Remembrance

I want this address called REMEMBRANCE.  What a wonderful word, remembrance!  This address applies particularly to the remembrance of those who have left the flesh and are on other planes, those that you love.  Remembrance!

Let us see how that memory is kept.  They say time softens sorrow but is it not true that time clouds memory with many, and as time passes so it seems that those you love pass out of the orbit of your understanding into some nebulous, far off place beyond your ken, beyond your touch.  We call this Remembrance Sunday, a recalling Sunday.

There are many ways of remembering those you love.  There is the somewhat old-fashioned idea in certain seasons of the year, and sometimes regularly every week, of placing flowers on their graves.  Sometimes they are remembered in a simple stone cross.  Many are remembered in the last war by acre upon acre of wooden crosses.  That is about all you have from that war – acres of wooden crosses.  Perhaps disillusioned men and women and saddened hearts.  They are supposed to be remembered by a careful country that doesn’t forget to go on making more engines of destruction, so that they can put up more acres of white crosses and further weigh down the hearts of those that are left.  They can never be remembered while the nations of the world go on arming against each other.

Then the simple churchyard cross or stone, with just a name, and very often a broken-down stone at that, mildewed and old, marking the place of some mother, some brother, some sister.  Are they remembered?  Oh, my friends, if you only knew what it means to them, how the joy of that reunion, the sweetness of that remembering, lifts them into a clearer and more definite Kingdom of Heaven, for out of the love you have for them, they build their mansions in God’s Kingdom.  They are out of sight.  Can you forget?  Dare you forget?  Their voices are hushed.  Your eyes are closed to seeing them.  Perhaps you forgot, and all the time, like hungry birds scrambling for crumbs that are dropped on the windowsill on a winter’s day, they are hovering near, just waiting for one donation, one sweet emanation of memory from the spirit.

They would not have you remember them in sorrow.  They would have you remember them in love and friendship.  They would not have you remember them with tears.  They would have you remember them with the handgrip of greeting, and if they are very near and very dear, they sometimes try to kiss the memory into your spirit.  I was called by many of those that you love.  They asked me if they could have a place of memory, somewhere in the City of Prayer, somewhere where the atmosphere would draw them very close.   I said: “Yes, let us have a flower for memory, and as most of you are English, let us have the emblem of England – the rose, just in the Cross, in memory of you, and I will ask my people to plant those roses on which their names shall be”.

So, a garden was formed out of their memory for you, out of their love for you.  Roses, a cross of roses.  Then roses in the grass, hundreds of roses for those who wanted to remember.  They were planted.  They have grown well.  They are bearing many flowers.  Each flower is a note, a note in a symphony of love.

Well, it was yesterday.  Yesterday was the Memory Day, and those that had planted a rose who could be there at eventide gathered round the Cross and called the name of their loved one and stretched out their hand.  Their hands were stretched out from the plane of earth to the plane of Heaven, and their loved ones touched them.  The sun set.  The birds just sang their last notes, and those in the flesh retreated from the Cross, leaving kneeling spirits, thanking God for the love that they had received.

Remembrance!  I shall not be happy or satisfied until the whole of those five acres, and aye, perhaps far more than that, of that Park is dotted with roses in the grass, in memory.  Can’t you feel they are calling you sometimes?  Doesn’t it happen that you get a flash of love, as it were, over you, a tumbling over of loving thoughts in your mind of them.  How near they are then!  How near!

And oh, what wonderful ceremony, never to be forgotten – a large number going close to the roses, and the silence, and the outstretched hands and the rush of those spirits for the hands of those they loved.  From my side of life, what a wonderful ceremony ringed round with spirit forms of little children, and above, as it were, floating in the sky, forms of angels with down-stretched hands.

Then darkness came, darkness to the eyes that you have, but still a light to the eyes of the spirit.  And a great song of praise, founded on that symphony of love, to those in Heaven, a song of praise and thankfulness.  And is the remembrance over?  We trust not.  We trust that day by day you will remember that outstretched hand, and year by year, on this one day of the year, you will come and meet them once more.

PRAYER

We ask Thee, oh Lord, on this Day of Remembrance, that those that love these who pray shall come closer to them during the coming days.

Oh Lord, give unto them a greater bond of love, binding friend to friend, child to parents, parents to child.

Oh Lord, if it be Thy way, may the hands that touched these, be the hands that lead each and every one into Thy Kingdom.

Amen

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An address by "Dr. Lascelles" - 1st July 1934