Paying Attention
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake. . . .Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” Henry David Thoreau
A couple of months ago, I took the Union of Concerned Scientists online quiz (http://www.coolersmarter.org/) designed to tell me how to reduce my carbon footprint. It was called 20 days, 20 ways, and 20% less carbon. I was surprised and pleased with what this quiz told me. It told me to buy a new more fuel efficient car! Really, it told me to buy a new car! I wanted a new car. My old car was pretty efficient, but it was nearly 10 years old with 180,000 miles on it. It was never a beauty and had become pretty ugly, but it was still reliable. I couldn’t believe that the concerned scientists were telling me to get a new car. It didn’t exactly seem like a “green” message to buy something new. But my wanting mind was aroused. Just at that same time, my daughter, who sells Hondas, sent me an e mail to say that she had a low mileage used Civic hybrid. Just what I wanted! So, I bought this new- to-me car, and it does get somewhat better gas mileage than my old car.
I did not expect the car would change me, but it has. The car has changed my driving behavior by making me pay attention. Between the top of the steering wheel and the bottom of the windshield is a big graphic that tells me how fast I am going and what my immediate – in that very moment- fuel consumption is. Most of my driving is on the Pennsylvania turnpike. In my old car, I was not paying much attention to how fast I was going. I kept up with the traffic which meant I was generally speeding. My speed wasn’t constantly visible to me. Every once in a while, I would look down and see that I was going much too fast. Or I would see a state police car ahead of me, look at my speed and slow down. I had heard that fuel economy was improved by going consistently slower, but that was not visible to me. Now, my car tells me. I cannot avoid seeing how fast I am driving and how much fuel I am using. I am paying attention, and because I am paying attention, I am driving more responsibly, generally close to the speed limit. I have reduced my carbon footprint more than I might have because I am not speeding. I have reduced my risk of having an accident or getting a speeding ticket. I may have become a little obsessive about trying to increase my fuel economy, but right now it seems like an amusing and useful game. I am paying better attention as I drive.
What, you may be asking, does this have to do with religion or with life? Quite a lot, I think. When we can pay attention to the moment, then we can be really alive. We can choose. When we speed through life on automatic, we are not really living our lives. Anything that helps us to pay attention helps us to awaken to life and thus to grow.
Buddha means “the awakened one.” Buddhist scholar, Robert Thurman, said that Buddhism means awakening and therefore he considered himself to be an evangelist for awakening. Awakening, he said, means “understanding what’s going on, being kind to others. The minute you awaken to the cause of suffering, which is your self-preoccupation and your self-misperception, you’ll begin to have a happier time. And the more you awaken to your interconnection with others, the more free of suffering you’ll become.” (www.beliefnet.com/story/141/story_14141.html)
I don’t think of driving as a spiritual practice, but it has become another reminder to pay attention, to be awake and to live in this very moment. Observing myself with this car reminds me that changes in our awareness change the way we live. May you be awake and alive in the moments of your life!
The Other Side of the World
Hello All,
I had been here on my post for a week before I saw that we were right near the river. From inside the barriers, on this flat plain, it’s hard to see much of anything beyond the camp walls. One of the guys asked me what I thought of the view of the river, and I thought he was talking about the canal (the canal is what I previously told you was the river). So now I know where to go to see the river – the top of the stairs. And it’s great to see all the green. On one side of us is a ridge, several miles long, that is mostl gravel. And on the other side is the town.
I managed to get outside the wire on a trip up to one of the other camps. We had late Easter service, movie night (Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage, highly recommended for single and married, very funny), and United Through Reading. RP (my assistant’s designation is “RP”) recorded videos of Marines reading stories to their children – then the DVD gets mailed back to loved ones in the States and kids can watch Dad (or Mom) read them a story.
