11/11/2014

Good morning. In a few hours’ time Big Ben will strike the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – marking the actual moment the First World War ended. Today, in this centenary year of the start of the worst slaughters in battle the world has ever known, those chimes will have an especially sombre significance.

One of my uncles fought in that Great War; but, in spite of a bayonet wound in his back, he thankfully survived and later went to live in South Africa. He would often say there that listening to the BBC and hearing that quintessentially British sound of Big Ben’s chimes from so far away filled him with emotion – signalling that all was well back home. And, as a minister himself, perhaps conscious of the little prayer in its famous clock tower, that begins: “All through this hour, Lord be my guide”

The inevitable passing of the hours – and the recognition that, as one Remembrance hymn notes, time like an ever-rolling stream will one day bear all of us away from this world - presents us, or perhaps should present us, with an ever growing sense of urgency about using the time left to us in the best possible way, before it’s too late.

Near the clock case inside Chester cathedral, where long ago I was ordained, are words by a Victorian poet, Henry Twells, - a man in his 30s when Big Ben first tolled.
“When I was a child I laughed and wept, time crept; When as a youth I waxed more bold, time strolled; When I became a full grown man, time ran; When older still I daily grew, time flew. Soon I shall find, in passing on, time gone. O Christ! Wilt thou have saved me then? Amen”