Choir Notes

Never Forget
From Music and the Spoken Word
Delivered by: Lloyd D. Newell • Program 4221

A recurring theme of poets, prophets, and sages across the generations is that we must never forget the source of our blessings. Moses warned ancient Israel, “Beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt.”1 Thousands of years later, at the height of the British Empire, Nobel-prize winning author Rudyard Kipling echoed Moses’s words in his poem Recessional:

The tumult and the shouting dies—

The Captains and the Kings depart—

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!2

It’s easy to forget the hardships and the sacrifices of those who have gone before us—especially when things seem to be going well. Sometimes we’re so busy, so caught up in the pressing demands of the present day, that we forget our collective history. As a result, we may indulge in misguided pride in our self-sufficiency, mistakenly thinking we are self-made men and women.

But no one is entirely self-made. Countless others, including some we’ll never know or meet, have helped us all along the way. Every good thing we accomplish, all of the freedoms and bounties of life we enjoy, are made possible because someone—whether today or hundreds of years ago—worked and sacrificed for it. Each generation builds upon the next.

So let us remember and be grateful for what so many have done for us—including loved ones, mentors, and the countless unknown men and women upon whose shoulders we stand and in whose shadows we live and breathe. As we live in the present and look toward the future, we must never forget those great souls of yesterday who left the world a better place.

1 Deuteronomy 6:12.

2 Poems and Ballads (1899), 57.