Today is Memorial Day, when we remember those who died in the military service of this country.  We often talk about such people as heroes, because they volunteer (or, in some cases, are required) to risk their lives for their country.  It’s a sacrifice that by its sheer scope demands honor.  But, for many of us, there’s some discomfort in this, too, because military service is not only sacrifice but also, often, aggression.  As such, the heroism of military service is often amplified or muted depending on perspective or context.   Do we view the Japanese soldiers who served and sacrificed in World War II as heroes?  If not, then how valuable is the heroism of our own soldiers in that war?  What is heroism if it ends at national borders?  Do we view the sacrifice of the Americans who gave up their lives on the beaches of Normandy as universally heroic, because they fought and defeated evil?  If so, what does that mean for the entire generation of young men who died, needlessly and by the millions, in World War I?  If heroism is dependent on the prevailing of some greater good, where is the heroism in dying in heaps in the oozing, shelled-out craters of Verdun, or in clouds of gas and torrents of machine gun fire, all to take a few scraps of dirt to be lost again the next day?

These are not easy questions.  This is, indeed, the central question of the central text of the modern Hindu tradition: the Bhagavad Gita (or “Song of God”).  The Gita begins with Arjuna, the great archer, on a battlefield as two armies assemble at the beginning of a war.  Arjuna asks his charioteer, Lord Krishna, to take him to the middle of the battlefield, so that he can see both his comrades and his opponents.  When Krishna did so, “Arjuna saw in both armies fathers, grandfathers, sons, grandsons; fathers of wives, uncles, masters; brothers, companions and friends.  When Arjuna thus saw kinsmen face to face in both lines of battle, he was overcome by grief and despair” and “with a sinking heart” he told Krishna that he could not fight.  “I do not wish to slay, even if I myself am slain,” said Arjuna.  “If we kill these evil men, evil shall fall upon us: what joy in their death could we have?” he asked his divine companion. “Even if they, with minds overcome by greed, see no evil in the destruction of a family, see no sin in the treachery to friends, shall we not, who see the evil of destruction, shall we not refrain from this terrible deed?”  The rest of the Gita is Krishna’s response to Arjuna, answering his questions, examining the nature of life and existence, and exhorting Arjuna to take up arms and perform his sacred duty on the field of battle.

The role of war in the Gita is a matter of extensive discussion and analysis.  The war can be, and often is, viewed as a metaphor for life, as the battle between good and evil taking place in the soul, with Krishna’s exhortation to fight understood as a command to act for good, even when your own family and friends represent the evil to be fought.  But the war can be, and often is, also viewed as a literal war, one in which both sides are equally human, and equally deserving of both judgment and mercy, and in which a soldier’s doing his duty is a sacred act in which he evinces his faith in God’s plan by surrendering his body to God’s will.  This latter interpretation is challenging, and finds equally challenging parallels in Christian scripture and thought (and that of other religious traditions), perhaps most notably in Kierkegaard’s treatment of the story of Abraham and Isaac.  We also see shades of this in our own history, when, for example, Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address recast the Civil War as God’s penalty imposed on this country for the sin of slavery.

I don’t intend to advocate for what I will call the “sacrament of war” interpretation of the Gita, nor to reject it.  But I do wish to recognize in it something that Lincoln recognizes again thousands of years later, on the steps of the United States Capitol: that the soldier in the war never fully understands the purpose of the war, but understands that war does have some purpose, and that this purpose, mysterious though it may be, must be placed above his or her own earthly existence.  So Lincoln says of the two sides of the Civil War: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered.  That of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes.”

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I live across the street from Oakland Cemetery, and it is my favorite piece of ground in this city, maybe in this world.  I walk through it often, contemplating the life I live now, and the lives lived by those now dead.  My two favorite places in Oakland Cemetery are the Confederate graveyard and the Potter’s Field.  Visually, no two places in Oakland Cemetery are more different.  The Confederate graveyard is focal point of the cemetery.  It spreads out, in rigid rows of small marble headstones, around a towering stone monument, a three-tiered obelisk, dedicated on Confederate Memorial Day in 1873 to “Our Confederate Dead.”  Nearly 7,000 Confederate soldiers are buried in Oakland Cemetery.  Among them are 3,000 young men whose identities remain unknown, commemorated only by the iconic Lion of Atlanta, the 1894 statue of a dying lion, sprawled in agony over a Confederate battle flag.

