By Father Leonidas Contos, New York, December 8, 1965
As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. Psalm 103:15-16
If we were to take this single verse from the familiar Psalm, and consider it in isolation from the rest of what is a glorious hymn of praise, no doubt it would fit the mood of this unhappy hour. But this is not at all what the Psalmist is saying. And we can no more read this passage out of the context of what goes before and what follows, than we can view life out of the context of God’s love, where all life is rooted; and so it is given to us, beloved, to seek to rediscover the God of love and mercy in the depths of our own sorrow. It is not God’s nature but ours that God should emerge more real somehow in the darkness than in the brightness of the day; that His mercy should be disclosed to us more fully in the valley of our pain than on the peaks of our earthly happiness. It is for us to remember it as well. To remember, not that everything vanishes into the earth, but that the gift of life is a provisional one, to be redeemed one day for that which is no longer contingent and passing, but free and everlasting as is He who frees it from decay and corruption.
The ancient Church, much acquainted both with the hostility of the world and with violent death, came to regard dying for the faith as a kind of baptism, indeed more glorious than baptism, for this was the most telling witness one could give of his faith in Christ and his devotion and obedience to the principles of the Christian Gospel. Those principles survived in a world that long and fiercely contested Christ’s sovereignty; and gradually, by the grace with which they lived, and the grace with which they died, the Christian martyrs, Christ’s witnesses, overcame the world in His name.
But the world never gives us the luxury of permanent victory. Christ is denied by some, and His dominion disputed, in every generation; the household of faith is by its very nature situated in enemy territory. We cannot, as Christians, contend that there is any such thing as a “holy war,” for war is always a blasphemy against the love of God and the sanctity of human life. Nevertheless, there are sacred things which, when assailed by another, require a man’s willingness to defend them in obedience, obedience “even unto death.” It is in this sense that the death of a young man on a distant battlefield may be seen as a form of martyrdom, of witness. Out of the unspeakable agony of war, the calm and measured thoughts of an American officer, expressed in his “Airman’s Prayer,” commend themselves to us at such a time as this:
“Let duty to God and country be my most sublime aspirations, and kindle my heart and soul with the determination to die rather than yield the ideals of my world. O God, my Father, whatever duty befalls me when my country calls, may I acquit myself as worthy of Thy guidance.”
We should be truly bereft if we permitted ourselves to believe that the great cost of our faith—part of which this son of the Church has paid, part of which his sorrowing parents are paying, part of which burdens every one of us—is not worth laying down. And we should be, as St. Paul says, of all men most to be pitied if we were to forget, while caught in the grip of mourning, that “the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting . . .” (Psalm 103: 17).
~Adapted from Leonidas Contos, In Season and Out of Season: A Collection of Sermons by Father Leonidas Contos
