| HOME » online historical archives » Millburn Cemetery » Memorial Day Services in 2002 » |
| [2001] [2003] |
In the summer of 1893, a 34-year old professor of
English literature at Wellesley College in
Massachusetts did what most Americans do in the
summer; she took a vacation trip. It was her first
venture to the American west. On the way she stopped
to visit the 1893 Columbian Exposition – The Chicago
World's Fair – where she marveled at the Fair's White
City of buildings and exhibitions proclaiming
America's technological successes, its business wealth
and cultural sophistication.
Later, during her stay in Colorado Springs, she did
the usual tourist things, including a climb of Pike's
Peak to watch a sunrise. That evening, recalling her
view from Pike's Peak of what she described as "the
expanse of mountain ranges and sea-like sweep of the
plains," she wrote what has become a favorite
patriotic hymn. The author was Katherine Lee Bates,
and you know her words:
The fact is that reality hardly matched those words in
1893. Just beyond the "alabaster city" of the World's
Fair lay the real streets of Chicago – teeming slums
filled with waves of immigrants, harsh working
conditions which had ignited the Haymarket Square Riot
of 1886 protesting for an eight-hour workday and which
a year later in 1894 would lead to the Pullman Strike
responding to drastic cuts in workers' wages. "Land of
opportunity, you say," a Chicago worker snarled in
those days, "You know damn well my children will be
where I am – that is, if I can keep them out of the
gutter."
That song has been much on our lips since September 11
of last year, and the facts of our own experience
continue to ask us, as we sing those familiar words,
what we are to do when reality does not match our
dreams. The parade marches by with flag snapping
smartly in the breeze, and a shiver of pride runs up
our spine. But we know that today's "alabaster cities"
do not gleam "undimmed by human tears." We live in a
world menaced by terror, convulsed by animosity and
prostrated by poverty and hopelessness. And the events
of the past year have taught us that even in our
suburban comfort we cannot escape the misery and fear
that others have lived with daily for so long.
The easiest thing will be to let either our dreams or
that reality shape us, but how that would distort the
spirit of Katherine Lee Bates' words. If only our
dreams shape our personal and social lives, we run the
risk of ignoring those matters of justice, compassion
and human dignity which cry out to us from the streets
of our communities, from the cities and farmlands of
our nation, from the far flung places of our world.
But if we allow only the reality of humanity's all-
too-evident misery and beastliness to shape us, we
shall more than likely sink into sneering cynicism or
cowering defeat. And if we were to do either, the
spirits of those who lie here and in a thousand other
graveyards who risked their "lives and fortunes and
sacred honor" to make a dream of freedom and human
dignity a reality have every right to rise up and call
us cowards.
For there is a third way. We can use our dreams to
shape the reality. Reality presents us only with the
hard facts of circumstances and the limited results of
our cleverness or our stupidity and nothing more,
while our dreams push us to strive for more.
Many years after Katherine Lee Bates wrote her song,
someone suggested that she write a new verse to
express a new longing for world peace and the unity of
human life. She declined, saying that she hoped rather
that persons singing her song would imagine the words
"from sea to shining sea" as beginning at the Atlantic
coast but moving around the globe in the opposite
direction to the Pacific coast so as to embrace the
entire world. Try singing those familiar words that
way and see how the dream grows.
That is what our dreams of liberty and equality and
human dignity for all, undergirded by God's steadfast
love and justice, tell us Memorial Day and in a world
made terribly different since September 11. The dream
does not match the reality, but that is all the more
reason to sing with all our might. For we shall not be
finished until reality matches our dreams and until
God's gracious goodness not only blesses us but
embraces the globe "from sea to shining sea."
| [2001] [2003] |