052508

Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
May 25, 2008

The Next Monument

A successful war memorial does something definitive to the public consciousness. Consider four of the best known, most iconic images in the collective vocabulary of the United States; the marble tomb of the unknown soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, the near by Marine memorial depicting the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, Maya Lin’s defiant, tender black granite wall etched with the names of those who died or never returned from Viet Nam, and the floating shrine over the USS Arizona, commemorating the victims of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Though very different from one another, each of these structures evokes a set of common responses – that is the task they share, and that is what makes them successful as public monuments. It is also the task of monuments in time, as well as those in space, such as anniversaries, like September 11, or Veterans’ Day, or this Memorial Day weekend.

Perhaps you find, as I do, something paradoxical and unsettling about the act of memorializing the dead of past wars, when we know that even today, as we are sitting here, American soldiers are fighting and dying once again in a land half way around the globe, in the service of our nation. That awareness makes me wonder two things: What can we say, today, in honor of those who died forty or sixty or a hundred years ago; those who died hoping to make the world safe for us who would follow? What tribute can we pay them, in the depths of our hearts, if not the only promise that matters, "Never again"? We are doing it again; have we learned nothing from their tragedies, who lie in the white, orderly rows, or full fathom five in the Hawaiian harbor which is their watery grave yard? How have we the audacity to summon their memories, when still the bullets fly, and tomorrow another mother receives the unyielding burden of a folded flag? What authentic words are possible, on such a Memorial Day? And I wonder, also, what will it look like, that next monument; the one we will build someday, when this, too, has passed? When we come to the realization, once again, that our only options are to forget, or to remember, what shape will we give to that remembering? What stone or bronze will we hew into yet another form of terrible warning, crying, crying across the generations not to do this irredeemable thing, and testifying once again that they were the best of us; the brave and bright and generous, and that we loved them with an utter love, immeasurable and helpless? On such days as this, I wonder these things.

If it works, that monument that is yet to be built, it will share certain characteristics, and perhaps a consideration of what those qualities are, might give us some clues for how to move authentically in this shrine of time that is designated Memorial Day. In the first place, it will have a feeling of grandeur; something about it will stop you in your tracks, make you pay attention, announce that something uncommon is going on here. Like the sheer, polished mass of the unknown soldier’s crypt, or the frozen energy of the GI s in the Iwo Jima statue, a good monument is arresting, commands first the eye and then the mind, in order to lay its message before us. In the second place, it will be solemn; by its own dignity and silent expectation, lifting our minds above the sordid elements of life, making us recognize trivia and vanity as the idle things they are. It will summon us to seriousness, hushing the babble of both inner and outer worlds, reminding us that there are higher matters, of which we often take too little notice. The Wall does this, there in the midst of ice cream vendors and strutting pigeons and tourist tee shirt carts on the capitol mall; it embraces even the casual glance in a way that reminds passers by that each of us has an accounting to make, that will not be measured in dollars and cents.

Of course a war memorial must of necessity also be tragic; it must be a place of mourning, bespeaking the overwhelming loss of so many, many deaths. If it works, it creates an inner movement back and forth between the incomprehensible numbers of men and women, mostly young, whose lives were cut off in slaughter, and the poignancy of all that each individual one of those casualties represented – the fathers and mothers suddenly old, the wedding dress never to be worn, the children growing up without a father, the education or promising career never to serve the world, the songs and laughter silenced forever. The magnitude of our collective bereavement weaves together with the precious uniqueness of each sacrificed life to summon new tears, for this grieving can never be completed, and that is why we raise these monuments. At the same time, though, the best monuments have also a serene beauty that sooths the troubled spirit, and reminds the visitor that these dead are now at peace and beyond all harm; that courage and honor abide, and that our task is to make our lives, and our nation, and the world, worthy of their memory. Such resolution can come through the solid, elegant symmetry of a white marble tomb or a black wall tapering into the earth, or from the balanced effort and comradeship captured in a bronze statue, or from the lift and curve of a harbor shrine reflecting the ceaseless rhythm of the ocean waves. Beauty is the mirror of eternity, which alone is large enough to contain and heal such sorrow.

Finally, to commemorate war authentically, a successful public monument must speak the truth, and reflect the ambiguity which is historically real about every military adventure. There is always folly, and greed, and pride in the making of a war; there is always blundering among the commanders, and treachery among the politicians and the diplomats; there is always secret despair and quiet inhumanity among those on the front lines, along with acts of bravery and generosity and selflessness. No war is ever as pure in its moment as the story that the victors will tell when it is over. Therefore the monuments of war, if they would conjure with the reality of all who stand before them, have to leave room for the recognition of difficult questions; of atrocities and profiteers, of deaths from friendly fire and collateral civilian casualties, of how it came to this when caution or justice or humility or patience might have found another way.

Perhaps it is this ambiguity that makes it so strange to observe Memorial Day in the midst of this war, for we cannot help but be aware of the terrible dissent in the public mind, and not least in many of our own minds, about the necessity and the conduct of our nation’s current military intervention in Iraq. Yet even if we believe, as I do, that the whole thing was and remains a bad idea, which should be brought to an end as soon as possible, that conviction does not take away one iota from my admiration and gratitude for those men and women struggling to carry out an all but impossible assignment, in a situation of grave and tragic peril. Nor does it lessen my grief at each of the over 4000 deaths that this enterprise has now cost us; indeed, the perception that these casualties were needless from the start only serves to make them that much more achingly sad, and their sacrifice that much more poignant to remember on this day.

