What a Piece of Work is Man?

 Psalm 8

May 29, 2016

Memorial Day Observance

Mark S. Bollwinkel

 

In the back drop of the Nine Year War with Ireland and all of the intrigue surrounding the end of Elizabeth I’s reign at the end of the 16^th century, William Shakespeare writes a tragedy of epic proportions based on a fictional fallen hero named Hamlet, prince of Denmark.   Driven to insane revenge by the murder of his father the King by his uncle, who soon after weds Hamlet’s mother the Queen, Shakespeare’s play profoundly illustrates the madness of power and greed at all human levels; international, personal and deeply spiritual.   By the end of the play all the main characters are dead and the audience is left to ponder the meaning of life itself.

In Act II, Scene ii, two friends named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are charged with accompanying Hamlet to England with secret instructions to arrange for his death.  Pretending concern, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet how he is holding up with the death of his father and the taking of his throne and queen by his murderous uncle.   Shakespeare has Hamlet reply with bitter sarcasm and irony:

I have of late,—but wherefore I know not,—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?  (Hamlet Act II, scene ii, pp. 287-298)

Can you hear the echo of our Hebrew scripture lesson today from Psalm 8 in Hamlet’s soliloquy?

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
   the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
   mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
   and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
   you have put all things under their feet…  

 

            Both pieces of literature suggest that God is active and alive in human destiny; that the earth and creation itself is inspired and transcendent.   Yet the two voices could not be more different.   One rejoices at the prospect.  One grieves the consequences of people who refuse to live up to such holy calling.   One is written in the comfort of abstraction by theologians.  The other is written by one who had more than his share of suffering and disappointment in the human condition.

            In the first chapter of the book of Genesis it is suggested we human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, that we are the children of God (1:27).  In the very next chapters with Adam, Eve, Able and Cain we children of God lie, betray and murder.

            “What a piece of work is man!”?   We may be crowned with glory and honor or all that we strive and hope for can be left as nothing more than dust.  And the choice is always ours.

            No where is the dilemma more profound than when it comes to war.

Christians have long debated the morality of war.   Some of the faithful have argued for a pacifist stance, refuting any justification for violence, citing Jesus’ many teachings on the subject.   Some of the faithful, citing the Old Testament in particular, will insist that God sends the good out to war against the evil using any violent means necessary to guarantee victory for the righteous.

Over the centuries still others have crafted a “just war theory”.  It suggests that to stand by and do nothing while evil ones plot and carry out violence on the innocent means that the good are in complicity with that evil.   Violence in measured response, strictly in self-defense, is justified then by the good as a last resort to stop greater violence.

Those “faithful warriors” who put on a police or military uniform and are daily willing to lay down their lives for others are living by that ethic (John 15:12-13, Romans 5:7).  They deserve our greatest respect.   We citizens should only ask that heir valor be spent when there is no other alternative.

While accepting the Nobel Prize for peace, President Jimmy Carter said, “War may be a necessary evil, but it is always an evil” (December 10, 2002).   Throughout history war rarely solves anything and in most cases makes things much worse.   Yet there come times when good people have no other option but to fight.   It is the legacy of those men and women who were willing to sacrifice everything to defeat totalitarian fascism in Europe and Asia during World War II that insured the peace and prosperity we now enjoy.     

On one of the walls of the World War II Memorial in Washington DC are quotes from this poem by Archibald MacLeish:

The young dead solders do not speak.
Nevertheless they are heard in the still houses.
(Who has not heard them?)   They say,
We were young. We have died. Remember us.
They say,
We have done what we could
But until it is finished it is not done.
They say,
We have given our lives
But until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.
They say,
Our deaths are not ours,
They are yours,
They will mean what you make them.
They say,
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.
They say,
We leave you our deaths,
Give them their meaning.

                        (The Human Season, selected poems 1926-1972, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1972.)

            What meaning have we given our fallen heroes?  If we best honor the legacy of their sacrifices by what we do with this world they have left for us, how have we memorialized them?   

It is fitting and good that we erect stone memorials, wave flags and march in parades, of course.   But our lasting tribute to the fallen is how we live and the future we build for their, and our, children.

In January 1945 at the end of what is called the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes forest bordering Germany:

 “Maj. Roy Creek of the 507^th Army Rangers, one of the heroes of D-Day, met two aid men carrying a severely wounded paratrooper back to an aid station.  Creek took his hand to give him encouragement.  The trooper asked, “Major, did I do OK?”   To which he replied, “You did fine, son.”  But as they carried him away, Creek noticed for the first time that one of his legs was missing.  “I dropped the first tear for him as they disappeared in the trees.   Through the fifty years since, I still continue to fight the tears when I’ve thought of him and so many others like him.  Those are the true heroes of the war.  I hope and pray that we never fight another one.””  (Steven Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers, Touchstone, 1997, p. 390)

   Since World War II have we built a monument of the justice, economic development, cultural tolerance and investment in education in the world that would ensure the peace for which Maj. Creek prayed?

Memorial Day Weekend always reminds me of my dad.  Growing up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana we would attend a BBQ hosted by one of his friends who lived on the parade route.  We’d listen to the Indianapolis 500 auto race on the radio, eat hot dogs and hamburgers.  We’d wave at the parade participants.  My father and his buddies would salute the flag whenever it passed, all being veterans of the Second World War.  

Just last week my mother shared with us a letter of commendation to my father’s Army unit for valor in the battle of Iwo Jima.  She had saved it in a long lost file.  We never knew of his two bronze stars until his military record was read during the internment ceremony for his remains at the Sacramento Valley National Cemetery in Dixon. 

I am proud to be the son of Cal Bollwinkel who lived his life with honor and humility.

 

...what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

   mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

   and crowned them with glory and honor.

Today we remember and thank God for the brave men and women who sacrificed so much in the cause of war.   Whether their wars were just or the contrivance of politicians, those in uniform honored the best intentions in the human condition.  They fought, and some are still fighting, for a world of peace and a better future for their children.

Isn’t up to us who live on to work for that peace and future promise?

Amen.