I feel the need to confess that I’m a fundamentalist, or at least a traditionalist when it comes to holidays and holy days. Some of you might remember that I stood here on Mother’s Day just a few weeks back, and while freely admitting that I had totally bought into the expectation that all three of my now adult children would have by dusk phoned in and or sent along a gift of some sort,
a jar of dead sea salts from my bath, for example, sent by way of Amazon.com, I did not want us to forget that Mother’s Day was founded as a day of activism to work for better health conditions for the poor, to stand for peace. This morning on Memorial Day weekend, I find myself in a similarly compromised position. No question that I was righteously or self-righteously indignant a few days ago when I stopped off at our local dollar store and noted the run-up for this first long weekend of the summer season.
A display of red, white and blue party decorations, little flags to stick in cupcakes, star-spangled plastic cups next to the bargain barbecue supplies and the giant ketchup bottles. And then there was the Home Depot Circular with its Memorial Day savings event, a limited time offer on a 2×3 flag kit complete with an eagle ornament, specials on stainless steel gas grills and perfect patio sets. At the other end of inappropriate and mistakenly calendared were the notices about generic military events, such as the Stone Mountain Park Task Force Patriot Salute to Troops, billed as Atlanta’s largest Memorial Day event, a three-day spectacular with nightly laser shows, flyovers and guest speakers, including the B-2 bomber pilot who holds the record for the longest aerial combat mission. Well, I took a pass on this and then I took a pass on the option of driving on up to Suwannee for patriotic music and a demonstration by Fort Benning’s Silver Wings Parachute Team.
But I did at least consider looking for sales on air conditioning units and I attended and I thoroughly enjoyed our own town’s annual art festival on the square and I saw many of you there at the same time. So I stand accused fairly of being an active participant in what one reporter has called the bipolar nature of Memorial Day. On one side it’s a fun-seeking celebration of the start of summer and on the other it’s a somber observance marking the deaths of our fallen military.
It took being the minister of the Unitarian Congregation in Dahlonega to the north of us to be reminded each year of at least the founding and foundational intention of Memorial Day because each year of the seven that I served there on the Sunday of this weekend I would drive around the bend into town and begin seeing the little red, white and blue markers alongside the road. Each one of them with the name of someone who had died in a war, some from the First World War, some from the Second World War, some from the Korean War and the Vietnam War and at least one or two from the Persian Gulf. This very small town in the Appalachian foothills is home to our state military college and a ranger training camp has in my view an aggressive tendency to use the American flag as a political bludgeon.
When we held a peace vigil on the corner of our property a few days before the start of the war in Iraq, we were met by the immediate planting of dozens and dozens of red, white and blue counter protests and then began a chain that goes like this, protest flag planting, flag planting protest and on and on throughout the year. But on Memorial Day, each and every Memorial Day, the markers were there and the flags were there simply to remind us of and to honor the dead, the war dead. Little white crosses by the roadside are pretty familiar sights around these parts decorated with mementos and flowers, some real and some plastic. They usually mark the places where, as we have come to euphemistically call them, traffic fatalities have happened. Often teenagers who have been killed in these deadly car crashes, ones they have been the innocent victims of or ones they have directly caused by drinking too much or driving too fast and sometimes both. No matter once they have died because now that they are gone, they are loved still and missed always and needing always to be remembered even after the wooden crosses weather and crumble and the flowers wither and die. I was thinking how this is also so for those who have been killed in wars, declared or otherwise, justified or otherwise. Sometimes the dead have been the perpetrators and sometimes the dead have been the defenders, some of them doers of unspeakable and unforgivable deeds and some relatively few of them have been undeniably evil. But for the most part, both because of and despite of what they did and how they died, they have been mourned and missed, their death somehow marked and for a time anyway remembered because they were connected to a particular human family and a particular human community or nation.
One story goes that the beginnings of what is now an official federal memorial day was the spontaneous acts of women, wives and mothers and grandmothers of men who died in the American Civil War. In the aftermath of battle in places like Gettysburg where thousands upon thousands were maimed and killed, the women came behind from both sides of the battles to mourn and to remember their dead loved ones by placing flowers on their graves. In fact, it is impossible to know exactly when and where this day of memorial, originally called Decoration Day, began. There are in fact over two dozen cities and towns that claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day.
