Tuesdays in the Chapel
February 5, 2013 ~ 8:30 am ~ MIT Chapel
Prelude: Adagio (Trio Sonata
1) ~ J. S. Bach (1685-1750) ~ Lee Ridgway, organ
Reading: The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord
Tennyson
Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
....
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
When my friend Bish spoke
last semester and quoted Kipling, I was a bit jolted by the tone. I knew the
poem and believed in being dutiful, but I would not have spoken of myself as
being called by a sense of duty. As I
have hoped it would do for all of us, these reflections cause reflection and
eventually I concluded that my initial reaction was wrong.
I grew up on the edge of
World War II and that war shaped my generation. We were not the “Greatest
Generation”, but we were their sons and drank deeply of their expectations. The
challenge was always, if we were called upon would we be dutiful and
courageous. The answer was yes. I grew up expecting at any moment to see the
enemy however defined, German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese coming over the sea
wall in Santa Monica.
You cannot live forever in
that kind of perpetual conflict and I think that the decline of the willingness
to be forever ready to do battle fueled the tensions that marked our country
during the Viet Nam era. On the one hand we had to look at what was happening
in South East Asia, the French had been defeated, but we had also to deal with
our own exhaustion from having continually to be ready to main the barricades.
We had to mute the voices that called us to act with courage.
Tennyson captured the moment
when you recognize that your leaders are flawed and you are called to respond.
What do you do? A generation said: “Hell No, we won’t go” and we have been
working out the implications ever since. It is ironic that the voice of the
anti-war movement, John Kerry, is now Secretary of State. But it is also clear
that for my generation, in my family, we were called to embody courage. What it
means to be courageous was being redefined.
On Sunday, quietly behind the
hype of the Super Bowl there was another celebration that is appropriate for us
to remember and it embodied the images I was taught to honor. Sunday, February
3, was 4 Chaplains Day. It is a day worth remembering. Seventy years ago off
Newfoundland, the troop ship Dorchester was torpedoed by a German submarine.
There were 904 men aboard the ship and only 230 survived. The ship was carrying
nearly twice the number of troops it was designed to carry and many were below
deck when the torpedo hit. The chaplains on board took charge, restored a sort
of calm and directed folk to their lifeboats. The chaplains were all First
Lieutenants, recently graduated from the Chaplain’s School at Harvard and on
their way to their first assignment.
George L. Fox lied about his age to enlist in
the Army during WWI where he was awarded several medals, including the Purple
Heart. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1934, and reentered the Army as
a Chaplain in 1942.
Alexander D. Goode was a Jewish Rabbi and the
son of a Rabbi. He was educated at Hebrew Union College and earned the PhD at
Johns Hopkins. After Pearl Harbor he volunteered as an Army Chaplain.
Clark V. Poling was the son of a Baptist
minister. Educated at Yale Divinity School, he volunteered as an Army Chaplain
because he wanted to face the same dangers other men were facing.
John P. Washington, a Catholic priest, was
educated at Seton Hall and Immaculate Conception Seminary.
When life jackets ran out, they each took
theirs off and gave then away. When last seen they had linked arms and were
saying their prayers and singing hymns. They received the Purple Heart
posthumously and it was determined that they could not receive the Medal of
Honor because their service had not taken place under enemy fire.
The Charge of the Light
Brigade and such stories as this were part of a shared mythology. I can still
see Errol Flynn in the movie that enshrined the brigade. And there are a set of
other movies that fall in that category including Four Feathers, The Lives of
the Bengal Lancers, Gunga Din that taught you what to do when you were afraid
or called upon to step forward. And out of the same milieu came the feminine
model in the story of Clara Barton who went to the Crimea to care for the
wounded and later founded the American Red Cross. There was heroism enough to
go around.
In my family you were
expected to do what was asked of you and it was understood that your life was
to be lived in the context of the poetry of the 23rd Psalm. Held in
the hand of God, cared for by Divine presence, the future stretched out before
us. And life since has been lived in the ying and yang of expectation and
context. Sometimes we feel cared for and sometimes we feel alone but we move
always forward.
I still take comfort in those
images and regret that grade B movies now have less noble stories to tell
although Django Unchained has aspirations and Zero Dark Thirty reminds us that
the call to courageous action with all its conflicts and contradictions is
still part of our national life. The
take away for the morning is to remember that the context is not simply
individual heroics, but the shared mythology of a community that understands
our interconnectedness and our accountability to one another. It is not simply
the enemy coming over the walls but it is also four men of different traditions
linking arms and stepping forward as models for us all.
Speaker ~ Robert M. Randolph, Chaplain to the Institute
Reading: Psalm 23, NRSV
The
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He
makes me lie down in green pastures;
He
leads me beside still waters;
He
restores my soul.
He
leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
Even
though I walk through the darkest valley,
I
fear no evil;
for
you are with me;
Your
rod and your staff they comfort me.
You
prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You
anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely
goodness and mercy shall follow me
All
the days of my life.
And
I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
My
whole life long.
Postlude: Praeludium in G Minor ~ Franz
Tunder (1614-1667) ~ Lee Ridgway
