The unusual power of silently remembering together

The collective silence of remembrance acts is unusual. Listen to its powerful lesson.

Christie Gilfeather

Christie Gilfeather writes about the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and its relevance to culture. She has a PhD in Biblical Studies from the University of Cambridge and is a parish priest in Hertfordshire.

Princes and army officers walk away from a war memorial while others look on.

Then Prince Charles at the Cenotaph war memorial, 2017.

Number 10, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Every year on the 11th of November at 11am, people across the UK stop whatever they’re doing and keep a two minutes silence in honour of those who have died in war. This collective silence provides the opportunity to reflect on the loss of life and cost of peace. It gives us the chance to consider the conflicts raging around the world today.

Collective silence is an unusual thing in our culture. There are few, if any, other opportunities for silence which are as widespread as the tradition at the centre of Remembrance Day. Silence is, however, a powerful tool in relation to suffering and death. It acts as a reminder that in the face of some horrors, there is simply nothing to say. Presence becomes all that we have to offer, because words simply cannot capture the depth of the sadness to which we bear witness. And we must bear witness to them.

No words are said. People stand alongside each other and bear witness both to the grief and to the light of hope represented by the flickering candle.

Remembrance Sunday is one part of the wider season of remembrance in the church. This season begins with the feast of All Soul’s, when the church gathers to remember by name those who have died.

A powerful tradition lies at the heart of All Soul’s services: the priest reads out a list of names of the dead. If you are grieving a loved one, it is a great relief to hear someone else say their name. Grief can be intensely lonely and easily forgotten by others. But the church promises not to forget, honouring the beloved memories of those missing from our communities on the feast of All Souls. In many churches, after the list of names is read a silence is held in which the congregation comes forward to light a candle in memory of their loved one. No words are said. People stand alongside each other and bear witness both to the grief and to the light of hope represented by the flickering candle.

The value of silence is easily lost in this world which prompts us to rush to speak about everything that is happening. The Bible, though, offers us examples of the power of times of silence and the wisdom that can emerge from them.

They did not speak, because this was not a place for words. They remained with him to bear witness to his suffering without trying to resolve it.

At the beginning of the book of Job in the Old Testament, we find the protagonist in the midst of disaster. Job has lost everything, his home, his livestock, his family and his health. When Job’s friends hear about what has happened to him, they seek him out to be with him amid his suffering. The story tells us that

‘They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great’.
There are no platitudes here. No hastily put together explanation of why this might have happened or what Job needs to do about it. The friends saw that Job’s suffering was ‘very great’ and they allowed their presence to be enough. They did not speak, because this was not a place for words. They remained with him to bear witness to his suffering without trying to resolve it. In the story this silence eventually gives way to unhelpful words, but it is striking, nonetheless.

We find another example of silence during grief in the New Testament. John’s gospel recounts the death of a friend of Jesus. Lazarus becomes ill and quickly dies, and upon hearing the news Jesus makes haste to join Lazarus’ sisters and bear witness to their pain. There is some dialogue in the story, but the most striking part of it comes when Jesus reaches the grave of his friend. The shortest verse in the Bible is found here. It simply says,

‘Jesus wept’.

At this point, Jesus doesn’t say anything. He simply weeps, moved as he is by the death of his friends and the grief of those around him. Jesus weeps, even though he knows that before long Lazarus will rise from the dead.

But Jesus does not rush to the surprise and joy of resurrection. Jesus’ silence and his weeping is an example of what it means to grieve well alongside others when they are hurting. In what is perhaps one of the purest expressions of the human condition, Jesus responds to the weight of loss and the fragility of life in his silent bearing witness to the loss of his friend.

When we bear witness to the suffering of others without seeking to fill it with our own explanations or opinions, we honour the loss that is before us.

Within the Christian tradition there are also many examples of protest and speech in response to injustice. Silence is vitally important, but at some point, it must give way to speech and action when questions about human dignity are at stake.

But in order to know how to engage in resistance to that which diminishes others, periods of silence are necessary. When we bear witness to the suffering of others without seeking to fill it with our own explanations or opinions, we honour the loss that is before us. That is at the heart of the national two-minute silence for Remembrance Day. In remembering those who have died in war, and considering the conflict that marks our world today, we bear witness to the fragility of the human condition. Out of silence, comes the resources to know how to speak with wisdom.

Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”