The trip up to the other camp was interesting – if for nothing else it was my first trip outside. We mostly drove through little villages along the side of a river. Lots of farm fields and in all that, plenty of poppy. It provokes an interesting set of feelings that I recall from seeing both the beauty and destruction in Iraq. The poppy fields are very pretty with white and purple flowers. And they have an evil green bulb that the heroine comes from.
I have an interesting exercise in attentiveness. It’s very dark out here at night and going to the pee-tube requires a careful approach and reasonably good aim (or a big flash light). On my way back to the hut, I get a spectacular view of the sky. It’s a good moment to just pause and appreciate something beautiful. We are moving from the winter constellations to the summer constellations. Scorpio is just climbing up over the horizon late at night. And Orion, the hunter, is sliding slowly toward the ridgeline. Soon his feet will be on the ground and the summer fighting season will begin.
Chow is still great, and I’m still losing weight – getting too hot to eat much. I manage to exercise a few times a week, so I feel good for the physical activity. Most of the showers still work, so we are able to stay clean. I got a newer computer – ou can tell the “y” key doesn’t work very well. But the CD drive works on this one, so that’s good. The computer guys out here are doing amazing work. We were told there were plenty of computers out here, and there are, but the are all so full of dust, that one thing or another doesn’t work on most of them. This is just part of what I mean when I say everything happens slowly. You have to take extra time to figure a way around the little ankle-biter problems. I am very happy to report that my surplus of guitar paraphernalia allowed me to deliver a complete set of guitar strings to a Marine who had a guitar and who knew how to play it, but couldn’t because of broken strings.
Thanks for all your emails, Seanan
Disclaimer: All entries to CLF/Quest Military Ministries page reflect the personal views of the contributor. The views expressed here are in no way to be construed as an individual or individuals speaking in their official capacities for the agencies, departments, or service branches they serve in. This is not an official publication of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Air Force, any government agency, or any other organization.
A Personal Relationship with God
The aspect of my personal faith that seems to bring about the most confusion in friends and colleagues is that I believe I have a deep and
abiding personal relationship with a God that is incapable of knowing that I even exist.
I find that the confusion about this theological point rests not only with those more theologically conservative than I, but also with those more theologically liberal or secular than I. More conservative ministers and theologians are confused by my claim that I can have a personal relationship with a non-personal God. My more liberal and secular colleagues question the same thing, but with the opposite emphasis.
While I have talked about this in other articles (including here), I believe that there is no division in God, that every moment of every day we are intimately involved with God; in a flight of birds, in a breath of wind, in a cab driver who cuts us off, in a moment on the Zen cushions… all one, all God. We are a part of God, and nothing can be more intimate than this. God is a holy spirit that is intimately involved in all things, and we are intimately involved in the part of God we can touch and sense.
However, God does not, in any personal way, know that I exist as an individual. I wonder whether God is even capable of “knowing” in any human sense. More, my faith in God does not require God’s knowing of me. I am “known” simply in my being, along with all of being, and together we are becoming… and becoming… and becoming.
I do not believe that God is “consciously” involved in human life, except that we are a part of God, and we are consciously involved in our own lives. Human Free Will is a part of God. What prevents us from sensing this is our own delusion of division and self… our own conflicted natures. Issues of whether God is omniscient or omnipotent depend upon God having a human understanding of knowing or of power, and I do not believe that to be true. God simply is, and we relate to God because of that.
As one minister/professor colleague of mine has said to me, this theological stance is fairly complex, and inspired by both my understanding of Christian Faith and my experience of Zen Buddhism. It is in part this belief that holds me in Unitarian Universalism, in that it inspires in me my connection to the inherent worth of all beings and the interconnectedness of all existence, two core principles of Unitarian Universalism.
A few years ago, in a communication within the Army Chaplain Corps, I found this statement: “Whereas the Chaplaincy, as spiritual leaders, model faith and belief in the Hand of God to intervene in the course of history and in individual lives;”. Now, I can do some theological circumlocutions and come to a place where I can accept that statement (if not agree with it), those circumlocutions are somewhat intensive. I certainly could not accept it in its obvious, literal intent. For me, God does not intentionally intervene in human history or individual lives… God simply is, and human history and individual lives change and mold in reaction to God’s existence. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, God does not play dice with the Universe, because God is the Universe and all within it.
