Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Today I am travelling up to Gettysburg for another Staff Ride with students from the Staff College. The weather this weekend looks like it will be spectacular for the visit, praise be Al Gore for the great weather, but admittedly weather like this probably isn’t that great for us in the long run, so say the climate scientists and researchers that I trust to tell the truth, but I digress…
Gettysburg is a good place for me to visit. It is a place that helps remind me that even in the midst of the most hateful, politically divided period of our history since the Civil War Era, which spans the 1850s, the war, Reconstruction, and the return of White Rule, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, that good has triumphed over evil more than once. That fact helps keep me grounded in history and reminds me that no-matter how hard the fight is that we must resist tyranny, racism, discrimination, and injustice at every opportunity, even when the odds are against us.
Gettysburg inspires me for many reasons. I cannot go there without sensing the spirits of the men whose blood hallowed that ground, to preserve the Union, and helped pave the way for the slow but steady advances in liberty that our nation experienced, despite often violent opposition, which appear to be threatened again today. I may be a realist, but I still have a sense of idealism that will not let me give up.
One of my inspirations is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a hero of the Battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. He was a Professor of Natural and Revealed Religion at Maine’s Bowdoin College, who against the wishes of his wife volunteered to serve, going on to great distinction during the war. He wrote:
“It is something great and greatening to cherish an ideal; to act in the light of truth that is far-away and far above; to set aside the near advantage, the momentary pleasure; the snatching of seeming good to self; and to act for remoter ends, for higher good, and for interests other than our own.”
We have to fight for the higher good, and not our own interests now. We have to act in the light of truth against the phalanx of lies deployed by the President, his advisors, and the propagandists that spread those lies as much as the press of the South encouraged disunion, and the hate of the North. When I hear the lies, distortions, and hatred being spread by them I get angry, but then I remember something else that Chamberlain wrote:
“But the cause for which we fought was higher; our thought wider… That thought was our power.”
So, have a great day and never give up.
Peace
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