Here & there: Consider what Lincoln said and give thanks ‘with charity for all’

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Nov. 20, 2019 | Photo by Vin Cappiello, St. George News

FEATURE — I’ve almost stopped reading the news.

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., Nov. 21, 2019 | Photo by Vin Cappiello, St. George News

Three men are found guilty of murder in absentia in a Dutch court for their roles in blowing up Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 with a Russian surface-to-air missile over the skies of Ukraine in 2014.  All 298 passengers on board were killed.

Four students at the University of Idaho are brutally stabbed to death in a house across the street from the small, rural campus.  No suspect has been identified.

Three University of Virginia football players are killed and two wounded on a school bus following a class field trip to Washington, D.C., to see a play.  A former football teammate and fellow field trip attendee has been charged.

Paul Pelosi, husband of soon-to-be-former Speaker of the House, is attacked and beaten with a hammer in his San Francisco home.  All reports indicate the attack was politically motivated.

Government officials in Kiev say 10 million Ukrainians are without power after a new barrage of Russian shelling of power facilities and in the aftermath of the September Nord Stream pipeline explosion, where Swedish investigators have found “gross sabotage” and fragments of explosive materials.

Our world is feeling like a bleak place.  And it’s not the first time.

Since America’s founding, we’ve seen a revolutionary war, a civil war, political assassinations, a Great Depression, world wars, segregation, more political assassinations, protests, riots, political division, two global pandemics and a storming of the US Capitol.

There will likely be more – more war, more turmoil, more conflict, more dissent, more division and more suffering.

And yet, we must not succumb to the bleakness. We must find ways forward.  In hope. In reconciliation.  In thanksgiving.

Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, the site of the signing of the surrender between Rebel and Union armies, thus ending the U.S. Civil War | Photo by traveler1116, iStock / Getty Images Plus, St. George News

Abraham Lincoln took to the balcony of the White House two days after the surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia.  The jubilant crowd gathered at the President’s residence is reported to have expected a victory speech from the Great Emancipator, but what they got instead was a speech of reconciliation.

Had the crowd known that Grant had met Lee’s troop surrender with great respect and perhaps even greater civility, and with an order to provide the suffering Southern soldiers desperately needed food rations, they may have had different expectations.

Or had the crowd known that President Lincoln himself had visited City Point, Virginia, near the Appomattox River just days before, like he had several times throughout the war, and had seen the continued and tremendous casualties of war, they may have had different expectations.

But the crowd had known – had heard – Lincoln’s call in his second inaugural address months before the surrender of the South: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

So, whatever they may have expected in their joy at the news of the significant surrender, the gathered crowd surely couldn’t have been surprised by the vision their President had to offer about the way forward.  A vision not that different from the Christian parable of the Prodigal Son.

American flags frame the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Nov. 20, 2019 | Photo by Vin Cappiello, St. George News

After a call for national Thanksgiving, Lincoln began: “By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority – reconstruction – which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty … I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad.”

He continued, “let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.”

As we gather in another expression of national Thanksgiving this Thursday, around our turkeys, our stuffing, our sweet potatoes and our pies – around our dining room tables and with family and friends of different ideologies and opinions – let us remember Lincoln.

Let us remember his vision of reconciliation after a time in our history of great suffering, of great violence and of great discord.

And let us remember that while the way forward may not be easy, acknowledged by Lincoln himself in the same speech from the White House, it is possible:  “We simply must begin with, and mold from, disorganized and discordant elements.”

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

Free News Delivery by Email

Would you like to have the day's news stories delivered right to your inbox every evening? Enter your email below to start!