Deacon David Cummings urged those in the crowd at Sarnia’s Remembrance Day ceremony Monday to hold on to their sense of common experience and mission.
Deacon David Cummings urged those in the crowd at Sarnia’s Remembrance Day ceremony Monday to hold on to their sense of common experience and mission.
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City residents, veterans, Royal Canadian Legion Branch 62 members, cadets, police officers, firefighters and local officials gathered in the park next to the library downtown to hear trumpeter Tim Hummel play The Last Post, observe a moment of silence and lay wreaths at the cenotaph.
Cummings spoke about recently hearing a Canadian military officer address a recent Veterans Week dinner about the “sense of unity felt by all those serving in Afghanistan.”
Men and women from different countries “were united by a common experience, united in a common mission,” he said.
“Unfortunately, it seems to me that we’re forgetting how to get along,” Cummings said. “We are losing our sense of our common experience, of our common mission.”
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That may be, at least in part, because “we are losing our sense of the sacred,” he said.
“The sacred is something greater than ourselves. It transcends time and space, and gathers us together through the generations,” with “the power to unity.”
Cummings told the crowd at the cenotaph, “Today, we stand in the presence of the sacred.”
“On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we stop in a sacred time,” he said. “We gather at a sacred place and remember “sacrifices” made for a greater purpose, a common purpose.”
Pat Poland, mother of Brent Poland who died in 2007 while serving in the army in Afghanistan, was again this year’s Silver Cross Mother in Sarnia.
Cummings spoke about her role representing “all mothers who lost children” and are “united by the common experience of grievance and loss.”
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He also spoke about cadets, serving members of the armed forces and first responders at the ceremony who have “chosen to unite themselves for a common mission of service,” and veterans, as well as those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
“The common experience we share, this Canada, is itself something that has been sanctified by their sacrifice,” Cummings said.
The ceremony began with a parade from Branch 62 on Front Street to the cenotaph and ended with the parade forming again to return through the city’s downtown to the legion hall for refreshments.
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