Memorial Day

Memorial Day is an interesting day in the life of most Americans. On one hand, it is the inauguration of summer, a green light for family gatherings and BBQs. It sort of announces to many of us that we need to slow down, relax, and have a lazy weekend.

On the other hand, it is the time to remember those who have made the “supreme sacrifice” and given their lives for their country. In cemeteries, American Legion halls, and other places people gather around the flag to remember and to pray for the families who are not the same because of war. War has robbed them of their brightest and their best, with only their memories remaining.

One of the best-known poems that still touches my heart is Flanders Fields, written in 1915 by a Canadian surgeon, John McCrae. This weary doctor, having just buried someone close to the place where he was conducting surgery to save another victim of the carnage of war, wrote this:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Dr. McCrae, in twenty minutes, penned lines that gave voice to the emptiness he felt as he sat across the road from a cemetery where the poppies had blossomed in the ditches adjacent to the graves.

Today, in battlefields far away, in places with strange names foreign to our ears, the poem is relived. We pray that our Lord would beat our swords into plowshares and we hope for a day when the vision of a lamb lying down with the lion would come true.