Memorial Day

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.
Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

~ John McCrae, 1915.

John McCrae wrote those lines in the spring of 1915, sitting in the back of an ambulance near Ypres after burying a friend. He drafted the poem in about twenty minutes and nearly threw it away. It outlived him.

Memorial Day, more than a long weekend or the unofficial start of summer. It is a day for faces and names, for people who “lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved” and who did not come home.

I am not a sentimental patriot. But I do believe that love, at its core, is costly. “Greater love has no one than this,” Jesus said, “that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13). He was speaking of himself. Yet the shape of that love still echoes in anyone who walks into harm’s way so that others do not have to.

We owe them more than a cookout.

McCrae’s poem ends with a charge. The dying hand the living a torch and ask us to hold it high. In 1915, that meant winning a war. Underneath that, the question is simpler and harder: will you let what we gave be forgotten?

Remembrance is not a feeling; it is a practice. Every Lord’s Day we gather around a table with bread and cup because he told us, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11.24). Memory becomes an act of loyalty, a refusal to reduce a sacrifice to a date on the calendar.

Memorial Day can work like that if we let it. Not nostalgia. Not politics. Just a quiet fidelity to those who went before us and did not return.

Take a moment today. Say a name. Mean it. And remember, above all, the Lord whose death we proclaim until he comes.

~PW 🌮🛶