Memorial Day is a cherished national holiday. For many people, it marks the beginning of summer, time for families to gather together, for backyard barbecues, or for enjoying the natural beauty around us.
Most of all, Memorial Day is an opportunity to pause, to remember, and to pray. We do so in tribute to those who have given their lives in defense of our country.
Just as we constantly need to make efforts to keep “Christ” in “Christmas,” so too we need to keep “memory” in “Memorial Day.” We remember and honor our heroes who gave their lives so that we might enjoy the blessings that our Country affords us. In a society with an ever-decreasing attention span, how quickly and easily such sacrifices can be forgotten, even when there are reminders all around us in granite and bronze memorial markers we walk and drive by every day.
On Memorial Day, we need to remember our fallen heroes who died in combat and in service. They put themselves in harm’s way to defend our lives and our freedoms and in the process lost their own lives and freedoms.
We remember them not as statistics on the cost of warfare, but as sons and daughters of God whose lives were filled with promise and hope for the future. Let us never minimize or sanitize their sacrifices we honor today. “No greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for another.” (Jn 15:13)
As people of faith, we often speak about “self-sacrifice” and “self-giving love” – and it is good that we do. The men and women we honor today lived that ideal to their deaths. Let us therefore not forget how and where they gave their lives for others.
In his State of the Union Address in 1942, given just after the United States had entered World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned the Nation to focus on the reasons for the epic struggle about to unfold. Victory in that war, he said, “means victory for freedom, victory for the institution of democracy, the ideal of the family, the simple principles of common decency and humanity, and victory for religion.” FDR’s words remind us of the high ideals for which our fallen heroes fought and we ask the Lord on every Memorial Day to reward them for fighting and dying for these ideals.
We entrust the immortal souls of our service men and women to the loving embrace of the Victor over sin and death, asking that those who gave us their all might be with Him in heaven. May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.