Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
GRAYSON: Christmas tells us who we are, why we are alive
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
For Christians, Christmas
is the celebration of one of the most significant religious, historical
and cultural events in the Western world. It marks a turning point in
human history, a new era for the human race.
Two thousand years
ago, the world was very different from what it is today. This was true
not only of material surroundings, possessions and institutions, but
more strikingly of human attitudes, relationships and beliefs. Women
were considered inferior to men and had comparatively few rights.
Fathers had absolute authority over their children, even to the point of
putting them to death. Marriage was dissoluble for trifling reasons.
Manual labor was relegated to slaves, who were considered chattel and
the property of their masters. Religion was intertwined with the state,
with the emperor standing at the head of both.
Then, on a day now known as Christmas,
in the words of St. John, the āWord was made flesh, and dwelt among
us.ā This event changed the world. God had come to Earth, conceived by
the Holy Spirit, born of a virgin, in the person of Jesus Christ.
God assumed a human nature, with all of its joys and agonies, trials
and tribulations, thoughts and emotions, sufferings and death.Jesus
did not come as God in the guise of man, or as part God and part man,
nor was His nature a mixture of the divine and the human. Rather, He
became truly and completely human while remaining truly and completely
God. With all of the human weakness He assumed, there was never any
lessening of his divine nature. His actions and teachings were always
those of the Son of God. This is the essence of the incarnation, the union of two natures, the divine and the human, in a single person.
Christ
chose to come into the world in the most humble manner. When Mary was
far from her Nazarene home, in the little town of Bethlehem, as St. Luke
describes, āshe brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in
swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room
for them in the inn.ā He whom the angels adore in heaven came into our
world in a stable, among the animals, under a roof not His own. As St.
John says, āHe came unto His own, and his own received Him not.ā Yet,
the result of this Nativity was profound. He who was the maker of the
world, before whom āthe pillars of the heavens tremble,ā took on the
lowliness of man and thus exalted the dignity of humanity. He assumed a
nature that was human in every way except sin and united it to himself.
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
said this was ānot so much the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, as
the taking of manhood into God.ā This is a privilege that not even the
angels received.
Archbishop Sheen further described the effect of this event:āBethlehem
became a link between heaven and earth; God and man met here and looked
each other in the face. In the taking of human flesh, the Father
prepared it, the Spirit formed it, and the Son assumed it. He Who had an
eternal generation in the bosom of the Father now had a temporal
generation in time. He Who had His birth in Bethlehem came to be born in
the hearts of men.āThrough the incarnation, our relationship
with our Creator changed. God became a personal God rather than an
unseen omnipresence. Now He had a human nature and form, with
experiences to which we could relate.
People saw Jesus,
heard Him, spoke with Him, ate with Him, and touched Him. Since
earliest antiquity, there have been prophets and seers, priests and
disciples, holy men and preachers. Yet God always had been distant,
ethereal, mysterious. Now for the first and only time in history, God
came to Earth and lived a human life ā having parents and relatives,
mingling with neighbors, practicing a religion, learning a trade,
working and finally assuming his public mission to teach, gather
followers, suffer and die on a cross. These are human experiences we can
relate to.
This first Christmas signaled a new era for the human race. Jesus,
through His teachings and the church He left behind, brought about
profound changes in the world. His doctrines on the dignity of the
person elevated women to equality with men, gave respectability to
physical labor, asserted the legitimate uses of private property and
showed the injustice and immorality of slavery. His concern for children
and the family established the sanctity and indissolubility of
marriage, extolled children and elevated the role of social justice and
the proper use of riches. His obedience to the ecclesiastical and civil
strictures of Judaism and Rome showed the importance of law and oneās
duty to oneās country. His statement, āRender, therefore, to Caesar the
things that are Caesarās, and to God the things that are Godāsā
presented a new relationship between the state and the church.
Today,
too many of us ignore Our Lordās teachings or warp them to fit our
desires. We choose among his words, rejecting what we do not like and
accepting only those that please us. As a result, we have forgotten why
we were created.
In a sermon on Christmas Day 1976, Cardinal Karol
Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, directly addressed this
attitude, saying:
āContemporary people in this last quarter of the
20th century, whose human dignity has been ignored and infringed in so
many ways, come to Christās
stable in Bethlehem to ask who they are and why they are in the world,
bringing with them their existential anxiety. And when they come to
Bethlehem, like each of us, they find the reply in the manger on the
straw: āI have given them power to become children of God.ā This small,
weak infant, who was born and forced to stay outside the town in a
stable, has given this power ā and he still gives it to us who live in
the 20th century and whose human dignity and essence have been so
compromised that we no longer really understand that we were made in the
image and likeness of God. However, this truth alone gives meaning to
our human existence, and only in this truth do we find the answer to the
questions of who we are and why we are alive.ā Washington Times Lawrence P. Grayson is a visiting scholar in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America.
