Memorial Day 2013

During the past twelve years, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, American soldiers have fought a different kind of war than they did in previous wars – but our debt to them is as great for what they did, so that you and I might spend our time as do right now. It bears repeating:

For love of country they accepted death...  ~James A. Garfield

They are still sacrificing, even as we pause to remember the cost to millions of American soldiers. (Wounded Warrior)

Renewed awareness of our soldiers’ courage and suffering – and my debt – emerged from an unlikely source – a book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey - the Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle. In the middle of a guided tour of the gilded excesses of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the author and current “caretaker” of the castle also describes the carnage of World War I as she reports how Lady Almina established hospitals for the wounded warriors of her times. She served hundreds (of the millions) of the soldiers who were injured, many of whom returned to combat and die on the battlefields. This legacy is far grander than any castle’s preservation – or the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and its subsequent tensions and rivalries.  

 Less than three decades later, the world was at war, again – the fruit of international politics and a peace treaty.  (The Treaty of Versailles) How both the World Wars changed us might well explain why  we are still embroiled in war. One general who fought in both wars, describes a legacy Americans – and the world – resist, considering: 

We have too many men of science; too few men of God.

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death.

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. – General of the Army,  Omar Bradley   (1893-1981) Armistice Day speech to the Boston Chamber of Commerce,1948.

May God deliver those in harm’s way today – and may God build in us a holy reverence for those whose courage cost them their lives, and their loved ones. And please God give us a holy fear of war and deliver us from its evil – and especially that of own making! But may we not shrink from defending our country.

War is evil, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. George Orwell.

Religion and foxholes





 

Insight

Insight is the ability to see with our hearts beneath a matter and understand what is not clearly apparent. It is both a talent and a gift – some gain it quickly; others learn it slowly, and a few of us never seem to have it. It paves the way for wisdom – and that is both knowing and doing what is right. 


The problem for me now, is having finally developed a bit of insight, the world in which I live is redefining “right.” 

I am coming to recognize that Jeremiah knew a thing or two about our hearts, as unpleasant as his description was – my heart is deceitful and wicked. (Jeremiah 17:9-10) Even when I do the right thing, it’s often for the wrong reasons. But, what is right if everybody can decide for himself or herself what right is?

And what now is wrong? 



The honorable Congressman from Texas, Louis Gohmert, recently became the poster child for how hard it is to describe right and wrong, mixing up gun control, same sex marriages and bestiality. It’s as if too many sound bites from talk radio, the pulpit, and House floor speeches were whirling around his brain and splashed out of an open mouth, ruining any hope of a civil discussion of how to control guns and protect people’s rights, while limiting dangerous behavior. 

And what do I mean by dangerous?


Especially now in light of a new ruling that young women of any age can buy a morning after pill without their parents or doctors knowing. What could possible be dangerous or wrong with that? 



• I think we risk becoming the best-informed society that has ever died of ignorance. ~ Ruben Blades 



Isaiah surely could see into the increasing confusion Americans face -- and his insight is keen:

What sorrow for those who say

that evil is good and good is evil,

that dark is light and light is dark,

that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. (Isaiah 5:20)




My ongoing prayer:

• 


God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it's me.
  ~Author unknown, variation of an excerpt from "The Serenity Prayer" by Reinhold Neibuhr

Memorial Day 2012

 

For love of country they accepted death ...  ~James A. Garfield

I first knew this day as a marker – the beginning of summer. I did not understand the debt our nation owed to its soldiers for many decades. Until the cost of war became personal, I never knew how inadequate my power was to repay those who fought for me and mine. 

While I grew up steeped in an awareness of the Civil War –  its cost was never personal until Ken Burns chronicled the cost through photographs and letters in his series, “The Civil War.” Battles like Antietam – the starting point of our Memorial Day celebrations, racked up unimaginable costs to the soldiers and citizens.  

The first time war became personal was Vietnam – the television news and journalists, most who opposed the war, shaped my opinions.  I never counted the cost to the soldiers.  That changed when I saw pictures of Vietnam vets so callously treated by the citizens they served.  One Memorial Day I watched the movie  “The Hanoi Hilton.”  I saw how much so few endured because they served.

A documentary in the early 1970’s The World at War, connected many facts I knew about WWII while showing how so many soldiers did so much – suffered so much, and how civilians suffered. So, too, moving to Annapolis refined my appreciation of a deepening debt to men and women who served – the USNA is a study in contrasts: the nobility of those who serve, and the horrors of the battles into which they go.   

Now, I understand this national holiday as a different kind of marker – this is what freedom costs. War is hell. (William Tecumseh Sherman) And real people really suffer.

