At the 90th birthday party of a parishioner many years ago I got the chance to break through the crowds of adoring family and friends to have a wee private chat with the birthday girl herself. When I leaned forward to give her a birthday kiss she sniffed me and said: “You smell delicious. What is it?” I replied: “Just a little something by David Beckham. What’s yours?” The 90 year old looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said: “I’m 90. It’s formaldehyde!”
What is worth preserving in our society, and not always in formaldehyde! What are the values, principles, ideas, places and traditions that are worth holding on to or adapting for some new purpose? We may think that many things should remain the same and not be lost in a world where there is constant change, but one of the challenges we all face is having a belief in tradition that doesn’t make us hide-bound or clinging to the past that means we are unable to get a hold of the present or welcome the future.
When I was training for the ministry nearly thirsty years ago, there was a concern then that when the generation who had served in World War One died out, future generations would no longer see the need to commemorate Remembrance-tide. The British Legion and others worked so hard to ensure that all conflicts, not only two World Wars, were remembered, and that Remembrance was not to be seen as a glorification of war but a more subtle call for the persistent need for peace. This was very much the focus in 2018 when the centenary of the ending of World War One was recalled. I have also seen across the country – and in our community – a determination not to ‘preserve’ the season of Remembrance, but to embrace it and adapt it so that its message of remembering past sacrifice and working for present peace is passed on to every new generation. Not only veterans from past conflicts, who served on the front line and the home front, but younger people who look at the ongoing need for peace with justice in all areas of our society. In the painful present with Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Sudan and South Sudan, and other parts of the globe, this commitment to a wider peace remains poignantly necessary.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it.And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
