we remember the lights going out over Europe at the start of the First World War and the sacrifice of all those affected in the conflicts since, let us be inspired in the knowledge and faith that they will always be relit by those prepared to give themselves for others. They left home and family often to foreign lands in the search of justice, freedom and peace; the effects of which we feel in our society today. The world could have been a very different place for us without their sacrifice, which cannot and should not be forgotten.

The memories we recall should spur us forward in the search for true harmony and peace throughout the world. As the Lord commanded the apostles to “Do this in memory of me” we pray for the grace of the great sacrifice of Calvary to engulf the whole world that we may live in the harmony for which Christ prayed; and to our fallen we say “We will remember them”.

Adie Harris