Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-26-25

On Memorial Day we think back – or we should, among other impulses – on the words of Abraham Lincoln when he dedicated the military cemetery at Gettysburg:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.

Dying can be horrible enough – or noble enough – but dying in vain is an awful thing. “Life is real; life is earnest,” in the words of the poet Longfellow in A Psalm of Life. “The grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.”

Another president, Theodore Roosevelt, addressed the subject of battlefield death when he learned that his youngest son was killed in aerial combat during World War I: “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had the chance to render some service to his country and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him.”

Can that sound cold? Was a war in faraway France “service to his country,” as many disputed at the time? Did such a death actually advance or delay the cause of either combatant? Was it Lieutenant Roosevelt’s “fate” to die in uniform? Well, in TR’s reference to “stuff that was in him” we find the essence of Memorial Day’s significance.

One of life’s most consequential qualities is standing for something. We should believe in certain things; we must be guided by principles we cherish. Of course matters of family, of faith, of nation, are paramount. We must discern and embrace the noble qualities, but in an abstract sense we are ennobled by ideals we adopt. We are motivated, we share, we are willing to sacrifice.

Beyond the prosaic “life and death” concerns we contemplate on Memorial Day (for it is not Veterans’ Day, honoring those who have served; but those who died during their military service) there is the factor of being motivated by the “stuff there was in” those who died in uniform. That is what we honor. It is my contention that the vast majority of men and women who die in combat are not haters, but lovers. Some soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines hate their enemy counterparts, sure. But I believe that most of them are motivated rather by love: love of their homelands; love of families they desire to protect; love of values they grew up with. There is a big difference, and the gruesome aspects of war do not harden the tender essence within the occasional brutality and the necessity to fight and even kill… or be killed.

In these contemporary times I increasingly wonder about the “stuff” that is in the country of the United States. Once upon a time, those who died in uniform lept to serve. They sometimes lied about their ages in order to enlist. Soldiers at Valley Forge went without pay, and without boots in the snow, in order to establish and protect a country that did not yet exist. Whites from the North, many who never had even seen a Black person, sacrificed and died in order to eliminate slavery. And so forth.

These days, however and despite those who volunteer and sacrifice comforts of home and family and safety and physical harm and their very lives, servicemen still are asked to sacrifice for the “stuff” of the nation, flag, and homes.

Would those men and women of the past, especially, had risen to arms in order to defend a nation that has lost its essential Christian moorings? Would they unhesitatingly defend a flag that now often stands for suppressing free speech, encouraging sexual perversion, allowing rampant drug use? Would they preserve a system where illegal migrants have been invited to distort the society, where sexual abuse, child abuse, and human trafficking are common? Can they be forgiven if they wonder What this flag represents any more???

… because I sometimes wonder about these things myself.

This is a changing country. Yes, all societies and nations evolve. But sometimes they devolve. Eventually they might dissolve. It is one of the prime commissions of men and women in uniform to preserve, protect, and defend their homelands. Whether America, having become an empire and not a republic, is correct to order our military to have footprints in 140 countries, and to require the consequent sacrifices, is almost immaterial on Memorial Day.

Rather we must honor the “stuff” that Theodore Roosevelt talked about; the resistance to “dying in vain” in Lincoln’s phrase. We cannot avoid being awestruck, and therefore must honor, the impulse to serve and to sacrifice that men and women in uniform practice. It is not a human impulse to act this way. Or is it?

Yes, it is – among the finest humans among us, anyway. The heroes we honor on Memorial Day. Take a moment to pray thanks, to remember, to honor, perhaps at a military grave, those who had that “stuff” in them. Maybe at a gravesite of someone you didn’t know.

But they knew you. Probably they never met you. But they knew you just the same. They gave their lives for you.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).

This weekend, Mickey and I visited the Great Lakes National Cemetery in our town of Holly MI. We laid flowers at the grave of a friend of hers who died in service; and we found a random gravestone at which to lay flowers in tribute to the Many.

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