Decades later, I’m a pastor sitting in my office. It’s Monday morning. A phone call comes from a seventy-something-year-old former Marine. He’s a big man, what tough guys call “a man’s man,” a World War II decorated veteran, six-feet-two, two-hundred-fifty pounds of muscle, part of the invasion of Saipan in the South Pacific when he was seventeen.
“My wife’s out of town. Can you come over tonight for a drink?”
I’ve never been to their home. I’m guessing he wants to talk about his marriage.
That evening, he welcomes me and takes my winter coat. He pours us each a Scotch. We sit down in the living room.
“You know, I’m not one of these peace guys. I stopped going to church for a couple of years, but something made me come back. I started to listen and I kept coming, and all this peace stuff and Jesus stuff started to get to me. It’s been a long time now. That’s why I called you. I need to confess before it’s too late.
“I hate the Japs! I know I’m not supposed to call ’em ‘Japs’, but I hate them! I do. But I can’t hate them anymore.”
He gets up and walks over to the mantel above the huge stone fireplace.
“My wife has no idea what’s in this box. I’ve never told her. I can’t tell her. I don’t want it anymore. I want this out of my house. I’m asking you to take it. I don’t care what you do with it. I can’t live with it anymore.”
He takes the box down from the mantel, places it on the ottoman in front of me, and opens the locked box with a key. He is shaking now and crying.
“This poor bastard! I killed this [expletive] with my bare hands!”
His whole body shakes as, one by one, he removes the contents: a Japanese soldier’s helmet, dog tags, a pistol, two eyeteeth, and a lock of hair from the Japanese soldier he killed in hand-to-hand combat during the American invasion of Saipan.
“All these years of hate. This poor bastard was just doing the same thing I was. He was just doing his duty to his country. How will God ever forgive me? I just want this stuff out of my house. I want it out of my life! How will God ever forgive me? I can’t hate anymore. I can’t.”
We stand in the middle of his living room. I hold him like a baby: a grown man—a “man’s man”—sobbing and shaking with guilt, sorrow, grief, the horror of it, hoping for relief.
I take the contents home. I give the gun to a friend, a former Marine who’s a gun collector. I have no memory of what I did with the box or what remained of the Japanese soldier. Memory is like that. It was too personal. It was too hot.
So . . . today I observe Memorial Day by returning to the original sense of Decoration Day—a day to remember the fallen, all of them—but even more, to recommit to ending the collective madness of war itself. I remember the in-breaking of a sacred stillness: three men in a living room—two Americans and one dead Japanese—and pray for something better for us all.
9. Colby, “War Minds,” in The Colby Essays, 15.
The Man Who Loved Graves
When I was just a young and naive pastor,an old man in the congregation would always arrive long before the rest of the people at the grave site. He’d shun the funeral, but haunt the cemetery . . . Standing by the open grave, he’d state his opinion of the deceased and share with me the type, style and brand of casket he’d told his wife he wanted when he died.As the morticians say, he “predeceased”his spouse, and when we met to plan, she tried to grant his wishes to the very last.She blessed their common gravestone with her tears,but smiled through life for many happy years . . .
—Steve Shoemaker8
My great-great-grandfather Isaac Andrews founded the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home next to the trout stream in Woodstock, Maine, more than two hundred fifty years ago. Isaac was a minister. Because there was no carpenter in town, he not only stood at the graves; he built pine boxes for those he buried. Over the course of time, the simple boxes became the caskets of the Andrews Casket Company and Funeral Home. You might say Isaac had a monopoly in those Maine woods.
Only recently did the Andrews property leave the family when Pete Andrews, my late mother’s favorite cousin, sold it to some whippersnapper who just wanted to make a buck.
My mother used to chuckle as she recalled playing hide-and-seek with her siblings in and among the caskets at the casket factory. The property, including the land, the mill, the old homestead, the funeral home, and the trout stream that had belonged to the family all those years belongs to someone new . . . which means that it, like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, never really did belong to us and does not belong to them. It does not belong to time.
Last October, my brother Bob and I stood with my cousins at the open grave of my ninety-nine-year-old Aunt Gertrude—our one remaining Andrews elder. I recited from The Book of Common Worship, the prayer I have prayed a thousand times at the open grave, the one my friend Steve and I prayed as young, naive pastors—a prayer for the living that feeds me day and night until my lights go out. I wonder if Isaac Andrews did the same way those many years ago.
“O Lord, support us all the day long until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, in your mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”
Standing at Aunt Gertrude’s grave, I am like the widow of the man who loved graves. I smile through tears for all the years, and take strange solace in knowing that I don’t really “own” a thing.
8. Shoemaker, “The Man Who Loved Graves.”
Mysterium Tremendum
Little Boys with Toys
Man is unwilling to accept the limits of his thinking.It is this nonacceptance which lies at the root both of “needs” and “self-deceit.” It is the unwillingness to accept the fact that our understanding cannot transcend the limits of experience which leads not only to self-deceit but also to presumption.
—Willem Zuurdeeg10
It’s one thing to play with toys. It’s something else when the toys are nuclear bombs and missiles.
Watching North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong-un play with the possibility of nuclear holocaust, Rudolf Otto’s idea of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the source of holy dread and attraction that sends shudders down the human spine, comes clearly into view.
In The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational11, Otto examines the dimension of human life that is non-rational—neither rational nor irrational. Otto calls it the “numinous”—the “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self”—the source of both holy dread and majesty and the foundation of all religion.
The experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—a Latin phrase defying precise definition, roughly translated as “the fearful and fascinating mystery,” is sui generis—a category all its own. This mysterium invokes the senses of vulnerability and wonder, death and awe, the tremor and fascination of the finite before the infinite, the shiver of what is mortal standing before the abyss of nothingness