The Potter’s Field, by contrast, is simply a sunken, grassy field running along the brick wall at the far end of the cemetery.  Aside from the occasional wooden bench and the usual scattered trees (though much more spartan than the rich canopy of dogwoods and magnolias that grace the Confederate graveyard and the rest of the cemetery), the only structures that adorn the Potter’s Field are a small stone tablet on a brick pedestal to memorialize two children from the Briggs family that died in 1881 and 1882, and a single false crypt erected in 1977 on which a bronze plaque reads: “A Memorial to the Citizens of Atlanta Who Rest in Unmarked Graves.”  This is one of two clues to what the Potter’s Field really is: an unmarked mass grave, in which another 7,000 bodies are buried, nearly all of them black.

The other clue is the name, which comes from the Gospel of Matthew: “Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’  They said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’  And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.  But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since it is blood money.’  So they took counsel and bought with them the potter’s field as a burial place for strangers.  Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.” (Matthew 27:3-8)

Today, the Potter’s Field, this field of blood into which the poorest citizens of Atlanta were deposited, and into which already buried black men, women and children, slave and free person alike, were moved in order to make space in more desirable locations elsewhere in the cemetery, is used primarily as a place to walk dogs and sunbathe.  I offer no judgment on that use, as I walk my own dog there, and try to imagine what life was like for those who inhabited the bodies buried beneath our feet.

The Confederate graveyard and the Potter’s Field are my two favorite places, because they impose the ultimate perspective: that, with the passing of enough time, nearly all of us will be forgotten, and if we are remembered at all, we’re likely to be remembered eventually as villains, forever in stone clutching our outdated battle flags.

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This week, two men in Portland died by the knife of a deranged man on a city train.  The two men, one a recent college graduate, the other a city employee, father of four, and Army veteran, confronted a man who was berating two young women, one in a hijab, with the sort of anti-Muslim rhetoric that has become all too familiar.  This man then slit their throats, the father of four dying on the train and the recent college graduate dying hours later in the hospital, where a third victim of the knife attack remains in serious condition.  In response I wrote, among other things, that these three men (the two who died, and the third who remains hospitalized) were heroes: “They represent the best of this country, and that’s the lesson I choose to learn from this: for every villain marching down the aisle, there are countless heroes sitting beside you on the train.”

In response, I’ve been pointed to an opposing view, which posits that these men were not heroes, because what they did was not heroic, but merely the carrying out of our minimal ethical obligations, and that in celebrating the supposed heroism of white male saviors we obscure the perspective of abused women of color and simplify the moral choices we face into a false dichotomy between aggression and passivity, and a false choice between standing up and standing by, when in fact there are myriad ways to respond to hate that do not require confrontation and escalation.  While there is something to be learned from that perspective (which I have tried to describe here as honestly and charitably as I can), I reject that view.

There are parts of this contrary view that are, of course, absolutely correct.  Standing up to bigotry is not morally exceptional; it is morally required.  And, to reframe what transpired on that train in Portland as yet another story of the White Knight who gallops in to rescue women or people of color from broadly drawn embodiments of evil would be inaccurate and dishonest.  An action is imbued with heroism by its context and not its inherent form, so heroism need not always be aggressive or confrontational; it can be quiet and diplomatic.  Waging a war may be heroic, but avoiding one may be heroic too.  All of that is correct, and we all should arrive at a place where we understand all of that, and make ample room for it in our conceptions of heroism.  But to end at that place, and to conclude, on that basis, that giving up your life by doing what is morally required is not heroic but ordinary, is every bit as inaccurate and dishonest as failing to get there in the first place.

Start with this: if giving up your life doing what is right is not heroic, then what is?  Is heroism reserved for those who go above and beyond that which can be reasonably expected of human beings?  If so, are there any such heroes left?  Are our only heroes those who act on the scale of King and Mandela, Ghandi and Suu Kyi?  And, if so, how do we define the contours of that superhuman heroism? In some ways, each of them was superhuman, but in other ways they were deeply human.  Do we celebrate King’s ministry and activism but overlook his adultery?  Do we celebrate Ghandi’s resolve and leadership but overlook his racism?

If we only make room in our definition of heroism for those who act in morally exceptional ways, on which side of that defining line do we place Anne Frank?  Her heroism was supremely human and ordinary.  Indeed, that was its power, the eloquence and honesty of her words casting the inherent goodness beating in the human heart in high relief against the inhumanity and evil of Nazism.  Her talent may have been exceptional, but her moral standard was not—it was the same standard we all demand of one another, and that is why we mourn and treasure her as we do.  And, on which side of that defining line should we place Hans and Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose? They too gave up their lives resisting that same evil.  But when, in our minds, we place ourselves as students at the University of Munich in 1942, would we not demand of ourselves the same resistance and the same sacrifice?  Does that demand render the White Rose less than heroic?