When we had a son and a daughter, I saw them in every soldier, sailor, or airman I encountered. Having grandchildren, the meaning of  “blood and treasure” deepens my gratitude to those who step up and serve, and my sorrow that we haven’t yet stopped fighting and killing.

Yesterday the text for the sermon was from Ecclesiastes – my camping ground this summer. It was a reminder to pray for the leaders whose policies and politics lead to, or away from, wars that grind up the lives of soldiers who are precious to so many.  

Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!
Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness! (Ecclesiastes 10:16-17)

 And a goad to put my money where my mouth is – and give!

More on the TEXAS Tornadoes

 

The blessing of the written word – and live cameras! Were it not for the chronicles of the storm captured by print and photojournalism I could not have pictured the extent and force of the damage – or the miracle that no one lost their lives!  And even this extraordinary weather event recedes in the rearview mirror of life as we raced through another day.  

Today, Mr. Steve Blow in the Dallas Morning News wants to give credit where credit is [really] due:  to man’s wisdom. People playing it safe – in Dallas, Plano, Lancaster and Forney Texas -- are the reason no one was injured in the thirteen tornadoes that touched down Tuesday. 

I am glad so many acted so wisely. In contrast, the  off-duty Dallas police officer who helped shelter many didn’t feel it was just what he had learned that made him useful:

"With any situation, as a police officer, we always think, 'What could I have done different?'" he said. "This was Mother Nature. I had no control over what was going to happen." (article)  

An interactive map shows the numbers of tornadoes and where they touched down approximately. One cell was an f-3 tornado with wind speeds exceeding 150 mph, two others were f-2, with winds over 100 mph.   (We live between University Park and Dallas – around the center of the map.)  

So, we can congratulate ourselves – hundreds of thousands of people remembered to take appropriate shelter.  That in itself is a miracle – in every sense of the definition of the word! 

1. 

act of God: an event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature and is regarded as an act of God

2. 

amazing event: an event or action that is amazing, extraordinary, or unexpected -- "It'll be a miracle if we get there on time."

3. 

marvelous example: something admired as a marvelous creation or example of a particular type of science or skill -- "a miracle of modern engineering"

[ 12th century. Via French < Latin miraculum "object of wonder" < mirari "wonder at" < mirus "wonderful" ]

What do you think?

Heroism – “Doe The Next Thynge.”

Atticus Finch in  To Kill a Mockingbird  defined heroism:

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”   (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11)

Two real women come to mind who modeled this description – Miep Gies and Elisabeth Elliot.   

By 1942, Miep Gies was licked – the Nazis had occupied her country, Holland, since 1940. A gun would not have helped her defy so mighty a force. But, she did what she could to save a few lives, humans who were marked for destruction because they were Jewish. She was a secretary of Otto Frank and she took a risk, hiding him and his family and a few others, and continuing to do what she did on a daily basis.  She said:

"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."

Indeed she was an office secretary, one who defied the Nazi occupiers, and hid the family for two years, simply doing the next thing.  Here’s the full story.

 

In 1955, Elisabeth Elliot, too, was licked when she received word her husband, Jim and four other men were speared to death in the jungles of Ecuador. (Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, Pete Fleming, and their pilot, Nate Saint also perished) She had no gun; widowed, the mother of a toddler, she lived among the very people who slaughter her husband and fellow workers. Like Miep Gies, she got on with her work and mothering.

In her own words: (Emphasis added)

When I went back to my jungle station after the death of my first husband, Jim Elliot, I was faced with many confusions and uncertainties. I had a good many new roles, besides that of being a single parent and a widow. I was alone on a jungle station that Jim and I had manned together. I had to learn to do all kinds of things, which I was not trained or prepared in any way to do. It was a great help to me simply to do the next thing.

Have you had the experience of feeling as if you've got far too many burdens to bear, far too many people to take care of, far too many things on your list to do? You just can't possibly do it, and you get in a panic and you just want to sit down and collapse in a pile and feel sorry for yourself.

Well, I've felt that way a good many times in my life, and I go back over and over again to an old Saxon legend, which I'm told is carved in an old English parson somewhere by the sea. I don't know where this is. But this is a poem which was written about that legend. The legend is "Do the next thing." And it's spelled in what I suppose is Saxon spelling. "D-O-E" for "do," "the," and then next, "N-E-X-T." "Thing"-"T-H-Y-N-G-E."

The poem says, "Do it immediately, do it with prayer, do it reliantly, casting all care. Do it with reverence, tracing His hand who placed it before thee with earnest command. Stayed on omnipotence, safe 'neath His wing, leave all resultings, do the next thing." That is a wonderfully saving truth.  Just do the next thing!