A Memorial Day Reflection

- The Rev. Stephen B. Snider

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendered is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth,Inspired hath in every holt and heath, The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne, Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne .... Of Engelonde to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke ....

Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales circa 1387)

I have been fortunate. Fortunate enough to have made the pilgrimage to Canterbury more than once. Fortunate for someone who grew up assuming life's experience from birth to death would be defined geographically between two rivers - the Mississippi and the Missouri. Growing up, living and growing old locally is not a bad thing. In fact, it is pretty good. With few exceptions my parents, grandparents and great grandparents and their parents, too, lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. The good in that? Familiarity, continuity, security, dependability - all these things were enhanced in the more rooted generations of my family. Irene's, too. Her family had a local custom. Each newborn was introduced to 'Ma' Kale, Irene's grandmother, who even at age 100 would bounce the baby on her knee and then announce to the clan, "We'll keep it."  The tradition ended for eternity just before our children were born. I had hoped to see the look on Ma Kale's face as she put first Matt and then Steve - both tipping the scales at 10 lbs - on her knee.  

Irene and I were not the first to expand the geographical boundaries of our families. Both of our fathers were. It's just that, unlike ours, their migration was neither voluntary nor permanent. World War II. One crossed the Atlantic and one the Pacific. One was Army and the other was Navy. After the war they met for the first time at our wedding. Thereafter I do not recall them having much to say to each other about Army/Navy games contested here in Philly. They didn't have anything to say about the war either. Ask them and the answer was, "You don't want to know." Except that I did.

I remember the first time I walked into that chapel inside ancient and immense Canterbury Cathedral, standing alone in the little room - there was enough space to swing a sword - where Thomas a' Becket, the hooly blisful martir, was murdered in 1170. I was the next in a line of supplicants who have been making the same pilgrimage for over eight hundred years. Was it a religious experience? Yes. How do I know? Feeling overwhelmed by it all and knowing I was present in a moment beyond myself are pretty good hints.

Later Irene and I undertook another pilgrimage. To England again, then Normandy, and lastly Belgium. It was the route my father took. Places like Azeville, Negreville and Ocquier don't appear on travel maps but I know where they are. I plotted them. We stood on Utah Beach and in Norman countryside where my father was, too. And if another sense of being overwhelmed were to occur, I expected it to happen in the little places almost but not quite forgotten to history. Places where my father and those like him asked, "Is this the last place I will ever see?" "Will it happen here?" For some it was the last place. It did happen there.

Time erases so much. Because it does, just as in that small Canterbury chapel, I needed my God-given imagination as I walked through bunkers my father's battalion helped capture. Then we came home. And I returned knowing my father in a way I never knew him before. That, of course, was the religious experience. It is impossible to replicate with every passing year; still, I raise some remnant of it on Memorial Day. And I do not forget those for whom it was 'the last place' they ever saw.