In the last few months, I’ve been mesmerized by Yeats’ prophetic masterpiece, the “Second Coming.”  In it, he sees the weakening of the moral gravity of the universe, and asks, famously, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, [s]louches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  I shudder at the phrase every time I see it, even as I type it now, its words having become saturated with thoughts of the Holocaust, the Second World War and nuclear proliferation.   Yeats was an undeniable genius, who saw something warping of the mind of man even before the same was obvious to the naked eye.  But he also flirted with fascism and promoted eugenics.  Is he a hero or a villain?  Perhaps he was both.  So, will we tear down our statues of him, once enough time has passed that we only remember his villainy?  Maybe, and maybe we should.  After all, none of us is promised a future in which we are remembered well, not me, not you, and not Yeats.

What we are promised, however, are these few moments together on Earth, struggling through the same mysteries of purpose and meaning that vexed Arjuna and that haunted Lincoln.  When is violence required?  How do I resolve conflicting duties?  How do I know what is right?  These are the hard questions of living, and there are no shortcuts to answering them.  To say violence is never required is to fail to consider the brutal state of nature into which we are born and to elide the violence, military and otherwise, that has fashioned for us a state of relative comfort and privilege in which we have the peace and freedom to entertain questions of ethics and morality.  And to justify all violence on the basis of that peace and freedom which may be purchased by blood is to denigrate and commodify the sacrifice of those who gave their lives and bodies, soldiers and slaves alike, in the construction of our modern state. We did not ascend Maslow’s pyramid only to build for ourselves an elevator back to its ground floor.  We can recognize that we are destined for the Potter’s Field, a resting place bought with blood, without ritually retracing the path of Judas in endowing its creation.

Likewise, our conviction of our own righteousness, the faith in God or country or cause that allows us to take up arms in the metaphorical field of battle if not the literal one, must contain a self-awareness of its own limits.  Like the soldier who asks God’s assistance in wringing his bread from the sweat of the face of another man who reads the same Bible and offers the same prayer in return, we may subordinate our lives to greater purpose even as we acknowledge that we don’t, and can’t, fully understand that purpose, and that we may be doomed to be remembered after all, but more like Judas than Jesus.

And therein lies the point: we cannot control how we will be remembered, but we can control how we will remember others, and how we view them before they are gone.  We can choose to see in the person of Dr. King not a fallen hero, but a remarkable man.  We can see in his unfaithfulness, or in Ghandi’s bigotry, something recognizable and human, even amidst a body of work so astonishing as to appear superhuman.  And through that humanity, not in spite of it, we can raise them up as heroes, not because what they did was extraordinary, but because they were ordinary, and in their ordinariness they remind us of our own potential to do things that appear extraordinary.  And we can raise up the recent college graduate and the father of four who did what was morally required of them on that train in Portland, not because they went above and beyond moral expectations, because we recognize that to be human is to often fall short of what is morally required of us, and that bravery, even when it is required, is uncommon.  And we can raise up soldiers who have given their lives for their country, because we can understand that, as with those men on the train in Portland, the courage to put your own life aside in the service of a greater purpose is an act of supreme faith, if not in a just God then in a just world.  Where, at least, we share some common notions of what that just world looks like, we can celebrate that faith as heroism, as an inspiration to act in the world with that same kind of selfless purpose.  And, where, as with Our Confederate Dead, we see no justice in the world in which these men placed their faith, we can have the humility to judge not, though we know we’ll be judged, too, in time.

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I’ve answered no questions here about how we ought to remember or commemorate our dead, because these are unanswerable questions.  They are ones I think about as I walk my dog through the Potter’s Field; they are ones each person and each family inevitably considers for itself many times over.  But, in remembering people primarily as pieces of our own narratives, political or religious, personal or spiritual, it can be hard not to lose hold of our ideas of their humanity, hard not to convert their stories into our story.  And, in doing so, we consummate another tragedy, albeit one to which most of us are doomed: the tragedy of being forgotten, or being remembered mostly for our failings.   So, where possible, I try—and the operative word here is “try”—to remember the dead as human beings with their own rich and complete stories, and not as pieces of the larger narratives of which I am part.  I pass a Confederate grave and try to envision a young man from South Carolina who left home at nineteen and was afraid of dying, who worried about what would happen to his little brother, and who in a hot night far from the front swatted at gnats and longed for the touch of a woman.  And I think of two men on a train in Portland, who deserve a fate better than the rest of us, who deserve to be remembered not forgotten, and to be remembered for their best moments, because in their final act on this earth they did what was required: they demonstrated a transcendent faith in this world, and inspired in many of us a sense of pride in our human kind, and thereby strengthened our resolve to carry that faith forward.  That is heroism, and that is why we celebrate heroes.