November Reflection

“Rooted in Memory, Growing in Hope”

Dear Friends,

November is a month that invites us to pause. In our villages, the turning leaves and lengthening nights seem to nudge us towards reflection. The fields lie quiet after harvest. The colours deepen. There’s a hush in the air. And in our churches, we prepare to mark the great season of remembering.

At All Saints and Remembrance, we gather with communities across the land to honour those who gave their lives in war—many of them from our own small villages and families. The familiar words of Laurence Binyon’s poem ring out again: “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.” In these moments, we’re reminded how the past lives on not just in history books, but in our hearts and habits—in the names on our war memorials, the stories we tell, the silences we keep.

But Christian remembrance is never just looking back with sorrow. It is also looking forward in hope. In the Christian tradition, memory and hope walk hand in hand. The God we meet in Scripture is the one who remembers His people—and calls us to remember who we are. Jesus himself, on the night before he died, broke bread and said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” Not as a private nostalgia, but as a sign of God’s enduring love and promise. In every Eucharist, in every act of kindness, we remember him—bring him present among us—again.

In the countryside, perhaps more than anywhere, memory is embedded in the landscape. We walk lanes trodden by generations before us. We tend fields farmed for centuries. We worship in churches that have stood through plague, war, peace, and pandemic. And yet we don’t live in a museum. Rural communities are living communities. Our faith, like our villages, must adapt, grow, and carry memory forward with imagination and grace.

Remembrance, then, is not simply about loss. It’s about gratitude. And it’s about resolve: to honour the legacy of those who went before us by how we live now. The prophet Micah famously asks, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?” These are not abstract ideas—they’re the daily choices we make. The way we treat each other. The way we welcome the stranger. The way we care for creation. Even in the quiet rhythm of rural life, our choices ripple outward. When we plant kindness, we harvest peace. When we remember well, we become bearers of hope. And when we walk humbly, we’re doing our best to follow Jesus—in small ways that can make a big difference.

So this November, let us be people of memory and people of hope. Let us hold the past not as a burden, but as a blessing. And let us look to the future not with fear, but with faith.

As the old Scottish saying goes: “They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.” May we remember well. And live well.

With blessings