While Waterloo, New York was officially declared the birthplace of Memorial Day by President Johnson in 1966, there are southern towns that insist that they hosted the first observance, organized southern women’s group in particular who say, for one, that they did it first and remind us that they decorated only the graves of the Confederate war dead. And there are, as we know, those sons and daughters of the South who still boycott the national observance and maintain their own Confederate Memorial Day.
It was only after World War I when the ranks of the American dead in this new war swelled that the battle, as it were, over separate Memorial Days cooled down some as boys and men from both North and South, East and West alike went to war in Europe and died and needed to be remembered.
Again in this war, this great First World War, where instead of thousands, millions died, 8.5 million military deaths in all, the central symbol for loss and memory on the battlefield in the presence of death was not the flag of one country or another, but again a flower, a natural and most important, a neutral marker.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
I know that for many this poem has become negatively associated with the romanticizing of war and a hyper patriotism that does not fit with our distaste for even our opposition to war and our dislike for the nationalism that so often leads to war. Or perhaps it is simply because for some it is associated with that kind of rote memorization of readings that spoils our love for poetry forever.
For me, looking at this poem afresh after so many years, I read in it a sensibility in the midst of battle that is subdued, even ironic and certainly universal. Because the poet does not name a particular dead, neither a dead Canadian or American or English or French or German soldier, the soldiers became simply the dead who had lived and been loved. And in their death, whatever the stated cause of the battle or war they died in and for, became something much simpler and smaller. He writes:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though flowers grow
In Flanders field.
Grand causes, burning battle cries, become in death quarrels only. There is something in the understatement and wistfulness of the poem about Flanders field that speaks to me instead of a faith that must be kept with soldiers that has much less to do with going on to victory in their memory than in remembering them as individuals. Fully human, imperfect individuals were caught up in something that is not always, in fact, rarely as simple as heroism. Whatever meaning was to be found in their death on that foreign battlefield, he seems to be telling us, was far more complicated than that. So I try to hold on to the root meaning of Memorial Day, which is neither a day for partying or for patriotism, but a day for counting and putting a face on those who have died in war. For some of us, those who have lost a loved one in this way, this annual assignment is painful but clear. For others of us, myself included, who have not suffered this loss and thus this connection, we must find other ways to make death concrete, to name the dead, to picture the dead, to know the dead as other than just a statistic.
Last week there was an article in the Atlanta newspaper about laws that are being passed in several states outlawing what they view as the commercial use of the fallen without permission from their families. According to the piece, despite serious questions of constitutionality, Oklahoma and Louisiana enacted such laws last year. The bills were prompted, it has been reported, by protests from military families that their deceased loved ones’ names and photos were being used on phone cards and body armor and other products, including a t-shirt created by a man in Flagstaff, using the names of our Iraqi war dead coupled with slogans like, support our remaining troops, bring them home alive. One angry mother said she was appalled that somebody could use somebody else’s name for their own political beliefs and without their permission. The t-shirt’s creator countered that he simply wanted to find as graphic and effective a way possible to prevent more deaths. I am one, I will confess, that’s moved by sheer numbers, thus our widow’s litany as a call to worship. I am also one who has been moved when I visited Gettysburg and Andersonville and the Arlington Cemetery.
All of those white gravestones, the silence, the sense of unfathomable suffering and loss. But I have also felt the need to have an individual picture in my mind of the deadly and long-lingering consequences of war. And in my case, it has always been the widow, fictional or otherwise, in the Vietnam-era song, Hills of Shiloh.
Her name, the name of the woman in the song, is Amanda Blaine and she has lost her love in one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Have you seen her haunted eyes, we are asked to imagine? Have we heard her mournful cries? Have we seen her running down, wandering through the streets of town in her yellowed wedding gown? Heard her singing soft and low because poor Amanda and her crazed grief doesn’t know that for her it ended 40 years ago.With the deaths of between 4,000 and 25,000 men in a cotton field turned battlefield, turned a mass grave in Tennessee.
