Writes Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy:
9:52 am on May 30, 2016Memorial Day in May of each year is a federally mandated holiday to remember those who died while fighting in the U.S. armed forces in all the wars of the U.S. It is not the same as Veterans’ Day in November, which is to remember all who were in the U.S. military.
For a Christian to remember those who were killed while trying to kill others is indeed a proper and right thing to do. Being killed while attempting to kill someone is not a great way to die or a very holy spirit to die in if one believes in the Jesus of the Gospels as God Incarnate and in the Way, He teaches in the Gospels to live and to die.
“The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you” (Mt 7:2; MK 4:24; Lk 6:38).
The forgiveness which Jesus manifest during His passion and murder is not the spirit one in living from when spraying enemies with machine gun bullets or napalm. Yet, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” is the standard that anyone who has prayed the Our Father has agreed to be judged by in his or her existence after their last breath. Living and dying in a spirit of anger, hate, revenge and homicide is incarnating the spirits of hell—which is why “war is hell” and going to war is “raising hell on earth.” Rambo and G. I. Joe cannot rationally be seen and interpreted as images or icons of Jesus and His Way to the Kingdom of God, any more than Jesus can be seen and interpreted as an image or icon of Rambo or G.I. Joe and their way to live and die.
Mere remembrance of those who died while killing people is a nationalistic propaganda ploy as transitory as it is impotent. But prayer in Christ and with Christ has the possibility of touching the eternal and rectifying the otherwise unrectifiable. For, prayer is the intentional use, sacrifice, of one’s life and time to try to help another. In one word, prayer for another is Christlike merciful love. And, it is through such love and only through such love that evil and death and their consequence are overcome and the human being and humanity are eternally saved.
So this Memorial Day get real and ignore the nationalistic and militaristic mythical mirages thrown up around the Day to divert awareness from a reality that has eternal tragedy oozing from every pore, that is, dying covered in the blood of others whom one has killed and in the blood-soaked spirit of homicide, enmity, hatred, revenge. Instead, this Memorial Day, pray, pray and pray for the eternal salvation of those who died while trying to kill others, who died living in the spirits of homicidal violence and hatred of enemies.
