London parish dedicates peace garden on Remembrance Sunday
Parishioners of St Mellitus Church in north London, together with many other local residents, gathered on Remembrance Sunday yesterday, to bless and open their new peace garden. The garden has been created under the memorial to the dead of World Wars One and Two, which is on the outside wall of the church. Beneath the memorial there is now a beautiful mosaic peace dove, made by pupils of Mount Carmel College. Around the flower bed there are stones with colourful peace symbols - doves, rainbows, crosses - painted on them by the children of Christ the King primary school. The parish priest, Fr Ardagh-Walter, blessed the garden and prayed for the victims, military and civilian, of all wars. The best way to honour them, he said, was to work to prevent war in the future. Local Anglicans, Jews, Muslims and Quakers joined the Catholics to take part. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo spoke about the suffering and death caused by that ongoing war. Judith Elkan, a Jewish psychotherapist, described her work in bringing together, in a telephone support network, the bereaved Palestinians and Israelis who had lost family members in the course of the current conflict. After observing the two-minute silence a prayer of dedication to peace was read by all, and a collection was taken for the work of the British Legion.