International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women Every year on November 25th, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women raises awareness of the pressing global... Read more
Remembrance Day – Lest We Forget
As the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month draws near, we gather not only to remember but to renew a promise born in the mud and blood of Flanders fields, where poppies still bloom between the rows of solemn white crosses. It is a solemn hour of stillness, pierced only by the hum of larks who still fly, singing over the lands that bore witness to lives lost and sacrifices made. We honor those who gave everything, laying down life itself, and we carry forth their legacy with the weight of that duty resting in our hands.
To those who once walked among us, who wore the uniform, who went willingly or with a heavy heart – you bore witness to what we can never know. The brutal finality of war, the bonds of men united under fire, the suffering etched into every second of the lives you laid on the line. You, who felt the warmth of dawn on your faces and watched the sunset fade over the fields of your homes, who loved and were loved in return, were wrenched from all that peace offered, to lie now in fields far from home, under crosses row on row. You are the dead – and though time may separate us, your spirits rise each year as we take up the call to remember and honor the lives given in battle.
For it was your hands that once held the torch, a light cast into the darkness of hatred and war. You bore that torch across fields scarred with trenches, through nights lit only by the deadly flash of guns and the stars. And as you fell, that torch passed from one hand to the next, a flame that survived when bodies could not, a light that speaks across generations, saying, “Take up our quarrel with the foe.”
Your foe, though changed, is still among us. Perhaps it is not always a man in uniform but is instead that dreadful specter of forgetting. For if we, those left to carry this torch, break faith with you – if we let slip the memory of your struggle and sacrifice, if we allow complacency to dull the sharpness of our remembrance – then we stand to lose not only you but ourselves. Each year we look out upon the poppies, and each year they bloom red as blood, as though from the very soil you now inhabit, as if to cry out in bright, living color: “Remember.”
If we allow these memories to fade, if we let the echoes of your sacrifice soften into history, then our world may forget what it costs to live in peace. We remember not to glorify war, not to bask in its valor or revel in its bloodshed, but to bind ourselves to a commitment – a commitment to peace, to unity, to justice. We remember because without that memory, we risk severing the very roots that hold us together.
Each year, as the clock strikes eleven, silence falls across towns and cities. For two minutes, life stops, and in that quiet pause, we reach across the decades, grasping hands with the dead who remind us that freedom and peace are neither free nor permanent. We live because you fell; we breathe because you could not; we laugh and love because you gave up those very joys. It is a debt unpayable, a promise that we carry in our hearts, and that we must renew each year if we are to be worthy of the lives you gave.
So we stand, we bow our heads, and in that silence, we hear your call. To those of you who lie in Flanders fields, know this: we hold the torch high, and we will not break faith with you. Though poppies grow above you, their red petals a reminder, we will not let you sleep unremembered. For you gave us not only your lives but also your dreams, your hopes, your faith in a better world. And so, on this day, under a sky where larks sing bravely still, we honor you and renew the promise.
Lest we forget.
