Keeping Faith With the Dead

Keeping Faith with the Dead

Memorial Day was formally established in 1868 to honor the Civil War dead.  “It is,” says the Website Memorialday.com, “about reconciliation.  It is about coming together to honor those who gave their all.”

   

The impulse to properly care for the dead is ancient.  In the 6th–5th century BCE story, Yahweh confronts Cain (Genesis 4:10) demanding, “What have you done?  Listen!  Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

In Sophocles’ ”Antigone” (440 BCE) two brothers kill each other in battle.  Their sister cannot accept that one is declared a hero buried with honors, while the other is decreed a traitor, his body left to be eaten by animals outside the city walls.  She buries her brother at the cost of her own life, declaring, “He is still my brother yes, ...I desert him not.”

John McCrae’s WWI poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915) challenges: “If you break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/in Flanders Fields.”)

Our need to care for the dead includes friend and foe.  NBC News reported, “A Massachusetts police chief begged Wednesday for help in finding a burial place for Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev… “There is a need to do the right thing," Worcester Police Chief Gary Gemme said. "We are not barbarians. We bury the dead.” 

Efforts to unite to honor the dead founder against war’s divisions. The 1868 antagonists were North / South; in 1918, interventionist / isolationist; in 1944, conscientious objectors / volunteer enlistees; In the Viet Nam era and later wars, hawks / doves and it is always between those who serve / those whose interests are served. 

 

How can honoring the dead heal living wounds?  To start, all who give their lives, like Ambassador Chris Stevens, his staff and defenders, must be honored with truth.

A Los Angeles Times editorial reprint from Memorial Day 1968 suggests what is needed is not a day but lives rightly lived.

“We would suggest that the best remembrance, the greatest tribute, we can pay those who have died in their nation's wars…is to live our own lives as citizens of this Republic, and conduct our affairs as a power in the world, according to the higher goals in whose name these sacrifices are made.

That would be tribute indeed, and surely little enough to ask.”

     

God, make our lives a tribute.  Amen.