Petals fall to recollect tsunami victims
Posted: 02 Nov 2006 @ 00:00
THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND petals dropped
from the roof of St Paul
’s Cathedral on Wednesday afternoon during an act of remembrance
for the victims of the tsunami in the Indian
Ocean .
For half a minute their rustling filled
the cathedral and moved many in the congregation to tears. Many had lost family
members in the tidal waves that struck Indonesia
, Thailand, Sri Lanka
, and other countries in the region on 26
December.
The death toll stands at 273,000, but the
numbers missing mean that the exact figure will never be known.
The service was attended by the Queen and
the Duke of Edinburgh. Lord Attenborough, whose daughter and granddaughter were
swept away by the tidal wave, read from Revelation chapter 21: “Then I saw a
new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed
away, and the sea was no more.”
In his sermon, the Archbishop of
Canterbury paid tribute to those among the bereaved who had set up trusts and
projects to help in the reconstruction of the region. And he spoke of the
“endlessly patient people of these poor and struggling communities” who were
attempting to rebuild their lives.
He went on: “The human response to pain
and tragedy is as ‘unreasonable’ as so much of the tragedy itself. It is
generous and creative, self-forgetful, capable of doing what sometimes seem
very small or ineffectual things simply because they are worth doing for the
sake of honouring other human beings. . .
“Despite all the ways in which we train
ourselves out of it by selfishness and busyness, love is essentially the most
natural thing for us.”
Leader comment