Memorial Day originally came into being as Decoration Day, and was observed by going to the cemetery and placing flowers on the graves of those who perished in the Civil War. It only became an official federal holiday in 1971. For most Americans, Memorial Day’s primary significance is that it marks the beginning of the summer season.
In this strange year with nearly 100,000 American dead from the corona virus, America is confronting death on a massive scale and the commemorative aspect of Memorial Day seems pertinent. It takes a great deal of dying to carve out a day that a nation dedicates a day to mourn.
The historian Drew Gilpin Faust has told the story of how Americans grappled with 600,000 deaths in the Civil War in her book “This Republic of Suffering.” Faust has put the carnage of the Civil War in context. The Civil War was bloodier than any other conflict in American History. It is estimated that 620,000 soldiers died between 1861 and 1865. Civil War fatalities are approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War put together.
The South paid a steep price for its quest for a separate identity rooted in slavery. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Union counterparts. One in five white southern men of military age died in the conflict. Thousands of civilians perished in the war. Their towns, cities, and farms were violated.
Faust notes that the creation of national cemeteries and the creation of the Civil War pension system to care for both the dead and their survivors produced programs on a scale and scope that would have been unimaginable before the war. She says, “Death created the modern American union—not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.”
In reflecting on the monumental consequences of such widespread death as the Civil War brought, Faust points out that: “Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face—to worry about how to die—distinguishes us from other animals.”
It’s humanity’s unique lot to handle death. We have to dispose of the bodies. We endeavor to make sense of what has happened to those whom we loved. “The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss”, Faust says.
Most of the time, we grieve on our own when a loved one dies. But the Civil War meant that an entire nation would do this. Grief and mourning were a public, not a private, affair. Faust maintains that “the work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking”.
We pause today, in the midst of another spate of nation-wide dying, because the deaths caused by the Civil War left so deep scar that attention had to be paid.
Today is a day to thank God for those who stepped forward to offer themselves to fight for the union of these disparate states and for “the proposition that all men are created equal”; and to despair over the terrible loss of those who gave their lives that some might be enslaved. A new and better nation was born in the crucible of that conflict out of their sacrifice.
A pandemic is not a war. It has no stated purpose. Nonetheless, the thousands of deaths it has visited upon us will have a lasting impact.
Christians meet death confident that on Easter morning, God has defeated death. To believe in Christ is to believe that death does not get the last word. The resurrected power of life gets the last word.
A Church mindful of Christ’s victory over death can be a resource to a grieving nation. We can offer words of consolation that honor the value and integrity of those who have died; and at the same time, we can offer the world that emerges out of this pandemic a taste of the Kingdom of God. Christ healed the sick and suffering, he sent his disciples to do the same. It is the job of the Church to work for spiritual and physical healing. As America undertakes the work of death, Christians can be emissaries of the Kingdom of God by planting the flag of Christ’s love.
Andrew +
