Memorial Day and the Feast Day of the Visitation

Today is the feast day of the Visitation, a feast day that celebrates the time that Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Both women are pregnant in miraculous ways: Mary hasn't had sex, and Elizabeth is beyond her fertile years. Yet both are pregnant. Elizabeth will give birth to John the Baptist, and Mary will give birth to Jesus.

Some feast days leave me shaking my head and wondering what modern folks are to do with them. Some feast days, like today's, make me wish I'd known about them earlier. I think about my younger self who was enraged that so much femaleness seemed to be erased from Christianity. What would my raging feminist self have done with this festival?

I'm not sure she'd have been appeased. I was also in the process of trying to assert that biology isn't destiny, while also acknowledging that I was one of the first generations to be able to assert that idea.

My middle-aged self is willing to admit that biology is often destiny, although not in the womb-centric way that the phrase is often bandied about. I'm seeing too many people at the mercy of bodies that they have increasingly less control over.

In an odd twist, today is also Memorial Day, a day where we will remember and honor those who have died in military service to the U.S.  It's another holiday where biology is destiny--young men have been expected to serve in this way, and when not enough of them do, they have been drafted.

As I've thought about the juxtapositions between the feast day of the Visitation and Memorial Day, I've thought about how both days celebrate those who are working in service to a vision that's greater than just themselves.  In fact, they may be working in service to a vision that they don't quite understand, but they have faith in the ones who have called them to the vision.

Of course, the difference is that the governments who use soldiers don't always have the best interest of the soldiers uppermost, while God, who called Mary and Elizabeth, was looking out for their best interest.

Nothing drives home the cost of war more than a visit to the Vietnam Memorial and seeing those 58,000 or so names carved into a black scar of granite.

How might our thinking about war change if we also added the names of all the maimed war veterans? What a cost.

And then there are the civilians. And the family members. So much wreckage on so many sides.

I'm thinking of the 2005 trip to France I took with my mom and dad and our stops at a variety of WWI cemeteries. That effect, too, is similar to the one that the Vietnam Memorial--those graves, stretching on as far as we could see.

So, on this day which has become for so many of us just an excuse to have a barbecue, let us pause to reflect and remember. If we're safe right now, let us say a prayer of gratitude. Let us remember that we've still got lots of military people serving in dangerous places.

And on this feast day of the Visitation, let us say a prayer of thanks for elder generations who look out for younger ones, who give them safe space to process what God has called them to do.  Let us give thanks for people of all ages who know what needs to be done to protect the mission that God gives them.  

Let us pray for all who need courage to do what must be done.  Let us pray that in the future, no blood needs to be shed to achieve and preserve freedom.