Too Deep for Words

The Apostle Paul probably never heard what will fill our ears on this Monday, May 30, at 3:00 p.m., when TAPS is played across the land. To him the blowing of the shofar (that ram’s horn predecessor of our trumpet), was the sound he most anticipated, for he believed it would signal the awakening of the dead when God finally brings down the curtain on this sin-sick world. But on this Memorial Day, it will be a more refined instrument, burnished in brass, that will carry the sound to a different awakening in our times. For on this day of flags, parades, and community gatherings, we will summon our best memories to awaken the dead in our hearts.

TAPS as we now hear it is attributed to a Civil War General in the Union Army named Butterfield, a bugle call to signal lights out that became a ritual in his military encampments. It soon caught on as an appropriate musical benediction, an instrumental final word, played at the burial of soldiers. Officially adopted over 130 years ago, it can now be heard at dusk on American military bases, at funerals, and in the wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington. I myself have been moved to tears when it was played at the interments of my father and father-in-law, both veterans.

TAPS is always part of the choreography of our Memorial Days, perhaps even more so this year. Assuredly we will gather in city parks and burial grounds to hear inspiring words honoring the courage and sacrifice of those who purchased with their blood the liberties we now enjoy and take for granted. And we will remember those soldiers, old and young, whom we have saluted in their flag-draped caskets as they were carried to their final campgrounds. Yet this day of memorials will trouble many a heart who has loved and lost, as they ponder the why’s and what ifs of their unresolved grief. Perhaps Paul will also come to mind as he joins us, in spirit, seeking that Divine intercession that we best know in sighs too deep for our words.

And sigh we will, individually and collectively. For this sacred ground upon which we live weeps along with those who will gather around the open wound of graves prepared to receive tender-aged children and their teachers—casualties of the social malignancy that sickens our nation. Memorial Day may well be the holiest of our national commemorations. But this one beckons us to more than the usual tears and sorrow. As our martyred sixteenth president once said on the hallowed ground of a Pennsylvania battlefied, this one compels us to a dedication to those whom we mourn, that their dying shall not have been in vain.

My hope is that each of us on this day of remembrance and mourning will take a few moments to listen closely and spiritually to the playing of TAPS. Its somber melody sings both to and from the depths of our hearts in chanted solemnity. So haunting in its evocations of war, heroism, and death, it will, this year, speak in wordless empathy for American parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and teachers as never before. For it is a call to attention that will be, for our country, a collective sigh much too deep for words. This holiday that should have heralded the opening of school doors to playful summertimes will now remind us of days, and years, and lifetimes lost to those whose living will never be the same.

A number of lyrical settings have been associated with TAPS, from hymns to campfire songs adapted by the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. But, I suspect, none can do justice to the repeated, three-note sequence that, in its eight modulated repetitions, seems to penetrate our ears and soften our hearts. Who, among us, upon hearing its first notes, doesn’t stop what we’re doing, clear the mind of its preoccupations, and just listen.  Sighs too deep for words.

But if in my sighing I could muster some words to say, or sing, these two stanzas from Horace Lorenzo Trim may convey as well as any what many of us will be feeling, in the depths of our being, as we honor the departed on this Memorial Day:

Thanks and praise, for our days,
‘Neath the sun, 'neath the stars, ‘neath the sky;
As we go, this we know, God is nigh.

While the light fades from sight,
And the stars gleaming rays softly send, To thy hands we our souls, Lord, commend.

When the world around us shatters our most cherished and guarded pretenses, and the spirit within us sighs, then perhaps a song, even the plaintive chant of a trumpet, may carry us where words alone, even the best we have, fall short.