If a belief in an intervening God who has a personal relationship with individual lives is a prerequisite to be a military chaplain, then perhaps I have some thinking to do about my call to ministry. If, rather, the document that quote was taken from actually is trying to define what the theological center of the Chaplain Corps is, then I accept that I am theologically on the margins but can still find a place. I will, in Unitarian Universalist prophetic tradition, continue to speak my truth, the truth that is written on my heart by my life, by scripture, by the flight of birds and the existence of evil, and let “Einstein’s Dice” fall how they may.
Yours in Faith,
Rev. David
How to be evangelist
First, let me introduce myself, as this is my first post at Quest for Meaning. I am Rev. Dr. Matt Tittle, minister of Central Unitarian Church in Paramus, NJ. I have been blogging since 2006, most prominently at the Houston Chronicle from 2006-2010. I am delighted to begin blogging here, where I will post every other Monday. You can read a more complete bio at the “bloggers” link above.
When I was kid growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, there was an old man who we called the “peanut man” at the downtown market. Everyday, he would push a wooden cart around selling boiled peanuts. I love boiled peanuts! The peanut man would constantly sing a little jingle. You could hear him coming like an ice cream truck. He would sing, “Peanuts. Get your peanuts here. Boiled peanuts. I can’t eat all these peanuts by myself.” We always bought a bag or two of boiled peanuts whether we needed them or not.
The peanut man was an evangelist. You couldn’t go to the Charleston Market without knowing about boiled peanuts, because he was always sharing his good news. Some people tried the peanuts and didn’t like them, and that was ok. Maybe they preferred roasted, or a different kind of nut altogether: macadamias, walnuts, almonds and pecans, or the ever-elusive and always hard-to-crack filbert. I love boiled peanuts, but I never tried them until I bought some from the peanut man because I didn’t know about them. I try to be like the peanut man in my own evangelism, never pushy, but always present.
In the Bible, there is a similar story of evangelism. After the Exodus from Egypt, Moses and the Israelites set out into the Sinai wilderness where they wandered for forty years, eventually crossing the Jordan River near the plains of Moab, east of the Dead Sea, before going on to their conquest of Canaan. During their wanderings, the people, some 600,000 of them, did a lot of complaining. They were hungry and wanted more meat, they longed for the fish and abundant produce they left behind in Egypt, even though they had been slaves there. Sometimes God would just punish them for their complaining, and sometimes Moses would intercede on their behalf.
One night, early in the journey, sometime probably during their third year, the people were complaining and Moses was having a really bad day. After walking around the camps listening to the crying families inside their tents, he spoke to God and said,
Why have I not found favor in your sight that, that you lay the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me “carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a sucking child,” to the land that you promised on the oath of their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give all these people? For they come weeping to me and say, “Give us meat to eat!” I am not able to carry all these people by myself, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once – if I have found favor in your sight – and do not let me see my misery.”
Of course, God knew that Moses couldn’t eat all those peanuts by himself—that he couldn’t minister to 600,000 people on his own, so he told Moses to find seventy others. God put the spirit into them—ordained them if you will—to let them share the burden of the 600,000 with Moses. Hey, that’s less than 8,572 people per prophet, there are many larger congregations.
But, as is often the case, not all of these new preachers followed the rules. Two of the newly ordained prophets, Eldad and Medad, stayed in the camp among the people, and preached there instead of in the tent where prophesying was supposed to take place. When some complained to Moses that there were people preaching in the camp, Moses replied: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them.”
