Remembrance Day: A Call to Honour Those Who Serve

Are you familiar with the prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola? He was founder of Jesuits in the mid 1500’s. It goes like this:

"Teach us good Lord to serve thee as thou deservest, to give and not count the cost, to fight and not heed the wounds, to toil and not seek for rest, to labour and not to ask for any reward, save the joy knowing that we do thy will."

To me, it's a prayer about service and loyalty. As we come to Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day in the US), I think it's important to keep the tradition to honour those who sacrifice and risk in the course of their duty. Obviously our military, active, retired and fallen come to mind, but for me, so do police officers and first responders (fire and ambulance) in challenging urban environments, as well as the shift workers in our Emergency rooms.

To those of you serve in these capacities, thank you!! You usually serve in anonymity and yet we depend on you in crisis and to avert crisis. Your work is selfless and often at great cost to your personal life including the time away from home, the stress of danger, and the lingering challenge of trauma. I've had only brief glimpses of what you do, whether on a night shift ride along with the Vancouver Police Department, being a patient in ER, visiting patients in ER, and a recent rescue that my wife and I made responding to a mayday call. I've also heard stories from friends who have served in war zones (Tannar, I'm thinking of your experience in Afghanistan). Your compassion, care and perseverance are remarkable and worthy of respect and recognition.

We enjoy a level of freedom today that until recent history could never be imagined. Freedom from domestic war, freedom from life robbing pandemics on the scale of the 50 million plus lives lost in the "Spanish Flu" of 1918-20. Yes, we are not free of public or private violence, of disease and other tribulation. But because of the service of those whose names we may never know, we have freedoms and healthcare on historical unprecedented levels.

So I hope you visit a cenotaph or memorial this coming Remembrance Day. Demonstrate a small sacrifice of time to say thank you, to show your support to the families of those who serve and who served. It's a tradition worth keeping 'lest we forget'. And on that note, please feel free to revisit my Blog of November 2023 in honour of Captain Kenneth West https://sierrasil.com/blogs/blog/remembering-sacrifice-lest-we-forget