A knight and his men return to their castle after a long hard day of fighting.

"How are we faring?" asks the king.

"Sire," replies the knight, "I have been robbing and pillaging on your behalf all day, burning the towns of your enemies in the west."

"What?!" shrieks the king. "I don't have any enemies to the west!"

"Oh, no..." says the knight. "Well, you do now."

I'm glad you liked that. I pulled two more off the internet:

A trio of old veterans were bragging about the heroic exploits of their ancestors one afternoon down at the VFW hall.

"My great grandfather, at age 13," one declared proudly, "was a drummer boy at Shiloh."

"Mine," boasts another, "went down with Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn."

"I'm the only soldier in my family," confessed vet number three, "but if my great grandfather was living today he'd be the most famous man in the world."

"Really? What'd he do?" his friends wanted to know.

"Nothing much. But he would be 165 years old."

3 During the Persian Gulf War, I was assigned to go to Saudi Arabia. As I was saying good-bye to my family, my three-year-old son, Christopher, was holding on to my leg and pleading with me not to leave. "No, Daddy, please don't go!" he kept repeating.

We were beginning to make a scene when my wife, desperate to calm him, said, "Let Daddy go and I'll take you to get a pizza."

Immediately, Christopher loosened his death grip, stepped back and in a calm voice said, "'Bye, Daddy."

As cute as that story is, the distraction of pizza will only last so long. When daddy doesn't come home that night and for a long time, Christopher is going to feel it. And sometimes Daddies or Mommies do not make it home at all.

That is why we have memorial day. Memorial Day, at its best helps us to turn our view from the chaos of war, to remember and reconnect with “divine order” that is based in love. At best it helps us to shift our focus from what we abhor to what we value. It can help us shift from fear to love, from resentment to gratitude. Today have remembered and reclaimed something of what is present to us.

Everyone regardless of their politics, mourns when their loved one. We can distract ourselves with pizza for only so long, and then the pain demands attenton from us.

There is a need for mourning. The Talmud instructs: “Let your heart be broken every day.” Whoah, tall task, huh? Yet, I have no doubt of the wisdom of it though. I am very grateful to have been given guidance, instruction and support to learn how to grieve.

Here's the thing. The times in my life that I have allowed and expressed pure grief are relatively few. Relative, that is to all the times that I have felt bad, but not actually touched the purity of grief. Instead of feeling the true sweet pain of losing of something precious, I learned to latch on to the pacifier of a mental conclusion. “I see how it is” “Screwed again.” “Those so and sos always do that.”

I am in no way alone in this habit. All of us are conditioned similarly. We learn to turn from our heart to our head. We learn to enthrone our mind and ego's capacity to make judgments. Some of these judgments, these pronouncements may seem positive. We might have the habit of blocking our grief with pronouncements of truisms, such as “no use crying over spilled milk. “ The net result is always the same. We are left with thoughts, limiting beliefs and we are distracted from the journey that moves us through our pain to reconnect with something completely precious inside us.

Over the past twenty plus years I have had several people express dismay and perplexity at not being able to cry on the occasion of the loss of a parent, spouse or friend? “What is wrong with me?” they said either explicitly or through the tone of voice.

Humans get so good at doing “business as usual.” But experience and our internal knowledge call us to grieve. We have seen this prescribed culturally in movies and books. We have seen others cry when someone dies, and we may tell ourselves that we “should” be grieving. There is also something that urges us from inside, that challenges our habit of acting as if nothing has changed.

We want to grieve. Yet if we have practiced distracting ourselves from the pain of loss, ... if thousands upon thousands of times we have carried out the training pattern to distract ourselves from the pain inside, then it's not surprising that we might find it difficult to grieve. If we have trained ourselves to say “oh well, I always look on the bright side of life,” or “everything happens for a reason” we are likely to go there, to stop short of being able to turn into our pain in order to find what is most precious. And the critical conclusions have the same blocking effect as do the so called cheery ones. It is simply the flip side of the same distracting pattern when we say “life is just unfair” or “there is no such thing as God.” In the pain of our loss we may judge the event as bad, wrong, pointless. And these beliefs actually distance us from the raw sweet pain of grief.

I say “sweet” pain of grief, because I and many others have expressed that when we break through all our diagnoses, judgments, false positive attitudes, when we reach and connect with what is most true inside of ourselves there is always a sense of relief.

I am not saying that it doesn't hurt. Oh yes, grief hurts. It hurts worse than any of the million times we have buffered ourselves and armored ourselves with limiting beliefs. However, we are relieved to finally feel and be able to get through that which has been gnawing at us from the inside.

You see most if not all of the conclusions we make about painful events limit us and block us from the fullness of life. A conclusion is often the place our mind gets tired of thinking, gets tired of trying to figure it all out.

And we do love to figure things out. So we think that we can think our way out of this challenge, without having to feel it. Memorial day for many U.U.'s is a day to figure out war, to try to come up with the most politically correct stance. Oh I sound as if I'm talking about others, but I know intimately the desire to be smart, to be right, to be hip, to have the party line.

Memorial Day at its best is not about politics. Its about moving toward wholeness by admitting that sometimes it seems to us that we have lost a part of ourselves, and finding a way to move toward reclaiming what we can. It's about remembering those who volunteered, were drafted, seduced or coerced to serve in our country's military. Remembering means re-membering, reclaiming those members of the body of humanity, that we have pushed into any of the many categories of other-hood. “Oh they are one of the unfortunate ones now.” “That's just the way it is, I must endure.” “I must cope.” “There is nothing I can do about that.” These are just more conclusions, more attempts to enthrone the ego, and separate us from the glory of life dynamic, of life flowing into us, life eternal.