All the Lord’s people as prophets is a message that has continued throughout the ages. In the 16th century, Martin Luther promoted the idea of the priesthood of all believers when he taught that everyone has access to the divine, not just the priests. In the 20th century, Unitarian minister James Luther Adams framed this idea again in terms of prophesy when he promoted the prophethood of all believers. Each one of us is a prophet. Each of you is a prophetic voice in the wilderness with something to say about your faith. Share it. Use your voice. Don’t squander it out of fear or uncertainty.
“Peanuts. Boiled peanuts. Get your peanuts here. I can’t eat all these peanuts by myself.”
Haunting Conversations
I moved away from Minneapolis to live in Boston and DC from 1989-2004, and then moved back. One thing I love about being back where I spent my young adult years is when I run into people I knew from the 1980’s.
Recently, I ran into a woman who looked dimly familiar. When I heard someone else call her Jean, I realized why and I asked, “Are you … Jean X…?’ Yes, she answered.
I said, “I think you took over the end of my lease in my apartment in a fourplex on 16th Street, back in 1982. It was a sweet little tiny apartment.” Yep, she indicated, that was correct.
“How long did you stay?” I asked. She answered, as I expected, “Oh, a couple of years.” Then , to my shock, she went on, “After that I moved upstairs and I’ve been there ever since.” I must have looked surprised, because she said, “I know it’s a small apartment, but I never got into the job, house, car thing. I bike where I need to go, work enough odd jobs to pay the rent, and mostly spend my time outside.” She nodded to the beautifully cared for community garden, where we stood, and I could see that she spent a great deal of time there, indeed!
This conversation has gone through my head a dozen times since we had it. This woman was still living exactly the way that I, and everyone I knew, lived in 1982! Before we got into the kid thing, before we got into the graduate school thing, before we got into the job, house, car thing.
It made me think of that Sufi story about the old fool, Mullah Nasrudin. As is often the case, Nasrudin is talking to someone much more prominent, successful, well-dressed, and self-important.
The rich man looks at Nasrudin’s house, shakes his head, and says, “You know, Nasrudin, if you could just get a job like mine then you wouldn’t have to live in this small shack and live on rice and beans!”
And Nasrudin looks back at him and says, “If you could just enjoy rice and beans and a simple shack, you wouldn’t have to work at a job like yours!”
Running into Jean made me think about these past 30 years. Am I happy about the changes I’ve made? Has the house, job, car thing worked for me?
Jean’s health and joy was apparent. Unlike most people I know, I’ll bet she does not wake up stressed about how to accomplish the day’s list. Is she living more the way humans are supposed to live?
I don’t know, and I won’t have time to think about it very long, for today anyway. I’ve got a house to clean, errands to run, a job to do! But our conversation keeps reinserting itself as I rush about, and I find myself planning rice and beans for supper.
Making Room for Silence
In his poem “Keeping Quiet” Pablo Neruda begins with this:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
As I read it, I am thinking: The well is dry.
Have you had those times in your own life?
Those times when try as you might to find restoration within
there is nothing there
only parched, dry, places, yearning for a drop of something to
make it to the next moment.
It feels crusty doesn’t it?
The incessant rush of activity that pushes from behind
or pulls at us, tugging without ceasing.
“Without ceasing.”
Often, during our morning check-in, my spiritual companion
will set her intention for the day to “pray without ceasing”
borrowing from Annie Dillard.
I have often thought of that prayer as one with words,
whether they are spoken out loud or remain caught in my throat,
swirling in my mind, dancing in my heart…they were always words.
But. Dillard isn’t talking about words.
In fact, she says: “the silence is all there is”
she says “pray to the silence.”
And I think: move right into the silence. Parched and wanting respite from
a life of constant motion.
Recently, I read something that caught my attention:
“Cornelia is ninety-four years old. She is a beloved founding member
of the board of Bread for the Journey.
Every afternoon she rests – if she can, so busy is her daily
schedule of appointments – because when she rests things fall away,
she says, and come clearer.”
Every afternoon, in the midst of her busy daily schedule, she rests.
