Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing?
Where have all the flowers gone
Long time ago?
Every spring I relish the blooming of lilacs. More than all the early flowers, they draw me into their fullness. They invite me to bury my nose in their petals and breathe in their pungent fragrance. I gather from our yard as many as my arms will hold and place them in free-form arrangements wherever I can be assured of catching their scent.
On Memorial Day in the Midwest, lilacs are the flower of choice for paying homage to those who have passed on. They are carried in abundance to the gravesites of the pastoral cemeteries that define scattered squares on the patchwork quilts of browns, yellows, and greens that stretch across the rich rolling hills of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
"Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, with loaded arms I come, pouring for you," sound the words of Walt Whitman. On this very day it is likely that my mother is placing her bouquet at the gravesite of my father in the cemetery of Armstrong, Iowa. At the ripe age of 89 she is paying her respects and remembering her love for this husband of 40 years who has been gone for the last 20.
At commencement exercises across the country, lilacs carry the fullness of floral clusters bordering platforms and podiums. To eager graduates and proud families, the message is, This is a time to celebrate! Only last week my family and I traveled to southern Vermont to the tiny borough of Marlboro, where my daughter Sarah graduated from Marlboro College. It was a thoroughly festive affair. I sat on the stage, honored to give Sarah her diploma and to deliver the benediction. Sarah had assured the administration that I would not "go heavy on God language" or, heaven forbid, refer to God as "he." "Not a problem!" she promised. And the same grandmother who is currently paying her respects to my late father was there to witness her granddaughter cross a quite different threshold.
Rites of passing and rites of passage. James Carroll--novelist, poet, former Roman Catholic priest, and Marlboro's commencement speaker-- referred to every commencement as an ending and every ending as a beginning. Carroll juxtaposed the challenges faced by the graduates of 1998 with the challenges he had encountered when he was their age--while assuring them that he was, of course, never their age. He invited consideration of what lies ahead as cause for free-spirited anticipation coupled with intimations of mortality. Mortality was an everyday issue during the years of his youth, the years of the War in Vietnam. Carroll had resisted this war and found himself alienated from his family. It was not an uncommon experience for those who took the path of opposition.
Only a day before we had heard a Baccalaureate address given by Jody Williams, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which spurred the International Treaty to Ban Landmines, a treaty still awaiting U.S. assent. Millions of these deadly devices lie planted in the landscapes of countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Vietnam alone, there is scarcely a family or a village untouched by the loss of a child, a mother, a father, or a friend who has stepped unknowingly out of bounds of any security wrought through the peace accords. For them, the war is not over.
Could Russ have been among the U.S. soldiers who planted those mines, leaving a legacy of war that no treaty or accords, past or present, can redeem? He could have been. I'll never know. Thirty years ago, Russell Ray Flesher--a former seminarian, an artist, a poet, an aspiring historian, and my first husband--was killed near the village of Quang Tri in the combat of the Tet Offensive. Why hadn't he, like James Carroll, this speaker at my daughter's graduation, resisted this war in which 50,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, died? For what did they die? Some of you may have a ready answer. I do not. I simply don't think it had much to do with saving the world for democracy.
Rites of passing and rites of passage. When we had crossed the Massachusetts border into Vermont and wound past country stores and farmhouses on the road to Marlboro, we were greeted by bush after massive bush dripping with lilacs. I had mourned their quick passing in our backyard, but here were others, full and profuse, a second springtime only a few hundred miles to the north. "With every leaf a miracle," just as Whitman had said.
And there they were again flaunting their transient beauty in bold vases lining the commencement platform. There they were offering an accompaniment of the senses to memories in the making and to memories called forth through addresses that are conventionally so tame and predictable.
What is the stuff of which memory is made? What do we memorialize? In cities and towns across our country high school bands march to the cemetery; important officials speak of the sacrifices made by our war-dead and the cause for which they gave their lives. Memorializing adds a layer of icing to remembering. The pomp and circumstance of Memorial Days wield the potential to obscure the essence of lives lived, the potential to advance the cause of policies that lay the groundwork for lives so needlessly lost. At least this is what I tried to put into words in my letter that accompanied Russ's war medals that I returned to the Army in the year of Tet. The reverence for life at the core of a simple memorial is blurred by the artillery of medals and bombast in the backdrop of avoidable wars. And I am not a pacifist.
The Genesis story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his only son Isaac is instructive.
"....God tested Abraham, and said to him, 'Abraham!' And he said, 'Here am I.' He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you....
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, 'Abraham, Abraham!' And he said, 'Here am I.' He said, 'Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me." (Genesis 22:1-2, 9-12)
While this may be told as a tale demonstrating Abraham's faith, I am not alone in finding it to be one of the most frightening accounts in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. But it is no less frightening than the history of those of us who would give our daughters and sons, our wives and husbands, to a cause that we are asked by a higher power to support in blind faith. When these daughters and sons slay and are slain, we receive medals and are told that their deaths have not been in vain.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?
Who is the God we serve, and to what lengths will we go to demonstrate our devotion? To celebrate the life that is lost in time of war is neither simple nor easy. But to celebrate a life free from the glaze of medals, marching bands, and cemetery speeches is to envision an Abraham who would resist a power that commanded him to sacrifice his child as a demonstration of total allegiance. Is this not the venue of our affirmation of "the right of conscience" and of our "humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason....and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit?"
The words of Archibald MacLeish ring in our ears:
"The young dead soldiers do not speak....
They say: Our deaths are not ours;
They are yours; they will mean what you make them."
Each of us struggles to make meaning of the deaths of those we have loved, no matter what the circumstances. Was I not privileged to send a daughter off to a promising life rather than a child off to war? Had I been asked by a higher power to sacrifice any of my children as a test of faith, would I not respond with a resounding, "Never!" heeding an integrity of mind and spirit?
Those rapturous lilacs, pouring like waterfalls along the road to Marlboro College, adorning the commencement stage, bore nature's witness to endings and beginnings. I sat there, maternal witness to this milestone, recalling that this daughter who was graduating was the same child who at the ripe age of ten, in the setting of a summer dinner in our backyard, had asked, "Would you like to know how the world really began?" and proceeded to set forth her theory. Here at Marlboro on this glorious May weekend the world was born once again, with a rite of passage carrying the refrains of endings and beginnings, endings and beginnings, life passing and life passages, intimations of mortality and pulses of vitality.
"Life has left her footprints on my forehead
But I have become a child again this morning,
The smile, seen through leaves and flowers, is back, to smooth
Away the wrinkles
As the rains wipes away footprints on the beach. Again a
Cycle of birth and death begins."
So wrote the Buddhist Vietnamese poet Thich Nat Hanh.
The lilacs have come and gone. In their going, the seeds of renaissance begin their slow dance. With their return, we are once again invited to "touch the earth with reverence," with memory, with celebration for the miracle of our lives and for yet another journey around the sun.
Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998.