The Unclad Soul

Memorial Day is not a time for bragging. It is not a day of rolling out the big ships and the stealth bombers and waving flags. It is not a day to rile the enemy or to make threats to others in the world. It is a day to remember the fallen. To mourn those who gave their lives in the always bloody and violent dread and horror that war is. My father, two of my uncles, one of my aunts, and my older brother all served in the military and made it through WWII and the Vietnam War. I lost two boyhood friends in Vietnam. I helped carry the coffin of one of them and could not believe his 19 year old life was gone, forever. War is an offense to humanity. A brutal and often senseless act of murder and destruction.   Einstein once said, “ "Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." We have not yet learned that in our country or hardly anywhere in the world. Today we should mourn that too.  Copyright 2015 Timothy Moody

This comment is the best I've seen so far regarding the Boston tragedy. It comes from retired Anglican Bishop the Rev. Steven Charleston. It was posted on my friend Dale McNeil's page. "Why? Why the pointless cruelty, O God? Why the premeditated evil that comes to bring death, pain and sorrow to innocent lives and leaves us stunned to imagine a heart so cold it could conceive such an act? We cannot understand it, God, we cannot make sense of the senseless. And how should we respond even if we did understand? Tooth for tooth, eye for eye, would it end the madness or return the lost to live again? Come, Spirit of God, come stand with us in this darkness. Hold the fallen in your arms. Heal the injured. Comfort the broken-hearted. And if you cannot tell us why we do this to ourselves, show us how to love more deeply, that such pain will never be the final word, but rather mercy that needs no explanation."