The gospel for this Memorial Day weekend is taken from the 14th
chapter of John’s gospel which has been read every day this past week, leading
up to Memorial Day. This chapter
contains Jesus’ appeal that we follow His commandments. His commandments go beyond the Mosaic Law
which provided a moral code to guide specific behaviors of the people of
God. Jesus’ commandments are less
specific but call us to attain a more mature spirituality based on love and
forgiveness. Loving one another as Jesus
defines it, requires a sacrificial love, exemplified in His life and
death. The perfect, sacrificial love of
Jesus is portrayed by the crucifix with the body of Jesus depicted in death. It is this very love that overcame death and
holds the promise of eternal life.
Although we will never achieve the perfection of love in
this life, and certainly not on our own, Jesus promises to help us by sending
the Holy Spirit to guide and strengthen us.
“If you love me, you will keep my
commandments. And I will ask the Father
and He will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of
Truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him.” (John 14:15)
Memorial Day is set aside as a national holiday to honor
those men and women who sacrificed themselves for our country and what it
stands for. They fought and many died
protecting our freedom from the threat of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. My own father landed at Normandy and fought
his way across France until he was seriously wounded six weeks later, just over
the border in Germany. After nearly
losing his leg, he wore a brace the rest of his life, never regaining the
feeling or the use of one leg below the knee.
He seldom spoke of the horrors of war he witnessed, and never complained
about the sacrifices he made for our country.
If anything, he was proud to have fought for the ideals of our country
and our triumph over the evils of socialism taken to the extreme.
It may be naïve to think that our country embodied a “Spirit of Truth” during the Second
World War, but at least we stood for the dignity of the human person. In contrast, the extreme socialism and
nationalism promoted by Hitler was driven by the belief that the government knew
what was best for the people, and that they could perfect their nation by
purging themselves of undesirables,
like the Jews and other minorities.
Theirs was a world devoid of “The Truth” as revealed by the tenets of
Christianity.
Sadly, as Europeans and Americans have become more secular
and abandoned their Christian heritage, they have begun to lose sight of God’s
Truth. We have lost respect for the dignity of human life
and view 40% of unborn babies as “undesirable.”
Like Hitler who authorized human
experimentation, we now use human embryos as fodder for research. In a virtual human holocaust, more than 50
million unborn babies have been killed in America over the past 40 years, and
millions more have been frozen as embryos, as if they were mere property. This is NOT what my father, a devout Catholic,
fought for! Our current government has
legislated the right to abortion, even while suppressing religious freedom, in
their quest to perfect our country and dismissing religious objections to
abortion as a “war on women.”
Similarly, our government has severely damaged the family by
promulgating laws to enable “no-fault” divorce, discouraging marriage among the
poor by rewarding single mothers, and penalizing married couples with extra
taxes.
Love is no longer understood to be sacrificial in nature, but rather an emotion to be enjoyed without
regard to commitment or personal responsibility to spouse or children. The individual is now considered the basic
unit of society, not the family, and absolute individual freedom held to be the
most important American value, even at the cost of discarding undesirable and inconvenient responsibilities
to spouses, embryos, and children.
Anyone who says differently is accused of violating the civil rights of
others, but when did divorce, abortion, and child abandonment become a civil
right? In short, our world “…cannot
accept the Spirit of Truth because it neither sees nor knows Him.”
The Spirit of Truth,
the Advocate, assists us in cultivating virtue in our lives, so that we may
become more capable of sacrificial love, while honoring our commitments and
responsibilities. This is the true path
to happiness, in contrast to radical individualism. Absolute individual freedom, as promoted by
our government, does not lead to fulfillment and happiness, but rather to the
slavery and isolation of selfishness.
Socrates was killed by his government for challenging the prevailing
culture of his time, and for promoting the cultivation of virtue. Jesus was murdered for revealing the True
nature of God while advocating love and forgiveness, and this was viewed as a
threat the status quo.
This Memorial Day, perhaps the best way to honor the Veterans
who have served and sacrificed for our country, is to resolve to uphold and
promote The Spirit of Truth which was so instrumental in the founding of our
country, but is now waning in the 21st century. Benjamin
Franklin, among others, knew that our Republic would not survive unless the
people of our country remained virtuous.
Democracy depends on the people’s understanding of what constitutes the
common good. Without a culture of life
and the guidance of The Spirit of Truth,
our nation will deconstruct, just as ancient Greece, Rome and early 20th
century Germany did, when their cultures fell into moral decay.
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