What are your Memorial Day plans? Like me, you may see a grill-out and time with friends and family in your future. While these festivities are appropriate, we mustn’t let them overshadow the reason we have a national holiday like this in the first place. What exactly are we celebrating on Memorial Day? Well, we know that, as the name implies, Memorial Day is about remembering. It is about remembering the brave men and women who have paid the ultimate price to secure our freedom.
If Memorial Day is about remembering, then it may do us good to create some traditions or rituals that will help us remember. First of all, it is difficult to observe a holiday properly if you don’t’ even know how it landed on the calendar in the first place. (You can read about the origin of Memorial Day here.) Another way to remember is through story-reading or storytelling. For example, my great, great uncle died at the age of eighteen on the shores of Iwo Jima. It may be helpful to retell his short but influential story as a family. Perhaps, there is a fallen hero in your family that you could read about or talk about around the family dinner table. Or maybe you could visit a national battlefield, museum, or memorial. There are many creative ways with which we can intentionally remember the sacrifice of our fallen heroes for our freedom.
In addition to created rituals that help us remember, we must remind ourselves of the great responsibility and task with which our fallen heroes have left us. This time of year, we often throw around the slogan, “Freedom isn’t free!” Yet we often live as if it is. As significant and precious as the blood of our nation’s fallen heroes is, that is still not enough to guarantee freedom for ourselves and our posterity.
As Abraham Lincoln noted in his famous Gettysburg address, a momentous task faces those of us who are still living. In his speech commending the sacrifice of Union soldiers for the unity of the states and the freedom of all men, Lincoln said, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the lats full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In other words, those who died in the Civil War, and the many more in wars since then, have begun the good work of preserving the freedom of the people of the United States of America. Freedom is a fragile thing and, just as it required a new birth during the Civil War, it often requires reviving. Thomas Jefferson observed in a letter to a friend in Paris in 1787, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” In this fallen, messy world, freedom is not free. From time to time, it must be purchased with the blood of our fallen heroes! Yet the task of keeping that blood-bought liberty—that the task of the living. This is my job and your job.
Now, the question is how we are to keep or maintain liberty. The Founding Fathers were prescient on this matter also. The Founders loved freedom, but they realized that freedom is the fruit of something else more valuable. They contended that freedom was the fruit of virtue, and that personal virtue was essential to its survival. In April 1776, just months before signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren about the impending duty of the colonies to set up a new form of government. In that letter, he wrote: “Such a Government is only to be supported by pure Religion, or Austere Morals. Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private [virtue], and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” After the War for Independence and during the Virginia Ratifying Convention for the Constitution in the summer of 1788, James Madison admonished, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.” The idea that just any kind of people can live in a democratic republic and enjoy the level of freedom we do in America is, as Madison put it, a naïve one.
This poses a challenge for us in America today. Virtues like honesty, integrity, self-discipline, gratitude, fidelity, and purity are on the decline in America at large. This is evidence of a decline in these virtues on the individual level as well. The truth that freedom is the fruit of virtue is as scientific and real as the laws of gravity or sowing and reaping. Those who cannot or will not govern themselves will be governed by others. For example, any American citizen of age has the freedom to drive a car in this country. However, if he cannot govern himself enough to restrain from driving while under the influence of alcohol, then the government will restrain him. His freedom will be taken away because of his lack of virtue.
While we like to lay blame at the feet of our government leaders (and surely such blame is warranted), we must begin our critique on the personal level. The people in Washington are representatives of “we the people.” They reflect the values and virtues of the people who elected them. We cannot bemoan the vice of Washington if we are not vigilantly developing virtue in our own lives. And we cannot remain a free people if we will not be a virtuous people. So, the real question is not, “How virtuous are the people in Washington?” The first question should be, “How virtuous am I?” Are you a person of honesty, integrity, and self-discipline? Do your children see the virtues of courage, determination, gratitude, and grit exemplified in you? Are you faithful and pure in your commitments and relationships?
So, the task of the living is to develop virtue in our personal lives. If we do that, it will nurture virtue in our families, communities, cities, and eventually our nation. We the people must be a people of virtue if we are to be a people of freedom. The story goes that as Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention, someone asked him what kind of government they had constructed. To this he supposedly replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” That is the task of the living. Our fallen heroes have purchased our freedom, and it is our job to keep it. This Memorial Day, let us be intentional about remembering our fallen heroes, and may we take our responsibility as seriously as they did.