Remembrance has become – rightly – synonymous with shrinking queues of elder-veterans being pushed in wheelchairs at salient anniversaries. We are watching them become fewer in number, year by year, and it will not be long before the last combatant of the Second World War will go to their eternal rest. There is much consternation about the need (believe it or not) or the viability of Acts of Remembrance when there will soon be no-one who actually remembers.

We can fall into the trap of connecting November with the Great and Second World Wars whose memories are indeed fading fast, and at the same time forgetting the later conflicts – and indeed those that rage still. I was a primary-school child when the Falklands War occurred, and at college when the first Gulf War erupted, and there seem to have been so few years of peace since. The focus of our Remembrance must change and evolve. Veterans, as a result of the change in warfare, are far fewer in number – and are far younger than our heroes in wheelchairs. It is a hard and sad truth that many of those who are veterans of recent conflicts are currently among the armies of homeless, many consumed by an addiction to substance, many more victims to decimated mental-health or simply lost to our awareness.

In the act of the Eucharist (Holy Communion), Christians are called to remember Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice and to act in remembrance of that. We do that by participation in the act of consuming bread and wine – modest to be sure, but an embodied act of remembrance. This month, when you are called to remember – you won’t necessarily be able to claim a memory to hold on to. Instead, adjust your focus and see with new eyes who and what you seek to recall. The flames still burn, and those who fought and survived are still among us. What will your act of participation be?

We will remember them.

Fr David