'This Too Is Us'

April 1, 2022
Cheyenne Boon MDiv II - April 1, 2022 | Morning Prayers
Image courtesy of Cheyenne Boon, MDiv '23.

Cheyenne Boon, MDiv '23, Seminarian, delivered the following remarks at Morning Prayers in Harvard's Memorial Church on April 1, 2022.

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Our reading this morning comes from an interview with the writer Barry Lopez, published in December 2019. When asked to reflect on justice and reconciliation, Lopez says, "Myself, I've got to get to a place where I can accept what Stalin did to people in the Siberian gulags, the scale of it. This too is us. This is what we do." He says, "That's why I told my grandson. As we stood over the wreckage of a battleship at Pearl Harbor, 'This is what we do.'

He had no idea that we killed each other on that scale, but I could say to him, I love you and I want you to know that this is what we do. And as you grow, you will see a way to help. And I hope that when you do, you choose that path, no matter how hard it is."

Some of you may remember, a Faith In Life Forum offered last semester by the Reverend Elam Jones, on the Sunday before Veterans Day. He invited us to consider what it means to house a war memorial in a Church, or perhaps to house a Church in a war memorial. What is it that we wish to memorialize here? Does a monument to war glorify violence? Or is this building a call for peace?

Before we heard from Reverend Jones, I never thought to ask those questions. The first time I walked into this sanctuary for worship, it was Barry Lopez I heard in my mind. I looked around the walls of our Church and it was clear to me that it was built as a memorial to one more and then another one needed to be added, and another one and another one. And we could add more if we wanted. Some aren't even on the walls yet. I saw all the names of the dead for the first time and I thought, "This is what we do." And it's easy, perhaps, if you live a life like mine, to forget that. Even now, when parts of our world are at war, when people not so unlike me are learning to make Molotov Cocktails in former dance halls, my life continues on, mostly unchanged. But it's not simply that the violence of war is not often front of mind for me. It's also easy to forget that I personally, that each of us, is capable of the kind of violence that took the lives of the people named on these walls. I mean this in the sense that we are people and the people we honor here were killed by people who were just as human as we are. When the circumstances of our lives point us toward violence, we hurt each other sometimes. "This too is us. This is what we do."

So if the question, "Why have a war memorial at all?" Is answered by the first part of what Barry Lopez says that, "This is us," then the question, why a war memorial in a Church, is answered by what Lopez says next to his grandson. "As you grow, you will see a way to help." Church, I hope, is one place we go to find that way, to discover the work being asked of us in this life, to find the courage to act on what we know and the resilience to keep at it, when we're not sure if we'll succeed, to find support in community and in the spirit of God. And at its best, the work we do together in this Church, our worship and our prayer, our hospitality and our conversation is itself a kind of help. It is work that moves us towards the best ways we know to be together, toward justice and peace and away from the worst things we are capable of. What we do here, all of us, if we do it well, has the potential to remake a tiny piece of our world. Maybe too, if we're lucky, into something more like the Kingdom of God.

Would you pray with me? God of justice, God of mercy, You called us to love our enemies as You called us to love our neighbors. The news each day reminds us that we have not done so. Forgive us, O Lord for the ways we are complicit, even in the violence we do not understand. Be with all those whose lives are marked by violence, both its victims and its perpetrators. Lead us to see in ourselves and each other no more and no less than people. Help us to accept all that we and others are capable of. Call us to something good, that we might be of help in this world so in need of a new way. Grant us Thy peace. Grant us Thy peace. Grant us Thy peace. Amen.