Thought for the day for Beverley FM for Remembrance Sunday 2024

 My Dad is 97, and although he doesn’t always remember things that have happened in the last few days, his recall of his childhood remains pretty clear – as is often the case when people get older.

Dad lived through the second world war. He left school in 1941 at the age of 14 and worked in the huge Ordnance Depot in Chilwell, just outside Nottingham, as an errand boy.

His mother – my grandma – was widowed during the First World War. Her first husband (not my grandfather), Horace, went off to war, but was sadly killed on March 24^th 1918 during the German counter-offensive. When I eventually got out to France to see his memorial at Pozières and brought back photos, I was able to show pictures to my uncle and aunt who were Horace’s children. No-one from the family had visited the location before.

Pozières cemetery and memorial

Grandma died in 1973, aged 87, and I was too young to have had a proper conversation with her about what happened. However, my dad describes an occasion when they were sheltering together from an air raid. There was a radio in the shelter, and the announcer gave out the number of German aircraft shot down that night by the RAF. The people in the shelter understandably cheered, but my dad remembers vividly that his mum did not. She quietly said “they’re some mother’s son”.

Let’s be clear, my grandma wanted to see the tyranny of Hitler defeated. She was no sympathiser with the enemy. But she retained the capacity to understand the common humanity we all share. She had received that awful news of the loss of her husband and she knew that families would be getting the same news far away. They may be on opposite sides of the conflict, but their grief would be the same.

That family story is always in my mind on Remembrance Sunday. It isn’t a celebration,  nor is it a moment to be triumphalistic. It was always intended to be a pause for sober recollection of the terrible human cost of conflict, of thanksgiving for those who put their own lives on the line for our freedom, and to commit to doing all we can to avoid it happening again.

When Jesus said “love your enemies and pray for your persecutors”, I don’t believe he was saying we should condone evil, or collude with injustice. However, I do think he was reminding us that even in the height of human division and conflict, there are some commonalities in our human condition. We are all created in the image of God, even though that image is often terribly obscured and dimmed, and we reduce our own humanity when we cease to remember the humanity of others – even those with whom we are in bitter conflict. They are, to quote my grandma, some mother’s son or daughter.