Memorial Day
Reflection by Rev. Devon, Interim Rector
Before I served St. Paul’s, I was the Interim Rector at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Like St. Paul’s, it is a wonderful congregation – full of hope and possibility and deep history. The church, located on the Philadelphia Mainline, sits on 40 acres of fields bursting with wildflowers, a lazy river that winds its way around a small forest and empties into a marshland, an extensive and unruly community garden, and near it, six bee hives. The church property is home to the original chapel built in 1715 by Welch immigrants.
Every Sunday for the early service, I would walk to the chapel from the main sanctuary through the church’s hallowed graveyard and I’d read the names on the gravestones as I walked by. There was one gravestone whose engraving had long since been reclaimed by weather and moss. And yet, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, early in the morning as I walked by on my way to chapel, it donned a small bit of decorative bunting – the red, white, and blue. It turns out that that ancient, not-so-forgotten gravestone belonged to a member of a Black Brigade of Union soldiers.
Nearly 40,000 African American men died while serving the Union Army – 30,000 of which from infection and disease. By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (or 10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. After the Emancipation Proclamation passed in 1862, recruitment of black men for the Union Army began in earnest – to little effect. Recruitment was slow until Frederick Douglass encouraged black men to become soldiers to ensure eventual full citizenship.
This Memorial Day I’m thinking about the countless men and women who valiantly served a country that didn’t always love them back.
Where I live in Minneapolis is the homeland of the Annishinabe (Ojibwe) and Dakota nations. My family and I have attended a lot of powwows – public, ceremonial events full of dancing and food and community. At each one there is always several moments when “all veterans present” are invited to the powwow circle for a dance. Everyone present rises to their feet as the veterans process to the sound of a beating drum, honoring the service of veterans who still live as well as those who lost their lives in service. At most powwows, too, veterans lead the Grand Entry procession, and there is even a powwow dedicated entirely to indigenous veterans. I marvel at the spiritual depth of a culture whose people offer themselves for national service and who, at the same time, have suffered unimaginable violence and injustice in federal boarding schools, forced relocation to reservations, disproportionate incarceration, and in broken treaties and promises.
Memorial Day is as complex an observance as the history it represents. It is tempting to settle down into a free day off, enjoying our picnics and maybe a little car racing. But as Christians we’re called to observe a deeper complexity, a more complicated history of both service and betrayal, hope and disappointment. It is an occasion to honor those who sacrificed their lives for the promise of freedom – for themselves and for us all. It is on Memorial Day that we proclaim what might be the most beautiful acclimation in the Book of Common Prayer (p.499):
You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return. For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
