Channing Memorial Church
Unitarian Universalist
Ellicott City, Maryland
The Reverend Susan LaMar, Minister

May 30, 2004 

"Memory, Patriotism, and Faith" 

            My father was solidly of the World War II generation. As was true of so many of the young men in the early 1940s, he joined the army and went off to war. My understanding of his role was that he guarded German prisoners of war somewhere in England. He came home in 1945, went to graduate school under the GI bill, and he and my mother started a family. He spoke very little of his war experience as I was growing up. We were aware of his military experience. There were olive drab uniforms in trunks in the attic and medals and ribbons in his top bureau drawer. The uniform shirts, his teenage daughters appropriated during the 1960s as another form of uniform adding various peace symbols and environmental medallions. He would quietly put out a flag on Memorial Day, Flag Day, and the Fourth of July, and we would usually attend some kind of Memorial Day Parade or commemorative service. But he didn’t talk about the war. Of course, we didn’t really know what questions to ask, I suppose. The only thing I remember him saying about his job in the war was about the prisoners he guarded.  

            “They were just kids,” he’d say. “They were just kids.” At the time it didn’t register with me that he had been barely more than a kid himself. He was my father. He had always been a grownup.  

            What I do know is that as he got older he became more and more committed to peace. He joined the UUUNO – Unitarian Universalist United Nations Organization. In the 1980s he became active in an organization called “Beyond War.” And in 1991, two years before he died, he was at my house when the United States went to war in Kuwait. Now, he was among what I call “the last of the old-school gentlemen.” He rarely swore. But as he sat on the couch watching the TV, and learned that the U.S. was moving in, he called the first President Bush a rather unflattering epithet referring to the purported canine species of his mother. I had never heard him use that expression before.  

            For me, all the memories of that era mix. The images of what was found in the concentration camps that I saw in old magazines. The vague knowledge that Dad had been in that war. The comfort of growing up in what appeared to my white, upper-middle-class child’s eyes to be a fair and equitable democracy. A vague sense of importance of the symbolism represented by the flag that Dad put out on holidays – but nothing very specific. Talk of people who had died in that war and in previous wars – but no personal connections. My mother’s brother had died during the war when the plane he was piloting crashed, but it was not in battle and his death and life were not ever mentioned on Memorial Day, at least not that I remember. 

            Somehow there was a “gentle patriotism” that emerged for me out of this exposure to Memorial Day by the particular adults in my life. I saw a more aggressive, militant patriotism in the surrounding culture, but my family did not participate in it. There was a deep sadness, a deep compassion, I think, that came out of my family’s Memorial Day remembrances, but not a pious devotion to country or nation. Yet though it was a gentle patriotism, it was also a steadfast patriotism. It was clearly a loyalty to something beyond just nation as geographic entity or political jurisdiction.  

            The imagery of the patriotic civil services that are held honoring those who lost their lives in battle is full of religious language. Much of this language draws on imagery of death and rebirth. Something or someone or someones must die in order for something new to emerge. Earth centered spirituality captures this in imagery of cycles of nature. Hindu spirituality captures it in imagery of reincarnation. Ancient Hebrew and some forms of Christian spirituality capture it in images of sacrifice – offerings are made to a deity in exchange for new opportunities. In one form of Christian spirituality this is taken to the extreme with Jesus’ death on the cross representing a final and ultimate sacrifice on behalf of all of humanity. Over and over we hear echoes in our civil memorial services of sacrificial imagery – People sacrificing their lives (making them sacred by giving them up) in order that this nation might live, to borrow from the Gettysburg address.  

I have reflected a lot on the theological significance of Memorial Day, because sacrifice is not at the center of my theology. The center of my theology is righteousness. Righteousness is one of those wonderfully rich and complex words that has fallen out of favor because we almost always only hear it with its negative modifier "self” – self-righteousness. Righteousness has to do with being in right relation with your neighbors – all of humanity – within an understanding that something far beyond the self – a being, or an ethic, or a sense of justice, or a sense of values, or a spirit that is generated within the relationships themselves – is also at work. Self-righteousness implies that we as an individual have a lock on all the answers. Self-righteousness closes down relationships. Righteousness opens up relationships. Righteousness implies that relations are free and welcoming to the give and take of ever-fluctuating existence. Righteousness, for me, contains God. It opens a place for God to dwell. 

How, then, does a theology of righteousness translate into Memorial Day? We are definitely honoring those who died. It is not a holiday, a Holy Day, that is generic. We are honoring very particular lives, names and faces – people we recognize as fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, teachers, and friends. Notice that relational language. It is important. Arjuna doesn’t just see “men.” He sees relationships. What does it mean to honor the righteousness of those who died, rather than the sacrifice of those who died? Because honor them we will. But we are honoring their lives not made sacred by their deaths, but born sacred from the very beginning. We are honoring them with compassion for their suffering and their too-short lives.  

But that still hasn’t quite answered the question of what, exactly, we are honoring on Memorial Day. What is important about these sacred, righteous lives lost? The righteousness that stands within the personhood of each individual, I believe, is conscience. Each person who died made, I hope, a conscientious decision  --  a choice from deep within their conscience – about how to exhibit their patriotism. They were, I hope, conscientious supporters of the wars in which they fought.  

That word conscientious has been on my mind lately because so often in Unitarian Universalism we assume that our members’ and friends’ consciences take them in only one direction. I was at a conference last Saturday, and the speaker, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told a story that I have heard so often in our churches. He was my age, so the war involved was Vietnam. And he told how supported he felt by his Unitarian Universalist community when he applied for and received conscientious objector status during that war. It seems, sometimes, as though many of our ministers of that generation have that same story. But I know that there are many in our congregations whose consciences have taken them, and will take them, in other directions. Objection to war is not the only possible outcome to a wrestling match with conscience. 

As I look back on it, I think that the steadfast patriotism that I was sensing in my family’s Memorial Days had to do with being loyal and devoted to a nation that was loyal and devoted to conscience. My father had gone to war, as had so many of his generation. But he and my mother had many dear and deep friends who were conscientious objectors (yes, there were such people even in World War II).  They were able, it seems, to remain in righteous community, friendship, respect and even love with a wide range of individuals making a wide range of conscientious choices. 

That is a faith stance. My particular parents probably would not have described it that way, humanists that they were. (Although my father might have.) But it is a faith. It is a loyalty in, trust in, and belief in the righteousness of the individual conscience, engaged with the righteousness of other consciences and infused with the spirit of God. It is a recognition that these choices of conscience bring us to our  knees, as the drumbeats overwhelm us and our relatives and friends and teachers line up on either side.

Memory faces backward. It teaches us about those who went before, filling us with compassion and sadness. Those memories and lessons feed our patriotism and our faith.  

Patriotism – love and devotion to our nation, dwells in the present. It brings us face to face with actual decisions that must be made in real time and real space, with real data. We must decide what it is about our nation that we love and are devoted to. And we must decide what to do.  

Faith faces forward, even as conscience writhes in anguish. It is only in looking forward that we can imagine turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. It is in looking forward together that the spirit of righteousness is unleashed. 

What about you? How do memory, patriotism and faith intersect for you? Where will you be, bodily and spiritually, on this Memorial Day, tomorrow? What memories feed your faith as you sit under your own vine and fig tree. How will you walk forward, holding hands and being in right relation with those who differ? 

Whatever your answers: May you walk in courage. May you walk in hope. And may you walk in peace.