“”¦that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion ”” that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain”¦”
–Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863
While most teenagers get ready to head to the beach or enjoy some other form of relaxation to celebrate Memorial Day, 13-year-old Colt Drew of Goose Creek has a heavier weight on his shoulders today.
He will put on his honor guard uniform, head to the James Island American Legion and play Taps at a Memorial Day service.
“He does an excellent job,” said David Coates Jr., a member of the honor guard based at the Goose Creek American Legion.
Coates recruited Colt because there’s a shortage of Taps players for military funerals and services, especially in the Lowcountry, with its heavy military population. Colt, who is home-schooled, is an accomplished trumpet player, and both his parents, Debbie and Mike Drew, were in the Navy.
”¢ NCA currently maintains approximately 3.1 million gravesites at 131 national cemeteries in 39 states and Puerto Rico, as well as in 33 soldiers’ lots and monument sites.
Ӣ Approximately 380,000 full-casket gravesites, 112,000 in-ground gravesites for cremated remains, and 130,000 columbarium niches are available in already developed acreage in our 131 national cemeteries.
”¢ There are approximately 20,000 acres within established installations in NCA. Nearly 60 percent are undeveloped and ”“ along with available gravesites in developed acreage ”“ have the potential to provide approximately 5.6 million gravesites.
Ӣ Of the 131 national cemeteries, 72 are open to all interments; 18 can accommodate cremated remains and the remains of family members for interment in the same gravesite as a previously deceased family member; and 41 will perform only interments of family members in the same gravesite as a previously deceased family member.
Marine Staff Sgt. Joseph Fankhauser had been in Afghanistan’s volatile Helmand province for barely two weeks when he stepped on what the military calls an improvised explosive device. He was on his fifth combat deployment.
There had been a rainstorm, the ground had shifted and was soft, and the usual signs of a hidden bomb were not there. It was a joint patrol: Marines, British forces and Afghans. Only Fankhauser, 30, was killed.
“It gives me a kind of peace that it wasn’t a mistake” but rather an accident, Heather Fankhauser, 35, said of her husband’s death. “It wasn’t anything he could have done. Lots of other guys, guys with families, were there that day, and they’ll be going home, and that’s how my husband would want it.”
Traditional observance of Memorial day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored, neglected. Most people no longer remember the proper flag etiquette for the day. While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, and not just those fallen in service to our country.
There are a few notable exceptions. Since the late 50’s on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the 1,200 soldiers of the 3d U.S. Infantry place small American flags at each of the more than 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing. In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day. More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye’s Heights (the Luminaria Program). And in 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.
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.
”“Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
In thanksgiving for all those who gave their lives for this country in years past, and for those who continue to serve”“KSH.
P.S. The circumstances which led to this remarkable poem are well worth remembering:
It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915 and to the war in general. McCrea had spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, French, and Germans in the Ypres salient. McCrae later wrote: “I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days… Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.” The next day McCrae witnessed the burial of a good friend, Lieut. Alexis Helmer. Later that day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the field dressing station, McCrea composed the poem. A young NCO, delivering mail, watched him write it. When McCrae finished writing, he took his mail from the soldier and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the Sergeant-major. Cyril Allinson was moved by what he read: “The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.” Colonel McCrae was dissatisfied with the poem, and tossed it away. A fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915. For his contributions as a surgeon, the main street in Wimereaux is named “Rue McCrae”.
Almighty God, our heavenly Father, in whose hands are the living and the dead: We give thee thanks for all thy servants who have laid down their lives in the service of our country. Grant to them thy mercy and the light of thy presence; and give us such a lively sense of thy righteous will, that the work which thou hast begun in them may be perfected; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord. Amen.
Make me to know thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me, for thou art the God of my salvation; for thee I wait all the day long.
–Psalm 25:4-5
The panel chosen to appoint the next Archbishop of Canterbury is facing claims that it is dominated by clerics who reject orthodox teaching.
The committee is unfairly balanced in favour of liberals who support “revisionist” moves such as the appointment of [non-celibate] homosexual bishops, traditionalists have warned.
Their intervention came as the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) met behind closed doors last week for the first in a series of meetings to decide the successor to Dr Rowan Williams.
….The Supreme Court is now expected to use the Miller case to determine whether states are required to consider giving juveniles a second chance, no matter what they did. And each side is giving up a little in this case. Alabama is not arguing that all juvenile murderers should be ineligible for parole, only those who commit the worst crimes””crimes that would bring a death sentence if the defendant were an adult.
Evan Miller is represented by the Equal Justice Initiative and its founder and executive director, Bryan Stevenson, and Stevenson isn’t asking anyone actually be given parole, only that when offenders are so young that at some point far down the road, they at least be allowed to demonstrate they are entitled to be set free.
BRYAN STEVENSON (Equal Justice Initiative): I think everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done, and I think that policy makers can make decisions about how to punish them. But I think children are uniquely more than their worst act; they have quintessential qualities and characteristics that a decent society, a maturing society, an evolved society, we believe, is constitutionally obligated to recognize and protect.
