patrickmurfin

We held our annual Memorial Day Sunday Service at the Congregational Unitarian Church yesterday.  I nearly earned a Purple Heart covering the event.  I tried to climb up on one of old pedestals around the monument on Woodstock Square that supported Civil War cannons before they were melted down for scrap in World War II to get a good angle for pictures.  Being well past my agile years—if there ever were any—I managed to slip off and fall into a bush and then onto a pile of fresh mulch.  Nothing was injured except my dignity and that is an item in such short supply that any diminuization is insignificant.

A scroll with more than 4080 images representing the American dead in the Iraq War stretched across one wall of the sanctuary.  Dave Drayer, who made the banner pointed out that more than 50,000 Americans have been wounded.  Upwards of 300,000 Iraqis are believed to be dead.  That would require a banner 70 times the length of this one.  Drayer is an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War who piloted some of the last evacuation flights from Saigon.


Tom Skiba, The Rev. Dan Larsen, and Peace &  Justice Committee Chair Ray Eberhardt (with flag) lead the silent march from the church to the Civil War Monument on Woodstock Square.


Members enter the Square and lay flowers at the base of the Civil War Monument.  For about ten years the Congregation has been laying flowers, a symbolic echo of an old Woodstock tradition.  In the 19th Century Woodstock residents would bring flowers to the railroad station and a special train would take them to Chicago to be left on the graves of Civil War veterans on Decoration Day.


Rev. Larsen leads a moment of silent meditation.


Leaving the Square.


Flowers lie upon the names of McHenry County’s Civil War dead.  A few years ago the name of all the known dead were added as an apron around the towering monument, which was donated to the city by the Grand Army of the Republic in the 1890’s.


Back at church the Unitarian Universalist Flaming Chalice burns underneath the Tree of Life symbol of the congregation.  At right is the flag donated to the congregation in memory of Thomas Loundsbury who was killed on the USS Arizona on December 1, 1941.  The son of the manager of the local A&P market and the town librarian, Loundsbury graduated from Woodstock High School just months before his death.  He was the first local casualty of World War II.  The day of his death Florence Loundsbury and the ladies of the church went ahead with their long planned winter diner.  They would not let a little thing like war interfere.  Mrs. Loudsbury didn’t learn of her son’s death until January.

 

Joan Skiba was an Army nurse in Vietnam.  She is an annual participant in this service.  This year she cited neglect of wounded troops by the Veteran’s Administration.   She demanded full and fair treatment of the injured instead of lip service to “supporting the troops.”  As always she ended with her remembrance of a dying young soldier “I called Red.” And as usual there was hardly a dry eye in the congregation.


Harold Rail, Joe Heinen, Sam Jones, and Dave Dreyer perform George Jones’ Fifty Thousand Names Carved in the Wall.


Rev. Larsen asks “How Do We Support Our Troops?”  He argues that, for him, the best way to support the troops is to end the war so they “don’t have to be killed and don’t have to kill.”  Like many other participants in the service, he wears a black arm band of mourning. 

We closed by singing the peace hymn This is My Song, words by Lloyd Stone to Finlandia by Jean Sibelius.

THIS IS MY SONG

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
  A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
          This is my home, the country where my heart is;
             Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
              With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
   And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
 And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,
  A song of peace for their land and for mine.