If the delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776 could have peered into the future, would they have trembled a little over how many lives would, over time, be lost because of the existence of this new country? Somewhere around 25,000 or more died in the ensuing Revolutionary War, a tiny fraction of the 655,000 killed when our country fought itself in the Civil War. AI tells me 1.3 million have died in all American wars – more than half the total population in 1776. That’s just our people. No telling how many from other countries.
So it goes with countries, especially big ones. We need a Memorial Day – or maybe Days. I worry we trivialize our national holidays by picnicking or drinking beer, even if we chat glibly about those who died to protect our freedom. Our freedom to… picnic? The lowest church attendance days of the year are the two Sundays closest to Memorial Day and July 4 – so we are free… not to go to church? These things (you can tell) get me in a grouchy mood.
You have to think of each death not in some swoon of patriotic emotion, but as a real death and loss to real people, one by one, who are grieved and broken forever. In the Iliad, with words that move me deeply, Homer narrates Andromache’s fear and then realization that her husband Hector has been slain in battle: “My heart is in my throat, my knees are like ice.” Andromache ran outdoors “like a madwoman, heart racing.” She pushed through the crowd, and saw her husband as the horses dragged him disdainfully… “Black night swept over her eyes. She reeled backward, gasping, and her veil and glittering headbands flew off. ‘Hector, you and I have come to grief. Now you are gone, leaving me in sorrow, a widow in the halls, with an infant, the son you and I bore but cannot bless.’”
There is an Andromache for every single one among however many battle casualties get counted.
And this… Novelist Wendell Berry imagined Jayber Crow reflecting on the death of his friend Forrest in World War II: “I imagine that soldiers who are killed in war just disappear from the places where they are killed. Their deaths will not be remembered where they happened. They will not be remembered in the halls of government. Where do dead soldiers die who are killed in battle? They die at home – in Port William and thousands of other little darkened places, in thousands upon thousands of houses like Miss Gladdie’s where The News comes, and everything on the tables and shelves is all of a sudden a relic and a reminder forever.”
Let us never, ever glorify death in war. Or in paying tribute to those who died, try to think of them not as a vast host but rather one by one. One death in a war is a huge number, one too many. Historians might declare war’s winners and losers. But in war, we’re all losers.
As Christians, the lens through which we see all suffering and freedom is the brutal killing of our Lord on the field of battle that is our world at odds with God. Who died for our freedom? Who made the “ultimate sacrifice”? Jesus Christ – and for freedom that isn’t me doing as I wish, but freedom for a life of holiness and service to that same Lord.
As Christians, we’re by default a little suspicious when we hear the justifications for this war or that attack. We understand that whatever the turmoil that got us here, God’s heart is broken. The voices of innocent victims are not likely to be heard. We pray and labor for peace – and for all people and nations, not just our own.
We have good cause to be humbly patriotic, perhaps especially coming to this 250th anniversary of our country. As Christians we are at the same time delighted that God made all people with a kind of natural fealty – a loyalty and love for home. Americans can be proud to be Americans, and we surely honor those who lost their lives in war (and those left behind). But we should never be cocky, as if we’re the greatest or only zone of goodness. The Swiss are proud to be Swiss. Haitians are proud to be Haitian. So we are rightly proud, yet we never attach God to only my nation and its priorities. We never cheer the devastation of others; we grieve, with God. We pray for our leaders, not castigating or drooling over them – and we pray for the leaders of other nations. They are all under the purview, care, and love of God.