Yes there is something you can do. There is always a way to reconnect with the source of life; always a way to plug in, or re-tune our receivers to the source of life.

Some take their pain and build monuments to the fallen soldiers. Monuments are like public tombstones. They acknowledge that someone in our family, or in our community has served. More often than not they acknowledge that the soldiers lost their lives. Most would say that fallen soldiers gave their lives defending our country. This is certainly true, always true to some extent. But society is prohibited from questioning the notion that wars can be offensive as well as defensive.

Monuments are more than tombstones. They elevate the fallen to the status of hero. The common assumption, one that is repeated year after year, is we enjoy the life we have because soldiers fought a war to win us this life. I do not doubt that such has been true- at least some of the time. Neither am I denying the value of monuments.

But where are the monuments that tell us we could achieve even greater conditions through peace? I've seen countless war monuments and statues of soldiers, and virtually no statues for the civilian armies of people that give their lives, often swimming upstream from established societal patterns in order to bring to fruition visions for healthier communities. What message do our memorials leave for the next generation? Do these attempts to honor our fallen soldiers help us to keep a realistic sense of the costs of war? Because people are desperate to find meaning when young ones have been killed, they sometimes are quick to assert the necessity and the value of war. Can we have a monument that questions the assumption that war has to be waged in the first place?

I have deep respect for citizens who have knowingly and willingly gave or risked their life in order to advance a greater social order and/or greater conditions for humanity. Many of you know that I have a large family, my mother's 13 siblings gave me over 140 cousins or children of cousins. Year after year he family newsletter boasts of another entering the military. Having children and going into the military seems to be the way to get acknowledged. Recently when my youngest cousin Teresa enlisted, I couldn't help but wonder if our family's parading of our soldiers, and my silence hadn't set her up. What picture did we give her of the path soldiers face?

How do we grieve these costs, and more importantly how do we get clear not only of what we don't want, but of what we do want?

Remembering the preciousness, the worth and dignity of the men and women who are serving or have served in the military seems an important step. This binds us together. We may become grateful for our country, and for the life we have here.

Perhaps what we also need is to remember the worth and dignity of the people of Iraq, Afganistan, and Iran. Perhaps we can pray not only for our soldiers but for the peace and wellbeing of the lands and the people we send them to protect. Perhaps we can begin to turn our focus from what we don't want, to what we do want.

Railing against war, will not bring us peace.

When a loved one dies how to we grieve? We write a eulogy. We tell stories. We have a memorial service, and we recapture something of their essence. We remember their beauty and the way their life has touched our own. This enables us to cry, to feel the sweet pain of the loss. It can also help us to bind the wound, to build a bridge across the chasm, to recapture and reclaim our connection with them.

We have set aside time at this season of the year to remember the fallen, not only the fallen soldiers but all who have fallen in war. Let us take a few moments right now to think with gratitude for those who have died. This is not an exercise in feeling bad. That's not what we are asking.

This is an exercise in remembering, in reclaiming, in reconnecting to the humanity of all our brothers and sisters. Start anywhere you can create some gratitude. If that is for the sacrifice of soldiers and for their families, start there. Put them in your heart, and pray for their peace, for their healing, for their well being. But don't stop there. Find anything or anyone about the situations and appreciate them. Forgive them. Just send them love. Wish them well. Imagine health and healing coming to them. Imagine war torn lands, and imagine healing rain and sun that allows for new life. Picture schools and playgrounds being built.

There is an order to this Universe, an order to the web of life. There is also chaos. There is entropy, decay, destruction, the breakdown of systems and death. Such is the nature of this existence.

We might think that we would have it otherwise, but what we love most about life is the contrast, the challenge, and the opportunity to choose life. If there was no challenge, if there was no chaos, no death what would there be to choose? If every one of our actions had the same outcome, where would be the choice in that?

But we live in a world where what we choose has an impact. Our greatest joy in life is choosing courage over fear. Perhaps that is what we respect most about our soldiers. They, even more than we face a landscape that is far from paradise. War brings out the worst in many people. And yet many who survive do so because they carry the picture of their loved ones back home. They journey onward and are buoyed not by hate, but by the love of land, and country in their heart.

And each of us also faces landscapes not entirely to our choosing. We can be grateful that the landscape we see is not the hell of war, but something at least a little closer to paradise. And before us is order and chaos.

What picture of loved ones carries us forward? What vision of home gives us the willingness to walk the landscapes before us? What beauty have we known, do we remember or do we dream of, that gives us cause to live?

Do we have the courage and the strength to imagine a better world? Can we see only chaos, corruption, hatred? Or can we find in every scenario the forces of life ever close to us, ready to nurture and feed us, to carry us to a new day? Can we dare to allow our heart to speak to us? Can we allow it to cry, express and release the pain of disappointments? Can we allow the tenderness and dynamic life energy to renew us and remind us of the beauty in our hearts?

Do we have the courage to dream of scenarios sketched by the longings of our heart? Can we imagine schools and playgrounds, and clean air and water, and parents and community for every child? Can we imagine a day when there will be no more enemies? When everyone will sit at the welcome table, Iraquis and Americans, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians, nonbelievers, and cultural creatives?

Can we start today to create and live in the world of our choosing? Can we find the courage to be peace makers in times of conflict. Can we find love great enough to heal divisions and fears? Can we take another step down this path, yea though we have wandered off a thousand times? Can we let peace begin with us?

May it be so!