Syria on Sunday strongly denied U.N. allegations that its forces killed more than 90 people in one of the deadliest events of the country’s uprising, and diplomats said the Security Council met in an emergency session to discuss the massacre.
The killings in the west-central area of Houla on Friday brought widespread international criticism of the regime of President Bashar Assad, although differences emerged from world powers over whether his forces were exclusively to blame.
What will become of the European Union? One road leads to the full break-up of the euro, with all its economic and political repercussions. The other involves an unprecedented transfer of wealth across Europe’s borders and, in return, a corresponding surrender of sovereignty. Separate or superstate: those seem to be the alternatives now.
For two crisis-plagued years Europe’s leaders have run away from this choice. They say that they want to keep the euro intact””except, perhaps, for Greece. But northern European creditors, led by Germany, will not pay out enough to assure the euro’s survival, and southern European debtors increasingly resent foreigners telling them how to run their lives.
This has become a test of over 60 years of European integration….
Over the past 28 months, assassins have targeted at least five Iranians scientists or engineers, men linked by Western intelligence agencies to the country’s controversial nuclear program.
One was Darioush Rezaeinejad, an Iranian electrical engineer working at a national security research facility. Last July, he was driving home with his wife after picking up their daughter from kindergarten. Outside the front gate of the family home, two gunmen in sunglasses approached, pulled out handguns and opened fire.
…marriage brings economic benefits. It usually means two breadwinners, or one breadwinner and a full-time, stay-at-home parent with no significant child-care expenses. Unlike Murphy Brown ”” who always had the able Eldin by her side ”” most women do not have the flexibility afforded a presumably highly paid broadcast journalist. And it’s not just a cliche that two can live more cheaply than one; a single set of bills for rent, utilities and other household expenses makes a difference. Though not necessarily better off than a cohabiting couple, a married family is much better off than its single-parent counterpart.
I’ve been studying single mothers since long before “Murphy Brown” was on the air. In a study I co-authored with Adam Thomas, I put them into hypothetical households with demographically similar unmarried men who, in principle, would be good marriage partners. Through this virtual matchmaking, we showed that child poverty rates would fall by as much as 20 percent in an America with more two-parent households.
In later research, Ron Haskins and I learned that if individuals do just three things ”” finish high school, work full time and marry before they have children ”” their chances of being poor drop from 15 percent to 2 percent.
In brutally poor neighborhoods and mansions alike, this city choked by military checkpoints seethes with rumors, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Even academics like to assert a favorite: The homegrown Islamic extremist movement that is terrorizing northern Nigeria is a CIA creation.
Others are convinced that the extremist group known as Boko Haram is a plot by the southern-led Nigerian government to create an eternal crisis in the north.
How else to explain Boko Haram’s transformation from a group of bearded radicals stashing homemade weapons to an organization that has half the country on military alert and U.S. lawmakers warning of threats to American interests?
He is the unfrozen phenom.
Brian Baker was going to be a tennis star. That’s where this was headed. A decade ago, Baker was one of the best junior tennis players in the world, the wiry kid from Nashville, Tenn., with the punishing game, so good he would later reach the boys’ final of the French Open in 2003. His early résumé contained wins over characters you may know. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tomas Berdych. Novak Djokovic. That’s right. The Djoker, the relentless No. 1 in the world, winner of four of the last five Grand Slams. That guy. Baker passed on college scholarships and pushed right into the pros. He had a clothing deal and a racket deal and a future. Life was good.
But then Baker’s body disobeyed him. Maybe “abandoned” is a better word. First Baker hurt his wrist, and missed 10 weeks. Then, in a qualifying match at Wimbledon versus Djokovic, Baker tore his MCL. This actually wasn’t so bad. Baker rehabbed his knee and resumed playing, but began feeling pain in his left hip. Hip surgery followed. Then, surgery for a sports hernia. All the while Baker’s elbow was nagging at him, especially on his serve. That led to Tommy John surgery on his elbow. Then more hip surgery””another procedure for the left hip, and the right hip as well. It was a spectacular run of medical intervention. Baker won a Grand Slam in the OR.
At this point Baker was 23….
Read it all and there is more here and still more there.
A Yiddish play with the title “Toyt fun a Salesman” opened at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn early in 1951. As most of the audience recognized from the name alone, the show was a translation of Arthur Miller’s drama “Death of a Salesman.” It seemed a mere footnote to the premiere production, which had completed its triumphal run on Broadway several months earlier, having won the Pulitzer Prize.
Even so, a theater critic in Commentary magazine, George Ross, declared of the Brooklyn version, “What one feels most strikingly is that this Yiddish play is really the original, and the Broadway production was merely Arthur Miller’s translation into English.”
History, it must be said, has not exactly ratified Mr. Ross’s judgment. In an enduring way, however, he framed a penetrating question about Miller’s masterpiece, which has echoed from the 1949 debut to the celebrated revival now on Broadway. Is Willy Loman Jewish?
