The philosopher Bertrand Russell said perhaps wars would end when we honored the people who refused to kill one another as well as the people who did. I can’t imagine the bravery and suffering of men and women who die in wars and combat, but it is true that voices for peace are weak and marginalized, you do not ever see them on their news or debating on their cable channels or speaking at podiums on national debates.
Pacifism is very much out of fashion, people compete on television to be more bloodthirsty and unforgiving and angry than the other, and are rewarded and applauded for it. People who seek a different way of resolving conflicts are pushed to the edges of public life, dismissed and ridiculed and ignored.
On my blog, on this Memorial Day, I pray for peace, and hope that these other voices rise up and are heard.
In my local cemetery, Woodlands Cemetery, a friend and I were waking, we found a marker in the heart of an old tree, perhaps it was a child, it was an extraordinary place to find a marker and touching. I can’t think of a safer place to mark a life than in the bosom of a proud old tree.
I call this statue Remembrance, she inspires me on Memorial Day to remember all those who have lost their lives or suffered through the countless wars. cruelty and butchery human beings have always inflicted on one another. I hope my daughter and grandchild live to see a world where Memorial Days are ancient history.
I am definitely not into giving speeches, but my friend Scott came to me and asked if I would say a few words on Monday, at the Pompanuck Farm Memorial Day Festival, a day of remembrance and hope. I believe in Pompanuck, it is worthy of support, so I agreed to give a talk. I wrote this over the last day or so, and I thought I’d share it with you. I’m giving it at 12:30 when the Pompanuck Festival kicks off, there will be food, a small circus, singing and dancing.
This is my talk:
“When Scott and Lisa Carrino asked me to say something about Memorial Day here at Pompanuck, I was uneasy and a bit stumped. What is there to say about Memorial Day that has not been said?
Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States, created to remember the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces.
The holiday, observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army Of The Republic, an organization of Union veterans, established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.
All over our country, including in our small town of Cambridge, people are carrying out this practice, May after May, laying wreaths, marching down Main Streets. More than a century later, the holiday has become something far beyond that. The holiday is enduring, but it’s meaning is sometimes clouded, especially in a world perpetually at war.
The holiday itself seems tattered sometimes. Anyone who goes to these parades and ceremonies can see that the crowds are getting smaller, the veterans older, the children more distracted.
At times, our national attention seems to wander, the awful sacrifice seems ritualistic, rote, lost in the mists of time and history, something we are supposed to do, but do not always know how to do.
War is a backdrop to the lives of so many people, it is easy to become numb to the horror of it. There is always a war, somewhere, and there has been for all of human history. We are the most violent species on the planet. Our children live with the idea of war as a permanent backdrop to their lives.
There is something about being human that is sometimes difficult to face.
Ironically, Memorial Day has also become a time to mark summer, a time of leisure, rest and celebration. It the holiday was meant to be somber, the summer is not for most Americans.
It is about the time schools close for the summer, beaches open, amusement parks start their rides, a time of celebration, barbecues, baseball games, the launch of TV shows and streaming episodes, concerts and travel, camping and hiking, picnics and festivals just like the one we are attending today.
Remembrance is a fickle thing, it has a short attention span, and we have little appetite for too much of it.
Many people are torn between the idea of honoring the dead and the idea of glorifying war. Their voices are rarely heard. How does one honor something we hope never happens again?
Before he died, Abraham Lincoln wrote that the greatest tribute one could ever pay to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the Civil War would be to never have another war. It was his greatest wish, he said, that one day there would be no need for a Memorial Day.
His wish, of course, did not come to be.
There is no better or more fitting place to talk about how to feel about Memorial Day that Pompanuck, a shrine to a different and more humane way of looking at the world and at one another.
When I thought about what I would say, it occurred to me that there are many parades and ceremonies and speeches to honor the people who died serving in the armed forces. But there are very few ceremonies to honor the forgotten dead, the victims of war and violence and persecution.
For most of them, here are no cemeteries, no parades, no plaques in the center of town, no bands marching down Main Street, or wreaths laid on gleaming tombstones.
War is no longer just about the soldiers. For most of its victims, it is not a matter of choice or glory. Even as we gather, millions of people are dying in genodical bloodbath and religious tribal and civic conflicts. Refugees have set off in great migrations to flee wars human civilization does not yet know how to stop or avoid.
I am not here to give antiwar speeches or to tell anyone what to think or believe. You can always turn on cable news for that, and your ideas are as good as mine.
I can only speak for me and my dilemma about Memorial Day: How to honor the brave war dead who died for us and also to mark this painful holiday, to acknowledge the unimaginable catastrophe that is war without drowning in its sorrows and suffering.
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I think there is only one answer for me, and that is hope, always hope.
Emily Dickinson wrote that “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”
To lose hope is to die a kind of death, a death of the spirit. I have not lost hope, and will not ever succumb to hopelessness. Hope is the tune without words. I hope we can honor hope today, as well as loss.
Pope Francis wrote about hope in his beautiful encyclical “Laudato Si.” He wrote that the great moral purpose of all of those who love and care for one another is to seek an alternative to wars and environmental depradation, and to pursue a new spirituality that proposes a new understanding of the quality of life.
That encourages a prophetic and contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption and the awful traditions of waging war and wasting the dwindling resources of the earth.
Francis calls upon us to be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, that opens us to love and generosity and greater horizons of tolerance, understanding and personal fulfillment.
This new spirituality will be marked by an appreciation of the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities that life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, to not succumb to sadness for what we lack.
Such simplicity is liberating, a way of living life to the full. We must dare to speak of the integrity of human life, of the need to promote and unify the great values. We must, he says, stop wreaking violence on humanity and warring against our mother, the earth.
Human beings are creatures of this world enjoying a right to life and happiness, and endowed with unique dignity and the right to live in peace.
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Reading “Laudato Si,” I thought how appropriate to be honoring, and yes, celebrating Memorial Day here at Pompanuck, a day of remembrance.
Pompanuck is a place dedicated to the human spirit and to healing the wounds of Mother Earth. This new spirituality is practiced right here, you can see it and feel it and honor it all day long. After the parades are gone, it seems the right place both for memory and for hope.
Joy is where we find it, where we look for it. For me, it is a sin, to be gloomy, there is enough bad news in the world.
I am happy to leave you with a message of hope, a kind of prayer I have loved for many years. It was written by Alexander Dumas, and I believe it is the perfect plea for Memorial Day:
“Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, “Wait And Hope.”
Nancy is the weekend Queen of Ace Hardware in my town of Cambridge, she is cheerful, wise and she loves to spoil dogs with lots of biscuits. Fate is very fond of her. She mixes some weekend paints and patiently answers my many stupid questions (Bryan, the very helpful store manager, does this during the weekend. When I tried to buy an axe from him last year, he asked if Maria knew what I was getting.) Nancy is quick to laugh and is practically a member of the family. I see her as a hardware therapist, she guides desperate and confused people through the tools of life.
