Every Remembrance Sunday at the cenotaph Big Ben is heard. The remembrancers fall silent as a representation that the guns fell silent on the original Armistice day in 1918.
At the same moment a set of guns are fired by the Royal Horse Artillery and after two minutes the guns fire again to mark its ending.
We do our imitation of this silence (without the guns) in church.
Silence is quite empty on the face of it. In church we often imply the value of perhaps praying. we do not mind that young children can't stay quiet.
There are no children at the cenotaph. But neither is there quiet (even though David Dimbleby usually says that silence has fallen).
Big Ben is not silent. After striking the arrival of eleven it faithfully ploughs on eleven times. Time does not stop for our quietness. Whether the guns fire on or not time continues to march. In war human beings seem so big (if they're winning), so small (when they lose). But time makes every human being small. For me it is impossible to imagine the cenotaph ceremony without the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh: what I cannot imagine, Time requires me to accept as inevitable. Even our bloodiest wars are doomed to be dwarfed by the relentless march of Time.
Then there's the birds. As the artillery gun is fired every year there is the sound of scuttling birds. Whether anyone notices I do not know. It reminds us that whatever the immensities of human war, nature in some form, marches on. Of course war ruins the natural world for a time, but all of us who have stood in normal looking fields or valleys or on normal looking hillsides and tried vainly to imagine that this was once where the battle happened know that Nature, like Time, dwarfs the greatest human conflicts.
How much more true this is of Nature and Time's Creator.
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