She pauses
She restores
She, in the silence, makes room for stresses to fall away.
For life to grow clearer.
That…working and resting every day is a recipe for
nourishing the soul…
Is a kind of praying without ceasing.
Using the hands and heart;
welcoming the stillness,
the silence.
Neruda, says it this way as he closes his poem:
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.
Who Would Jesus Fence Off?
Last week a Baptist pastor by the name of Worley got a fair bit of internet attention for declaring that gay people should all be stuck behind an electric fence – lesbians in one area and “queers and homosexuals” in another, where food could be dropped to them from an airplane until they all eventually died off because they couldn’t reproduce. OK, just for a minute we’re going to set aside things like the obvious fact that straight people would just go on having gay babies like always, thereby replenishing the supply of queers outside the fence. Let’s even let go, for the moment, of the congregants who cheered during the service and supported their pastor with a standing ovation a week later. Not much you can do about stupid and mean except call it what it is.
No, what I’m thinking about at the moment is the fence. The idea that we can identify the undesirables and wall them off. For Worley, the world would be a more virtuous, lovely place if you could just stick the “queers and homosexuals” off someplace where he wouldn’t have to look at them. Which doesn’t strike me as all that different from wanting a giant wall along the US/Mexico border. Which, perhaps, is not entirely unlike wanting to live in a gated community, the kind where a neighborhood watch patrolman might shoot a kid who looked as if he didn’t belong there and might be up to no good.
There’s something deeply tempting about the idea that we can make ourselves safe by simply building a wall between ourselves and the thing that scares or disgusts us. It is, I suppose, human nature to believe that we can find security by fencing out the “other.” Which is why the role of religion is supposed to be to remind us of our better selves, to push us toward letting go of the scared hind brain that wants to wall ourselves off from danger, so that we can move instead toward a more evolved self that longs for peace built on a foundation of love.
You can search the Christian Scriptures all day for a suggestion from Jesus that we should wall ourselves off from those who are “different” or “disgusting” and all you’ll find are stories like that of the Good Samaritan, where the hero is a member of a despised ethnic group, or of Jesus eating with a tax collector – someone utterly unwelcome in polite society of the place and time. Pastor Worley may be speaking for the large percentage of Americans who have entrenched themselves in fear and loathing, but he sure as heck isn’t speaking for Jesus.
Give It All Away! Wisdom of the plants
These days, as spring turns to summer, the garden is insistent with one message: Give it away, or lose it all.
Early in the development of a garden, it’s about procurement. Picking out plants, choosing a place for them, seeing how they do. With the kinds of perennials I tend to favor, that is both fun and highly interactive. Many of the flowers in my yard have stories that go along with them about who gave them to me, stories that make them that much more beautiful.
And now, as I go into the fifth or sixth summer of having turned my yard into flowers, herbs and vegetables, it is imperative that I give stuff away. If I don’t, if I try to hold onto all of the abundance for myself, the whole thing will die.
And so I join my local facebook group for perennial exchange and post regularly what I have to offer, “Bee balm. Rudbeckia. Strawberries. Grape thistle. Dig your own!” People come with shovels, apologetic about taking too much, and I want to tell them, there is no such thing as taking too much!
I go to farmers’ markets, see people paying $5 for rhubarb, $25 for a hanging basket full of morning glories, and though I want farmers to make a good living, still I want to whisper, “I’ll pay you to come to my house and take that same thing!” I refuse to allow a friend I am there with to buy morning glory plants, my voice so sternly admonishing, you would think she wanted to eat kittens. I convince a friend into native foods to try to eat Jerusalem artichokes; I happen to have hundreds. I offer plants to neighbors who walk by and stop to admire, to friends planting gardens at their kids’ schools. I plant lupines and ferns and hostas in pots from garage sales and sell them myself at a garage sale, to start others on their gardening journeys.
There is so much wisdom, so much life, in what the garden is teaching me about giving it away.
