I’ll Live On….
Memorial Day 2006
Revs. David and Leslie Takahashi
Morris
May 28, 2006
A Remembrance in Time of War:
On this Memorial Day, we struggle to be present to the reality that we are a nation at war. We confront war’s consequences in numbers:
Statistics do not put faces to
the numbers. Every single number
represents a real person whose life is lost.
On this Memorial Day, let us consider these members of the
These Iraqi lives were lost in the first part of this month:
Knowing the names and circumstances of their deaths does not tell us who these women, men, and children were. Each and every one of these names and numbers represents a real person whose life mattered and matters as much as each of ours. They had aspirations and hopes; they had dreams and plans; they had desires and commitments and fears. They loved, and they were loved. They were not ready to die.
How do they live on?
Sermon Rev. David Takahashi Morris:
How do we live on?
In Jewish writings on the end of life there is an intriguing way of speaking about “the world to come.” When these writers speak of the place someone who dies will have in “the world to come,” they are not assuming that person will live an after-life as a self-aware being with the same identity. The “world to come” is not a geographical heaven or hell in which we will knowingly reap rewards or revenge for the lives we’ve lived.
In this conception “the world to come” is quite literal: The world as it will be beginning the moment after our death. The world that will come tomorrow if I die today. Where will I be in the world that continues without my physical presence?
In Unitarian Universalist memorial services, we say we are “celebrating the life” of the one who has died. It doesn’t mean that we don’t mourn, but it does mean that we take time to acknowledge and be grateful for their life. We do this primarily by remembering. The first person for whom I led a memorial service told a friend, “The meaning of my life is not in my hands, but in the hands of those who remember me.” I think he was right: Once I am gone, those who remember me and not I will decide who I was, what my life was worth, what I should be remembered for.
As it happened, this person’s service was rich with stories and memories, and I’m quite sure that his family, friends, and colleagues still tell some of those stories to each other, to their children, to new people in their lives. We live on in this way.
But our place in the world to come is about more than how we are remembered. It is also about how we are present in that world, present among those people whose lives were touched by ours.
How are those who have died in war present in the world to come? They are someone’s constant companion, greeted in the morning and bid goodnight every day, engaged in casual conversation over a cup of tea, conjured in the smoke of a cigarette for a joke or a quote or a wry observation about the state of things. They are an empty, aching silence in someone’s heart, where laughter and delight and love used to be. They are someone’s warm, armless embrace in a moment of fear or despair. They stalk the halls of someone’s nightmares. They shine in front of someone like a beacon guiding them to their best self.
What place, what presence do we give them?
We could add a line to our responsive reading: We need one another when we have died, for we are each other’s immortality.
No one passes through life untouched. Every single interaction we have affects us and affects the person we interact with. Through the lives of others our lives are changed; we are what we are in part because they lived and because we knew them, lived with them, feared them, admired them, learned from them, loved them. And their lives are changed by our presence in them.
In this way, too, we bring each other into the world to come. We speak phrases that our parents used to say. We choose a painting or a set of glasses or a piece of furniture that reminds us of a departed friend. We pursue thoughts which we first heard from a teacher who has died; we dedicate ourselves to finishing the work of fallen mentors or partners or heroes. “They are with us still,” Kathleen McTigue writes. “We, the living, carry them with us: we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.”
We are each others’ immortality.
What immortality can we give to those who have died because our : is at war? How can we help them live on?
Sermon Rev. Leslie Takahashi Morris:
Mommy,
do we think soldiers are bad?
No, buddy, you know we
don’t think people are bad.
But Mommy, we don’t
like war.
No, we don’t.
And soldiers are in
wars and they kill people. So?
I’m here to tell you that
any moral ambiguities in the world can be identified and dissected by your
neighboring UU six-year-old. I’ll be
honest: conversations like this one make
me long to look away on one of those rare occasions when I see a soldier and I
am with my son—to look away as if that will keep all the complicated things at
bay. The kind of moral labyrinth I walk
in my conversation with my son reflects that liberal ambivalence to the whole
celebration of Memorial Day. Yet, if our
form of immortality is in how we remember them, how can we not be present and
pay attention?
As a church, we may tend to look away, because we are not of one mind on war. As Unitarian Universalist Association president Bill Sinkford has observed, “As a religious community, Unitarian Universalists do not say that war is never justified: we are not a “peace church.” But most of us view war as an absolute last resort, to be embarked upon only when all other avenues have failed, or when we have been attacked. Most of us do not believe this war met those tests.”
And
we are invited to look away—to look the other way. This war is being managed so that we don’t
have to think about it, or be present to its realities. Its slogans and logos slip it into a neat
corner of our mind where little thought or regard is needed. Its packaged images are carefully controlled
so as not to allow the media to lose the war as some military leaders believed
happened in
We
look away because war brings up complications in our own families. Many families are split on the war. Maybe you are the sole one against the
war. Maybe you are the one person who is
for it among your relatives. War breeds estrangement.
Yet each of us has a part in making sure
the young, dead soldiers will live on, in remembering we need one another. Regardless of our position on the war, each
of us has a way we need to summon to be present to the fact that we are a
nation at war. If we support the war,
then our presence is needed to make sure we are protecting the freedoms and
liberties in whose name it is fought. If
we oppose the war, our voices, and not just our silent disapproval, need to be
present. Either way, we are part of the
eternity for those whose lives have been lost in this war and our remembering
is part of our tradition which calls on us to search for, name, and then act
upon, our own truths. On
this Memorial Day weekend, whatever our personal feelings about this war, we
cannot as people of faith, look away. We
must embrace the complexities and struggle with the questions, we must ask
again and again until our answers give us a better sense of what is required of
each of us.
We need to look at this war, not a few times a year, but on a regular basis, knowing that we have many ways to get other information—by asking, by looking on the Internet, by making the effort to read and get involved.
When the president of our country
authorized an invasion of
In 1950, the United States Congress, requested
the President to issue a proclamation calling on the people of the
Echoing Archibald McLeish, they remind us: “Our deaths are not ours, they are yours, they will mean what you make them.”
May we be present to this great responsibility as people of faith. Amen.