Remembrance Sunday and Feast of St. Martin of Tours

This year marks the thirty-ninth Remembrance Sunday observance at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church. Reggie Mitchell, Denis Payne, and Fr. Martin Dewey Gable began this tradition at St. Martin’s Church. We welcome members of the British Commonwealth and North American community, and representatives of other nations in metropolitan Atlanta who are reading, singing, playing and praying with us on Sunday, November 10. Through Morning Prayer, the Choir, bagpipes, trumpet, and organ, we will remember those who have given their lives in defense of their nations, often side by side, in the same cause.

Remembrance Day, Armistice Day,(the event it commemorates), Poppy Day or Veterans Day – is a day to commemorate the sacrifices of members of the armed forces and of civilians in times of war, specifically since the First World War. It is observed on November 11 to recall the end of World War I on that date in 1918. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice.)

For Anglicans and Roman Catholics, there is a coincidental but appropriate overlap of Remembrance Day with the feast of St. Martin of Tours, a saint famous for putting aside his life as a soldier and turning to the peace-filled life of a monk. Statues or images associated with St. Martin are for this reason sometimes used as symbols of Remembrance Day.

The poppy's significance to Remembrance Day is a result of Canadian military physician John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields. The poppy emblem was chosen because of the poppies that bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their red color an appropriate symbol for the bloodshed of trench warfare. An American YMCA Overseas War Secretaries employee, Moina Michael, was inspired to make 25 silk poppies based on McCrae's poem, which she distributed to attendees of the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries' Conference. Two years later the poppy was adopted as a national symbol of remembrance.

The Remembrance Day Service will be Morning Prayer on Sunday, November 10th, at 11:15 a.m. A reception will follow the service in Gable Hall.