First, in order to give away what I can’t use myself, I need to be in constant relationship with many people. Weeding and throwing on the compost pile is the simplest way to say goodbye to too many lupines and kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate plants; it is tremendously more fun to give them to people who will love them! When someone I can’t remember ever talking to stops by and says, “We have been eating raspberries all week from the shoots you gave us,” it makes my day. It’s unlikely that a few people will want all I have to offer. I must diversify channels for the abundance to flow!
Second, it’s OK to change my garden, to simplify. The “tall garden” I loved turned out to block my neighbor’s view of the lake, so now I have a short garden I love, with the tall plants elsewhere in my yard, and the yards of others. The vine that promised beautiful flowers turned out to be so vigorous it scared me–dig that out and pass it on to someone who wants to cover an old barn!
And finally, the most beautiful flower becomes a weed if it’s growing someplace you don’t want it. Along with aphids, beetles, early frosts, flooding rains, and sudden frosts, I get to arbitrate life and death in the garden! I am the creator of this plant haven so I also am given the power to be the destroyer—to decide that vinca is, after all, not what I want, even though it is thriving in my yard, or that the fancy lilies simply get on my nerves with their showy blossoms; I prefer more humble snapdragons. For those of us who tend towards codependency and putting others before us, gardening is a great exercise in getting to put our own needs first!
There are hundreds more messages I receive from the plants on a regular basis; I will be sharing these as they arise. One of them is “To everything there is a season,” and today’s season is about sharing and relinquishing the abundance of life in order to treasure what is particularly yours to treasure.
Sex and War: Thoughts on Memorial Day Weekend
For Sunday, May 27th, I titled the worship service at the Church of the Restoration, “Sex and War: Love and Hope.” My title mostly came from a 2008 book by Malcolm Potts and Tom Hayden, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. It’s a very interesting book, but not what I am thinking about this afternoon. When I arrived at the church today, the lovely man who changes the lettering on our sign had put these words, “Sex and War or Love and Hope.”
The sign startled me. It just wasn’t at all how I thought about the relationships between these four things. Now, like many ministers, I am the kind of person who when surprised by something just starts thinking about it. Some of my family members say (kindly, usually) I think too much about strange things! One of my colleagues recently bemoaned the fact that anything can become a story for a sermon or a blog. We observe ourselves and we observe our own thinking. My friend would like to just be in the experience, and there is certainly something to appreciate about being in the moment, in the flow. In fact, much of spiritual practice is designed to help us to be “in this very moment.” Still, there is also much to appreciate about observing ourselves, especially observing ourselves without judgment but with curiosity.
When something startles us, when two unusual things come together in our minds, we can be opened to creativity, new ways of seeing things or new questions. So, when I saw the sign, I thought, “What was he thinking when he put the word “or” on the sign?” Very briefly, I wondered if I should ask him to change it but thought, “No, it’s kind of provocative that way. What will passersby think that it means?”
I thought that the wording seemed to put a negative implication toward sex. Now, this might be true of some ministers and some churches, but is not at all true for this minister. I think sex is a vital, essential part of life and indeed can not only be deeply loving but also deeply spiritual. Well that thought lead me to think about the relationship between war and love and hope. It seems to me that it is complicated.
I have known loving warriors. I live in Carlisle, Pennsylvania which is the home of the Army War College; colonels come to Carlisle for a year of study. The Carlisle Barracks also houses the Peace Operations Training Institute whose mission is to study peace and humanitarian relief any time, any place. Their mission is in part, “We are committed to bringing essential, practical knowledge to military personnel, police and civilians working toward peace worldwide.”
(www. http://www.peaceopstraining.org/e-learning/cotipso/partner_course/725)
I learned by listening to the colonels. Those colonels who study peace and war are not usually leaders who want to go to war. All of those who go to war often go with love in their hearts: love of family, friends and country. Combat veterans tell us that their actions are motivated by love for their comrades, the “band of brothers, and now sisters,” who are right there beside them. We who stay behind love those who go. We all hope and pray for their safety. We all hope and pray for peace.
