Some Memorial Day Thoughts
A Day Later
I wanted to maintain the single focus of yesterday's post, so I want to add a few thoughts today from the past couple of days.

I was sitting out the other evening enjoying my coffee cooler at Caribou Coffee and was struck by the peace and serenity of the evening. It was nothing short of beautiful. As I sat there I thought of those places in the world that evening where it was anything but peaceful because of the engagements of war. How quickly life can go from peace to hell when war is in the neighborhood.

I then thought about how fortunate- lucky- I am to have been born in the United States where such issues have not bee a major issue. Some of that, of course, is due to the men and women whose lives we remembered yesterday- those who fought and died in wars for the United States. Nothing can change that gratitude. But nothing can ever take away the fact that even in the desire for freedom and justice that these died for, it doesn't take away the pain and the horror of having a day to remember deaths in wars.

Death brings sadness and fear and lost hopes and dreams. We mask it in patriotic words- and these men and women who we remembered yesterday deserve the honor of such words. I have been reading 1776, David McCullough's majestic history of that pivotal year. War is war is war. Even the best of wars and the most just of wars involves death. Even as we remember with gratitude those who have served and died for our freedom, we also must ask their forgiveness that they had to be put into that position for us.

It is the natural and sadly all too common result of our human sinfullness. We are, as the Christian faith reminds us, sinners.

Elisabeth Sifton, daughter of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the book, The Serenity Prayer,

that wars begin in incoherence and chaos and end in incoherence and chaos. Prayers are one of the necessary expressions of our repsonse to these dirty, ugly truths, our hope to redeem them. --p. 291

The blog Street Prophets had the following prayer the other day to help us keep all this in the redemption perspective. We can have the humble contrition that even the best of wars will require confession and a sense of obligation to God for having participated in death.

O One, help us never to forget that war is evil and war is hell.
Help us to honor its dead and to pray for its victims who live on,
through him who for our sakes laid down his life,
that we might never need do it again. Amen.
--Street Prophets