For the truth is, it seems to me, that all wars begin in the calculation of strategic advantage, planned by old men who see something to be gained, to be fought by young men and women who trust their national leaders. And yet, when we remember those who have given their lives, whether it was a hundred years ago, or yesterday, we cannot help believing that such devotion is about something more than geo-political maneuvering, and the ambitions of kings. Not just that we want it to be better than that, worth more than that, but somehow it really is, no matter how corrupt the cause, or how fruitless the tactics. What is it, after all, that makes people willing, in the crucial moment, to risk their lives in battle? There is no simple, universal answer, but if you listen to the stories that ordinary soldiers tell, what matters most, most of the time, is their loyalty to one another; the recognition that they are in this together, and the commitment to get through it as a team. Nowhere is the human capacity for community more powerful than among those who must fight and die side by side; the most immediate motivation to do a brave and dangerous thing is for the preservation of one’s comrades, even at the expense of one’s own life. And this capacity for mutual devotion is one of the noblest qualities of the human spirit; a source of inspiration and to be celebrated, even when it is exploited in the service of cynical ends.

We are made such that people do not willingly give their lives lightly, or for trivial things. Human beings look upon death, and die, for the sake of values that they cherish; loyalty, comradeship, duty, honor. And it is this belief that makes me remember the Declaration of Independence today. For while there were no doubt sordid considerations of economic advantage and personal power struggles at work in the deliberations of that Continental Congress, as there are always and everywhere in the affairs of nations, there was also a set of ideals to which those who announced them were willing to pledge their lives as much as their fortunes, and their sacred honor. It was, in part, an act of solidarity, for by it all the signers branded themselves traitors to the British throne, and as Ben Franklin was moved to observe, if they did not hang together, they would surely hang separately. It was essential for them to have one another’s backs, and that motivation of personal trust cannot have been irrelevant. Nevertheless beyond both advantage and comradeship lies a principle of liberty that is the stuff of sacrificial idealism, as true and urgent today as it was two centuries ago. This document is itself a kind of public monument, bearing testimony over the years of our nation’s history to the values that were essential to its founding, forever challenging its later generations in their diminished aims and lesser motivations. At the same time, we know very well that those who signed the declaration did not themselves entirely understand or live out its full implications; only the succeeding generations have recognized and begun to fulfill its implications for women, for the indigenous peoples of the continent, for people of color and of minority sexual orientations. In fact, the true realization of our liberty is an ongoing work in progress, and we will not see the end of it our lifetimes, any more than they did in theirs. So these words continue to summon us to a faith that is utterly of this world -- in the inalienable dignity of human nature, the long arc of time bending toward greater justice, and the will to freedom that can never be finally crushed out of the hearts of people.

It is a solemn thing, to know that someone else died so that you might live, and no one understands this better than the soldier who comes home when his or her comrades did not. But it is not only in the rocket’s red glare of the battlefield that such debts are undertaken; the final lesson of Memorial Day is that every one of our lives is a gift from those who names are graven on the walls of monuments, or who lie unnamed, in tombs of honor or in the forgotten fields of distant lands. It is a debt that cannot be paid, and yet these memorial days arrive every year, reminding us that even so there is something owed. Three things, in fact, I think that we must bring to history’s account, if we are to be people of good faith, building a nation of integrity in an honest world. The first item that we owe is the tribute of memory, the monument that chooses not to forget their suffering and sacrifice, whose lives were given in the service of others and the future. Whether that gift shall have been for peace and a new hope, or for nothing, is not theirs to say, and their tragedy is no less even if it is betrayed by the faithlessness of others. The second thing we owe them is all that is humanly possible to stop the scourge of war from blighting the promise of another generation. The work of peace is tedious, gritty, discouraging, painful, unromantic, unprofitable, thankless. Perhaps nothing could make us persist in that effort, difficult and disheartening as it is, except their silent presence, for whom there is no other service we can still render. Beyond this, we owe them what they died for; that our lives might be free and full, happy and long, useful by day and safe in the nighttime. We owe them a country that fulfills its promise of freedom, justice, and opportunity, that gives its strength to serve the needs of the humble, as they gave their youth and strength to serve a greater good.

All I have is a voice

To undo the folded lie --

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street,

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police;

We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

The final message of every successful monument is the same -- it is that we, the living, have a duty; our lives are not our own. Beleaguered as we so often are by negation and despair, still we are called upon to notice the points of light that signal the work of justice. We are reminded that even in a low, dishonest decade, even in a time of war itself, we have a voice to undo the lies, to challenge both the authority of the imperial state, and the conventions of cynicism. Perhaps by this day next year, or the year after that, -- or let it be some not too distant year! -- we shall celebrate this anniversary of remembrance without the troubling fusion of wars both past and present. The next monument that we build, a handful of years thereafter, will assert the eternal claim over us and our progeny, and there too we and they will leave the tokens of our remembering; the flags and the flowers, the wreaths of honor, the tears, the songs. May we be summoned in that presence, as we are by this day, and all forms of sacred memory, to lives of wholeness and works of peace. May we, composed as we are of Eros and of dust, show in the name and memory of our honored dead, an affirming flame.

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SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god:

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew

All that a speech can say

About Democracy, And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave;

Analysed all in his book,

The enlightenment driven away,

The habit-forming pain,

Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air

Where blind skyscrapers use

Their full height to proclaim

The strength of Collective Man,

Each language pours its vain

Competitive excuse:

But who can live for long

In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare,

Imperialism's face And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out, The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.