"A Sermon for Memorial Day 2003"

One of the first congregations I served as a minister was a small fellowship located in a New Jersey town that had been deeply divided by the Vietnam war. Although the war had ended several years earlier, the emotional aftermath lingered. Bitterness hung in the air like the pollution over the New Jersey Turnpike nearby. Angry, lost and disabled veterans were everywhere.

One of them found his way to our fellowship. His presence had an immediate impact. It was such a small group that one new person already made a big difference. And every Unitarian Universalist in the fellowship had been an anti-war activist, a highly visible element in the painful local schism. That was another big difference.

As we got to know our new member, we became familiar with his plight and the hardship he shared with other local veterans. We learned about post traumatic stress disorder; about his nightmares, flashbacks, and depression; about his inability to find work or even a good night's sleep; about his spiritual questions and doubts. He led us to the Newark Veteran's Center, where his support group, along with our fellowship, gave him an emotional lifeline and hope for the future.

One Sunday the men from his support group came and did a service for our fellowship. I will never forget it. The veterans' stories were memorable enough: about combat and coming home, about sickness and Agent Orange and not knowing if they would ever get help. Simply to tell those stories to sympathetic listeners was a healing step for them to take.

But something happened in that interaction for those who listened as well. By hearing about the suffering that the war had imposed on our own military, we understood that the war was far from over for Americans. They may no longer have been in Southeast Asia, but our veterans would live the rest of their lives with wounds that would never heal. And their wounds were everyone's responsibility.

The irrevocability of war hit everyone in the room, some for the first time. It meant living with the grief forever. Whoever we were, whatever side we were on, there would always be work to do. That realization brought us together and transformed our sense of community. From then on, we were all in it together.

Today is Memorial Day. This is the time we set aside to mourn the dead of all wars. Grief is a powerful and constructive human emotion. It is a process that moves through us and changes us as we go. After time has passed, grief subsides, and the pain of loss abates, but never the fact of having been changed by the experience.

War creates different kinds of grief. Parents lose their children in war and children lose a parent. Soldiers lose their comrades. Combat veterans grieve for the enemy. Citizens grieve for the losses on all sides, for our young military, for the innocent people caught in crossfire, for the journalists. The list goes on and on.

If you followed the coverage of the war in Iraq, you could not help but feel some of the grief. Whatever your feelings about the war, you cannot come away from it without a sense of loss. Even if you win. You still grieve. And you are changed.

A week or so ago I listened to a radio interview with war correspondent Chris Hedges. He spoke about the difference between those who know war and those who do not. Those who know war, he suggested, whether they are combatants, journalists, or civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, have a knowledge the rest of us cannot share. If you know war, you know its ambiguity, its horror, and its adrenaline rush of power and excitement. The grief you bring home is informed by things you'd rather not know about yourself or others. Your grief is more than loss alone. Your grief has changed you too.

But everyone grieves when the world is at war, even if all they know is what they see on the nightly news. You may feel some emotional distance from what is happening in Iraq, but not from your neighbor who disagrees with you about whether this war should have happened at all. Relationships suffer under the strain of war. They shift; they do not always snap back into place. They are another loss to mourn, another change to note.

Here we are now, at the conclusion of another war, with much uncertainty ahead. What should we do? How have we changed?

The first step always is to let our grief bring us back together. Just as the women did after the Civil War, we grieve the losses on both sides. Grieving affirms our humanity.

The dead are gone, however, and eventually the survivors must move on. There are other ways to bring people together again. In his essay "Healing the Wounds of War," Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about bringing American and Vietnamese war veterans together to talk about their pain. People on both sides had already suffered for years. When they put themselves in touch with each other's suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh concluded, they were able to move on with their lives. When we shift our awareness from ourselves to another, we develop compassion. Compassion leads to hope and perhaps someday, to peace.

The grief that comes from war needs to move through these stages. It is not enough simply to mourn and to honor and to move on. That is the lesson we learned back in New Jersey with the Vietnam veterans and the antiwar activists. The war won't be over until we learn what it has meant for us all.

Archibald MacLeish's poem "The Young Dead Soldiers" pleads with the reader: it is not finished until we have given meaning to their sacrifice. "Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this."

On Memorial Day, it is not finished if we only speak in honor of the dead. We must speak about what we can do for peace and new hope. This year, with a new war to give us more dead to grieve, the need to find meaning is timelier than ever.

Any war, whatever its purpose or its outcome, takes a huge toll in human life. Over a hundred of our soldiers and thousands of Iraqi people are gone forever. These are our dead this year, and in the spirit of the original Memorial Day, our grief acknowledges the losses on all sides.

I have a hard time finding meaning in these deaths. Right now, I feel sadness and frustration that there seems to be no alternative for humanity but to bring violence upon each other. Reflecting on Memorial Day this year, I found myself thinking about the veterans - the ones who come back alive, but changed forever.

Thousands of new veterans will come home soon, some with visible wounds and injuries of war. According to a letter from New Directions, an agency that reaches out to veterans here in Los Angeles, they also have "silent injuries, the ones that won't be noticed for years to come." Right now there are 27,000 homeless veterans in Los Angeles. Who knows how many more this latest war will add to their midst.

"Homeless veterans don't enjoy the freedoms that they fought so hard for. Many are still fighting the war of addiction or post traumatic stress . . . . Some simply have little education and no marketable skills that transferred from their military experience. And most are sick physically, emotionally, and spiritually."

We cannot speak of peace and new hope after this war without speaking of the victims it has yet to churn out, here and abroad. We cannot honor our dead unless we take care of the living. It is not enough to grieve and move on. It is not finished. We have more work to do.

I often walk my dog on the beach early in the morning, around 6:30 or 7. The people who sleep there are just waking up. Some are heading down to the pier for coffee, others just shift from one location to another. They don't ask much of people like me. Sometimes we stop so they can visit with my dog. Everyone knows that they are a social service problem too big to handle, a constant reminder that something in our world has gone terribly wrong. And everyone knows that many of them - 27,000 of them - are veterans.

If we human beings are unable to keep ourselves from going to war, then let us at least give the care they need to the veterans who made it home. For some, it is almost too late. Their problems are so intractable that it is hard to know where to begin. But the war won't be finished until the meaning we give it shows the way to peace and new hope for those who need it most. This is something we can do right here and now, to observe this Memorial Day.

I am not reconciled to war. But I still grieve. I am sorry for the dead, for the irrevocable loss that makes our world less than it could have been. We are all changed. The work is not finished. Now we must find meaning so that all can live together in peace and new hope.