For indeed, if Memorial Day is about remembering and decorating the graves of our fallen military, it is also about those who are left behind, the parents and the widows and the children and now widowers as well. What do we see when we look at the face of war and those who have died? It’s not just adult males. So far, more than 160,000 female American soldiers have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, today nearly one out of every ten American soldiers is female. The face of war has included not only married men and single men and married women and single women, it has also included children as soldiers. Unlike later wars in American history, young boys by the thousands participated in the Civil War as drummers and messengers, hospital orderlies and often full-fledged combatants. One, Elijah Stockwell, was only 15 years old when he enlisted. “We heard there was a going-to-war meeting in our little log house in Alma, Wisconsin,” he recalled. “I went to the meeting, and when they called for volunteers, I put my name down. Well, my father was there and objected to my going, so they scratched my name out, which humiliated me somewhat,” he wrote. “Never mind, I told my sister, who had given me a severe calling down. I’ll go and show you that I’m not the little boy you think I am. The captain got me in by lying a little. I told my sister I had to go to town. She said, hurry back for dinner, it’ll soon be ready. But I didn’t get back for another two years.”
The young Civil War soldiers, the boys who lied their way in or were taken in knowingly, soon saw the romantic illusions about military glory evaporate under the harsh realities of combat. They suffered hunger and fatigue and discomfort, and they gradually lost their innocence in battle. Every aspect of soldiering, we are told, comes alive in their letters home and in their diaries. The stench of spoiled meat, the deafening sounds of cannons, the sight of maimed bodies, and most particularly, the randomness and anonymity of death, the deaths of young boys and older men alike.
As Peter Singer, a National Security Fellow, has written, “There is no moral excuse for sending children into battle, but the dark reality is that this terrible practice is now a regular feature of modern warfare. Some 300,000 children under the age of 18, boys and girls, are now combatants, fighting in approximately 75% of the world conflicts, from Colombia to Liberia to Kosovo to Sri Lanka and Sudan and Iraq. The British Ministry of Defense has acknowledged that at least 15 17-year-old soldiers have been deployed there, including four females. More than half of those who joined the Army last year in England were under the age of 18.
While Memorial Day was neither intended to be a day to glorify war or a day set aside explicitly to protest war and argue for peace, it is simply too hard for me not to go there when we remember that this holiday is indeed not a diversion but a time of painful memory. So I take the liberty of using this day, this time, to make the turn towards ending conflict as we enter here in this congregation into a summer of peacemaking.
We have elected to be one of the pilot congregations for the Peacemaking Study Action Issued, passed at General Assembly last year. Over the course of the summer, beginning today, our Children’s Religious Education Program will focus on the four paths to peace, and I urge you to listen to the four paths to peace.
Peace for Me, helping us discover the wonder and beauty within ourselves where peace begins.
Peace for Us, exploring daily relationships, stressing cooperation, conflict resolution, and communication.
Peace for Everyone, encouraging justice and the possibilities for peace within groups of diverse people.
And finally, peace for the planet, for exploring planetary care and appreciation.
Our children, as usual, will lead the way for us as they equip themselves to make a positive difference in the world, but there will be many opportunities for adults as well, from our ongoing groups exploring nonviolent communication practices to a series of conversations around the 60 years conflict between Palestine and Israel, to our third Thursday Cinema Series sponsored by the Peace Network, and to our monthly demonstrations asking for an end to our combat presence in Iraq and the safe return of our troops. Not the bloody escalation that our President has just this week predicted and accepted.
Gwen Teet, a member of this congregation, and Mother O’Brien Teet, a high school classmate of my youngest child, has asked me to ask you for your thoughts and prayers that we work for a resolution of our involvement in Iraq so that her son, who is in Baghdad, and whose platoon has suffered serious and deadly casualties these past two weeks, can come home to her alive and unharmed in the fall.
Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Well, they’ve gone to graveyards, everyone. Oh, when will they ever learn?