The account of Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles, which we heard in the first reading, is set against a background that contains one of the last great frescoes of the Old Testament: the ancient story of the construction of the Tower of Babel. But what is Babel? It is the description of a kingdom in which people have concentrated so much power they think they no longer need depend on a God who is far away. They believe they are so powerful they can build their own way to heaven in order to open the gates and put themselves in God’s place. But it’s precisely at this moment that something strange and unusual happens. While they are working to build the tower, they suddenly realise they are working against one another. While trying to be like God, they run the risk of not even being human ”“ because they’ve lost an essential element of being human: the ability to agree, to understand one another and to work together.
This biblical story contains an eternal truth: we see this truth throughout history and in our own time as well. Progress and science have given us the power to dominate the forces of nature, to manipulate the elements, to reproduce living things, almost to the point of manufacturing humans themselves. In this situation, praying to God appears outmoded, pointless, because we can build and create whatever we want. We don’t realise we are reliving the same experience as Babel. It’s true, we have multiplied the possibilities of communicating, of possessing information, of transmitting news ”“ but can we say our ability to understand each other has increased? Or, paradoxically, do we understand each other even less? Doesn’t it seem like feelings of mistrust, suspicion and mutual fear have insinuated themselves into human relationships to the point where one person can even pose a threat to another? Let’s go back to the initial question: can unity and harmony really exist? How?
The answer lies in Sacred Scripture: unity can only exist as a gift of God’s Spirit, which will give us a new heart and a new tongue, a new ability to communicate.
Read it all (emphasis mine).
Western nations are pressing for a response to the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, with the US calling for an end to what it called President Bashar al-Assad’s “rule by murder”.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council this week.
The UN has confirmed the deaths of at least 90 people in Houla, including 32 children under the age of 10.
Holy Spirit, Spirit of the Living God,
you breathe in us
on all that is inadequate and fragile.
You make living water spring even
from our hurts themselves. And
through you, the valley of tears
becomes a place of wellsprings.
So, in an inner life
with neither beginning nor end,
your continual presence
makes new freshenss break through
–Brother Roger of Taizé (1915-2005) as cited in Prayers Encircling the World: An International Anthology (London: SPCK, 1998), page 71
O Holy Spirit of God, who didst descend upon our Lord Christ at the river Jordan, and upon the disciples at the feast of Pentecost: Have mercy upon us, we beseech thee, and by thy divine fire enlighten our minds and purify our hearts; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Saint Nerses of Clajes (4th century Persian Bishop and Martyr)
O God, who in the exaltation of thy Son Jesus Christ dost sanctify thy universal Church: Shed abroad in every race and nation the gift of the Holy Spirit; that the work wrought by his power at the first preaching of the gospel may now be extended throughout the whole world; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
–Gelasian Sacramentary
“You shall count seven weeks; begin to count the seven weeks from the time you first put the sickle to the standing grain. Then you shall keep the feast of weeks to the LORD your God with the tribute of a freewill offering from your hand, which you shall give as the LORD your God blesses you; and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God, you and your son and your daughter, your manservant and your maidservant, the Levite who is within your towns, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow who are among you, at the place which the LORD your God will choose, to make his name dwell there. You shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt; and you shall be careful to observe these statutes.
–Deuteronomy 16:9-12
Watch it all.
The basic problem is that many people won’t keep their euros in a Greek bank, and perhaps not in a Spanish bank, either, when those euros can be moved to Germany or some other haven.
Yet German citizens do not appear ready to guarantee Spanish banks or, by extension, the whole credit system of Spain and the other periphery nations. Guarantees of that scope are probably impossible and may also require constitutional changes in some nations.
We thus face the danger that the euro, the world’s No. 2 reserve currency, could implode. Such an event wouldn’t be just another depreciation or collapse of a currency peg; instead, it would mean that one of the world’s major economic units doesn’t work as currently constituted.
Ascension theology turns at this point to the Eucharist, for in celebrating the eucharist the church professes to know how the divine presents itself in our time, and how the question of faithfulness is posed. Eucharistically, the church acknowledges that Jesus has heard and has answered the upward call; that, like Moses, he has ascended into that impenetrable cloud overhanging the mountain. Down below, rumours of glory emanate from the elders, but the master himself is nowhere to be seen. He is no longer with his people in the same way he used to be. Yet he is with them, in the Spirit.
–Douglas Farrow, Ascension Theology (New York: T and T Clark, 2011), p. 64
Bikers revved up their engines at the National Convention of the Sons of God Motorcycle Club.
The event held at Trinity Episcopal Church runs through the weekend and is expected to host over 300 bikers and hundreds of Harleys. The national group gets together twice a year for conventions, and they have members stretching from the East to West Coast.
Several thousand people have gathered in Christchurch this afternoon to protest the demolition of the city’s Anglican cathedral.
The protest rally began in Cranmer Square and saw past and present civic leaders, MPs and other high profile Christchurch residents calling on the Anglican Church to immediately halt demolition work on the quake-damaged Cathedral.
Members spent the day working through three questions around finance, governance, and ACIP:
1. How might God be using the current financial situation of General Synod to tell us about our future in carrying out Vision 2019?
2. What might the Holy Spirit telling us about ourselves as we grapple with the complexities of our current governance and structural challenges?
3. How might Jesus be leading us on a journey of spiritual renewal through the presence of Indigenous peoples among us, and their witness in the Mississauga Declaration.