the angle of the sun, the rhythms of day and night and their location in space, while their Dad is racing around the world and the universe on his MacBook Air looking for a resting place when the resting place is right up those stairs.
We humans think we are an exceptional species, superior to the lizard who scampers down from the lounge chair and the West Highland White Terrier and the Shitzu-Bichon Frise. Yet we refuse to recognize our home within the limits of life itself . . . time and place . . . here in the garden, erasing all limits with the MacBook Air until . . . we become . . . like God.
Discontent with embodied existence and valuing little, we scurry away, not seeing, not touching, not hearing, not feeling anything much but one, two, three, four . . . eleven, on our way to nowhere in particular where perhaps the MacBook Air will take us vicariously to a joyful resting place . . . outside the reality of time-bound lizards and dogs . . . a delusional placeless place beyond dust to dust, ashes to ashes . . . and we miss the whole experience . . . on the way to someplace which is no place.
I want to learn to be in one place at one time. I want to live less anxiously. More present, one might say, to embodied life in this one spot where I really am . . . this one place . . . and find within it a joyful resting place in time.
6. Thoreau “Life Without Principle.” Originally presented as a speech titled “What Shall It Profit?” in Providence, Rhode Island on December 6, 1854.
7. Berry, The Art of the Commonplace, vii.
Memorial Day and the Soldier’s Helmet
As wounded men may limp through life,so our war minds may not regain the balance of their thoughts for decades.
—Frank Moore Colby9
Memorial Day once honored the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers. They called it Decoration Day, and they laid wreathes and flowers on the graves of the dead soldiers.
When I learned this in elementary school, it struck me as more than a little strange. My father had served as a Chaplain on Saipan. My father was a good guy. The people he went to war against—the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians—were not. How strange to honor soldiers who fought against each other, heroes all, killing each other, especially when one side was good and the other was evil. It was more than a little confusing.
Decades later, I’m a pastor sitting in my office. It’s Monday morning. A phone call comes from a seventy-something-year-old former Marine. He’s a big man, what tough guys call “a man’s man,” a World War II decorated veteran, six-feet-two, two-hundred-fifty pounds of muscle, part of the invasion of Saipan in the South Pacific when he was seventeen.
“My wife’s out of town. Can you come over tonight for a drink?”
I’ve never been to their home. I’m guessing he wants to talk about his marriage.
That evening, he welcomes me and takes my winter coat. He pours us each a Scotch. We sit down in the living room.
“You know, I’m not one of these peace guys. I stopped going to church for a couple of years, but something made me come back. I started to listen and I kept coming, and all this peace stuff and Jesus stuff started to get to me. It’s been a long time now. That’s why I called you. I need to confess before it’s too late.
“I hate the Japs! I know I’m not supposed to call ’em ‘Japs’, but I hate them! I do. But I can’t hate them anymore.”
He gets up and walks over to the mantel above the huge stone fireplace.
“My wife has no idea what’s in this box. I’ve never told her. I can’t tell her. I don’t want it anymore. I want this out of my house. I’m asking you to take it. I don’t care what you do with it. I can’t live with it anymore.”
He takes the box down from the mantel, places it on the ottoman in front of me, and opens the locked box with a key. He is shaking now and crying.
“This poor bastard! I killed this [expletive] with my bare hands!”
His whole body shakes as, one by one, he removes the contents: a Japanese soldier’s helmet, dog tags, a pistol, two eyeteeth, and a lock of hair from the Japanese soldier he killed in hand-to-hand combat during the American invasion of Saipan.
“All these years of hate. This poor bastard was just doing the same thing I was. He was just doing his duty to his country. How will God ever forgive me? I just want this stuff out of my house. I want it out of my life! How will God ever forgive me? I can’t hate anymore. I can’t.”
We stand in the middle of his living room. I hold him like a baby: a grown man—a “man’s man”—sobbing and shaking with guilt, sorrow, grief, the horror of it, hoping for relief.
I take the contents home. I give the gun to a friend, a former Marine who’s a gun collector. I have no memory of what I did with the box or what remained of the Japanese soldier. Memory is like that. It was too personal. It was too hot.
So . . . today I observe Memorial Day by returning to the original sense of Decoration Day—a day to remember the fallen, all of them—but even more, to recommit to ending the collective madness of war itself. I remember the in-breaking of a sacred stillness: three men in a living room—two Americans and one dead Japanese—and pray for something better for us all.
9. Colby, “War Minds,” in The Colby Essays, 15.
The Man Who Loved Graves
When I was just a young and naive pastor,an old man in the congregation would always arrive long before the rest of the people at the grave site. He’d shun the funeral, but haunt the cemetery . . . Standing by the open grave, he’d state his opinion of the deceased and share with me the type, style and brand of casket he’d told his wife he wanted when he died.As the morticians say, he “predeceased”his spouse, and when we met to plan, she tried to grant his wishes to the very last.She blessed their common gravestone with her tears,but smiled through life for many happy years . . .
—Steve Shoemaker8
My great-great-grandfather Isaac Andrews founded the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home next to the trout stream in Woodstock, Maine, more than two hundred fifty years ago. Isaac was a minister. Because there was no carpenter in town, he not only stood at the graves; he built pine boxes for those he buried. Over the course of time, the simple boxes became the caskets of the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home. You might say Isaac had a monopoly in those Maine woods.
Only recently did the Andrews property leave the family when Pete Andrews, my late mother’s favorite cousin, sold it to some whippersnapper who just wanted to make a buck.
My mother used to chuckle as she recalled playing hide-and-seek with her siblings in and among the caskets at the casket factory. The property, including the land, the mill, the old homestead, the funeral home, and the trout stream that had belonged to the family all those years belongs to someone new . . . which means that it, like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, never really did belong to us and does not belong to them. It does not belong
