[StBernard] The two spiritual truths of Memorial Day

[Westley Annis]

The two spiritual truths of Memorial Day
May 24, 2012
  
I'm always eager to restore meaning and magnificence to holidays that have
been stripped bare of their true and deep significance by a flood of hot
dogs, parades, auto races and yard sales. Memorial Day is one of America's
true hidden spiritual gems.

Memorial Day was once called Decoration Day, and it once honored only the
Union dead of the Civil War. Over time, it became a holiday to honor all
those who serve and have served in the armed forces of the United States.
However, limiting Memorial Day to the celebration of fallen soldiers, though
essential, seems to me to be spiritually and culturally limiting.

I want you to consider what I believe to be the two towering spiritual
truths of Memorial Day: 1) America is bigger than us; 2) God is bigger than
America.

The first Memorial Day truth, that America is bigger than us, must challenge
us to remember that we don't have freedom; we were bequeathed freedom by all
those whose bodies lie under the little flags in the military cemetery near
my home. We owe a debt to America for our freedom. Sadly, this unassailable
fact is not at all obvious to many Americans who believe that America is
just a place to pursue our private lives and careers.

We owe something to America for our freedom because of the sacrifice of our
honored dead, and because America is bigger than any of us. Indeed, America
is as much an idea as a place. There are many honorable ways to pay that
debt without dying on the battlefield, although those who have died for our
freedom are above us all. The debt of freedom and our generational efforts
at repayment create a bond between us. Our acknowledgement that America is
bigger than any of us enables us to be bigger than we are. Lincoln knew this
when he said in the closing words of his first inaugural address (1861):

"We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may
have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of
memory, stretching from every battle field and patriot grave to every living
heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus
of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better
angels of our nature."

The second spiritual truth of Memorial Day is that God is bigger than
America. What troubles some is that patriotism can appear as idolatry.
Stanley Hauerwas, my friend and a professor at Duke Divinity School, has
written eloquently about this spiritual and moral danger. Stanley loves
Isaiah's critique of blind patriotism in Chapter 40 (17, 22-23, 28-31):

"All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less
than nothing, and vanity.

"It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth and the inhabitants
thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain,
and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: It is he that bringeth the
princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.

"Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the
Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?
There is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint;
and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall
faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait
upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as
eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not
faint."

We must always remember the connection between freedom and God. This is not
a connection between freedom and any particular religion. It is a connection
directly between our Creator and our Creator's will that all people should
live in freedom. These words, inscribed on the Liberty Bell, "Proclaim
Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof," are God's
words given in Leviticus 25:10.

Bringing freedom into our public life and culture is the meaning of bringing
God into our public life and culture. Beyond freedom, every religious belief
must remain private and sectarian.

God's will to freedom is God's gift of freedom through America to us all,
and that's the basis for a holiday that goes way beyond and way above hot
dogs. That's a holiday whose song we must all learn to sing in much stronger
harmony:

"I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

"They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

"I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

"His day is marching on."

-- "Battle Hymn of the Republic," by Julia Ward Howe (1861)