The Last Full Measure of Devotion (excerpts from article in the May 2010 issue
of Quest, a publication of the UUA’s Church of the Larger Fellowship)
Written by DAVID TAKAHASHI MORRIS, CO-MINISTER, MT. DIABLO UNITARIAN
UNIVERSALIST CHURCH, WALNUT CREEK, CALIFORNIA (READ BY MARGIE MANNING)
There is no official Unitarian Universalist doctrine on war. For some of us, war is evil; for
others, it can be good, or at least necessary. Some of us support the “just war” idea, while
others can’t imagine how those two words can possibly be used in the same sentence. In
the midst of these conflicted feelings, I wonder if it’s possible for us to find a way to honor
those who gave what Abraham Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.”
Why should a church—especially a church where peacemaking is such a high community
priority—try to find a way to honor soldiers who died in war? After all, Memorial Day isn’t
really a religious holiday. It’s part of the great American civic religion of holidays and
remembrances, but it’s fading even in the secular world. Couldn’t we just leave it alone?
Of course we could, but it would mean ignoring or denying basic truths about ourselves.
War touches our lives and our families. The young dead soldiers are in our houses. They are
speaking to us. We can’t just leave it alone, yet how are we to come to terms with it? Can
we keep Memorial Day without glorifying war? I am not about to offer you a magic solution,
but I have a few thoughts, suggested by Archibald MacLeish’s poem.
First, I think we need to disentangle our feelings for those who died in wartime from our
opinions about war itself. Set the young dead soldiers free from their country’s conflicts.
Their deaths belong to them, and to us—not to the battles that took them. They were
beloved, loving people with hopes and dreams that surely did not include being broken by
the engines of war.
We have to acknowledge that our so-called enemies who died were also real human beings,
with lives, with families, with stories and hopes of their own. They too wanted to live. They
too left behind people they loved, people who loved them, at home and among their fellows.
We can honor the dead without reservation by recognizing the human grief of these human
deaths. There are no enemies among the dead.
This is the challenge for me as a critic of war: If my contempt for war makes me unable to
grieve for the lost lives of the young dead soldiers, then my contempt for war does not arise
from respect for life. Honoring victims—and living veterans, for that matter—does not
require denying the moral ambiguity of war. Women and men who take up arms by choice
or by conscription take up that moral ambiguity along with their weapons. Regardless of
their willingness to serve, whatever they may believe about the war they are engaged in,
warriors take actions that contradict civilized value systems. We are raised to believe that
harming others is wrong, but we expect them to harm others. We are raised to believe that
disputes should be settled without fighting, but we expect them to fight disputes that we
can’t settle. Soldiers carry the moral ambiguity of war for the rest of us. It is easy and selfrighteous to blame them for that difficult job without recognizing how limited their choices
are. It is just as easy and self-righteous to deny the ambiguity, to pretend we believe that
anything done in war is justified if we believe the war is just.
This is the challenge for supporters of war: If the dead can’t be honored without
aggrandizing war or denying that even the most just war forces people to do wrong, then
honoring the dead isn’t showing respect for them. It’s only self-justification. We honor the
casualties of war by accepting that war’s moral ambiguity doesn’t belong to them; it belongs
to all of us who live in societies that have not yet learned how to live without war. We
should not ask them to carry it for us. We honor the fallen warriors by working to make a
society which does not require morally questionable actions to sustain it, and by working to
heal those whose minds and spirits have been wounded along with their bodies by the
ambivalent work they have carried on our behalf.
The young dead soldiers 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.” We decide what their lives
and deaths were given for. Their lives should never be forgotten. This does not mean we
should hold on to the hatreds and enmities that caused their deaths. We keep faith with
them by working for justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. We can make
peace and new hope the meaning of their lives, and of their deaths. Their death is not the
last full measure of their devotion. The world of wholeness and peace we build in their
memory is. And may our work to build that world be the last full measure of our devotion.