RSS FeedToday is Remembrance Day and a number of us gathered outside the church at the base of the tower to mark the two minutes of silence from 11 a.m. until 11:02 recalling the signing of the armistice ending World War One. The large bell of Yorkminster Park and the bell of Christ Church Deer Park both tolled for fifteen minutes calling the community around to mark the silence at the accorded hour.
A number of people gathered with us or stopped as they were walking up the street when the bells fell silent. Downtown at the cenotaph outside Old City Hall a great throng was gathered and another similar crowd at the war memorial on the grounds of Sunnybrook Hospital. A vintage war plane on its way to or from a Remembrance Day Service fly-by pierced the silence as it passed over our tower. Another passed over Christ Church on the west side of Yonge.
Of course there were drivers in too much of a hurry to slow down and even one annoyed and annoying pedestrian who almost pushed one of the women on the sidewalk as he complained that we were blocking his way.
In what seemed like no time at all the bells were pealing to end the silence and everyone moved along to get on with their lives except of course those who had preserved our freedoms and way of life, by laying down their own. It will be another year before their names are read aloud in church, but a single day will not pass unblessed by their lives and by their deaths.
The fallen whose names below have been entrusted to our care, come from the two congregations that merged in 1962 to form Yorkminster Park Baptist Church. I can't begin to imagine how devastating it must have been for those earlier members of our church to lose so many young people in such a short span of time. When we remember them we are flanked by their parents and their Sunday school teachers and Choir Director's and all who kept them in their prayers and preserved their names in the years that followed the war.
The words of the Canadian poet John McRae who laid down his own life in 1915 are etched on the hearts of all Canadians. In the closing verse he had us in mind when he wrote,
Take up our quarrel
with the foe:
To you from failing
hands we throw
The torch; be yours
to hold it high.
If ye break faith
with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
THE NAMES OF THE FALLEN FROM...
BLOOR STREET BAPTIST CHURCH
1914-1918
Frank Beddow Walter Allison Kirkconnell
John W. Carter Albert W. Lansdell
James Russell Chamberlin John Boyd Lewis
Wilfrid Arthur W. Cook William Edward Lloyd
Charles Walter Davis Clarence MacKenzie
Ernest Herbert Davis John Arthur Robert Martin
Allan MacNab Denovan Stanley Martin
Cecil Harry Foxlee William James Metivier
John Buchan Freeland Frederick L. Miller
Charles George Gibson Herbert James Ness
Gordon Stephen Gilbert Archibald Webb Palmer
William Robertson Goodall Roy Harold Robinson
Geoffrey Heighington Harry Roy Smith
Robert Inman Clarence Everton Thompson
William Norman Jones Bernard Freeman Trotter
YORKMINSTER BAPTIST CHURCH
1939 - 1945
Wallace Gale Arlidge Eric Morgan Finn
William Elliott Brown Peter McCormack
Alexander C. Carrick William R.B. Relyea
E.A. Wesley Dawson Theodore E. Rising
James Fearn Franklin Neil Zimmerman
PARK ROAD BAPTIST CHURCH
1939 - 1945
Andrew H. Gain William K. Johnson
John Gardiner Roy B. Keedwall
W. Dixon Goodrick Stuart G. Storer
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon
Peace,
Peter
