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Good morning. The other day, I was writing down the date, and instead of the new year — twenty sixteen — I wrote down the wrong one, but not the one you’re thinking of.
Instead of twenty sixteen, I wrote down nineteen sixteen.

Nineteen sixteen is remembered in Britain and Ireland for different reasons.
For some, they’ll remember the atrocities of the battle of the Somme, one of the worst battles in history, where on the first day alone, almost 60,000 people, many of them Irish, died in fields in France by a river where, by the end, over a million bodies had fallen.

For others, they’ll remember the Easter Uprising of nineteen sixteen in Dublin, that failed plot to bring independence to Ireland that led to it being granted a few years later with the creation of a new Irish Freestate, and a new Irish border that was resented by some and welcomed by others.

The battle of the Somme and the Easter Uprising are stories that include people from both Britain and Ireland. We are so close, these islands, similar and different. And sometimes our telling of history unites us, and sometimes it divides us. Perhaps that’s a purpose of history — to tell the past in new ways so that we see old things with new eyes, not seeking to start new wars, but live well with the effects of old ones.

God of history
and today.
You who have seen our wars
and have bled with the dying.
Help us turn toward the living
and help us live
so that fewer die.
Amen.