Now, my prayer is that there be no more war; my hope that we will all learn to live in peace. My basic stance is that of non-violence and pacifism. I never want people to go to war because they have been intentionally deceived or for corporate profits. But may we never forget the worth and dignity of all, the love and courage of those who go to war and of those who stay behind.
All these thoughts came from seeing the word “or” on our sign, and as it happens, he used that word because we don’t have a colon.
May love, hope and wisdom guide and sustain you.
Rev. Kathy Ellis
The Meaning of Memorial Day
I thought I understood the meaning of Memorial Day. I thought the military uniform hanging in my closet taught me the meaning of Memorial
Day. I thought that growing up the child of a soldier, and the grandchild of a sailor taught me the meaning of Memorial Day. But I was wrong.
I sensed the meaning of Memorial Day. A few years ago I preached a sermon about standing at the Vietnam Wall with my father, watching him trace names of friends across the wall. It was the only time I ever saw tears in his eyes. I saw my grandfather visit the Punchbowl WWII memorial in Hawaii, and I saw those same silent tears.
I thought I knew the meaning of Memorial Day… but I did not. Not until my wife came and told me that the television news had just reported the death of my friend, military partner, and former roommate in the Al Anbar province of Iraq on December 6th, 2006. It was not until I realized that I too would one day have a name to trace across a memorial somewhere, the name of Travis Patriquin, that I learned the meaning of Memorial Day.
While I do not believe in a spiritual place called hell, I think General William Tecumseh Sherman was right when he said that “War is Hell”. It is a hell that exists in this time, in this world, not in some metaphysical afterlife. I wish with all my heart we could rid ourselves of it… I wish for the day to come when we no longer send our young men and women off to walk through that hell. I wish for the day when our problems are solved by meeting, not by killing. It is rarely those who should be meeting that instead face the killing. I wish with all my heart for what military forces we have to become a tool of peace, not a weapon of war.
Clinton Lee Scott once said “Always it is easier to pay homage to our prophets than to heed the direction of their vision”. The true meaning of Memorial Day is not homage… it is not to honor those who have served, those who have died for our nation. Oh, that is what the media will tell us, what the President will say when he lays a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery in a few days. I expect him to strike a tone of “honor our dead, and standing resolute.” No, it is not honor that our war dead ask of us. Honor is the easy way out of the vision they call us to.
The true meaning of Memorial Day is to remember. It is to remember that the cost of war is almost always too high. The true meaning of Memorial Day is not to honor our dead, but to remember the price they paid. To remember the price their families pay. To remember the physical and psychic wounds that the survivors of war, on all sides, carry with them till the end of their days. To remember the lives never lived. To remember the horrors unleashed upon civilian populations by the tools of modern warfare. To remember…
I want to cease thinking of Memorial Day as if it were a holiday, for it is not. I want to end the Memorial Day sales and the picnics, the trips to the lake and the hamburgers and hotdogs with stars and stripes napkins. We should never “celebrate” Memorial Day. I want Memorial Day not to be a holiday, but rather a National Day of Mourning.
It began as “Decoration Day”, a day when families and friends would go to cemeteries and place flowers and flags upon the graves of those who had died in the Civil War. From those graves they heard, and they remembered the cost of war. I want to return to that spirit, so that the memory of the true costs of war is fresh in our minds, renewed annually… so that perhaps we can honor our dead by sending no more to join them.
Keep your Memorial Day plans, if you have them, but remember the “reason for the season”. We do not honor the casualties of war with flowers and speeches, but by truly and deeply remembering the cost of war when we contemplate sending our service members of today into harm’s way. We honor them by remembering that war is a hell that should rarely, if ever, be unleashed.
Remember.
Yours in faith,
Rev. David Pyle
www.celestiallands.org
Chaplain, U.S. Army Reserve
