11 August 2023 – Friday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time – Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Deuteronomy 4:32-40

      Moses calls the people to return to the Lord, for they had abandoned their faith and they had sinned. He reminds them of what God has done for them: He had liberated them from slavery in Egypt and he had guided them through the desert to the promised land.

       Sometimes we have a hard time remembering.  Sometimes we remember in a selective way. What we remember can change over time. This past week marks the anniversary of the bombing in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which took place on August 6 and August 9 of 1945. Those bombings were approved by President Harry Truman, feeling they were necessary to bring an end to the Second World War.  

As you can imagine, the use of atomic weapons has been viewed very different in the United States and Japan.  In 1945, after the bombings, a poll found that 85% of Americans approved of using the new atomic weapons to destroy those two Japanese cities. In a recent poll, 56% of Americans said that use of those atomic weapons was justified, down from 63% in 1991. Today, only 14% of Japanese saw their use as justified. My dad served in the Navy in the Pacific during WWII.  He entered before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as many men saw that war was imminent.  You can imagine that I see things and remember things with that perspective in mind.  Probably a lot of you had family members that served in WWII as well. 

     The Lord calls us to be peacemakers and mediators in the world, the Lord calls us to justice and righteousness, yet when we see so much violence and crime in many of our own communities today, we know that working for these ideals of our faith is not an easy task.  When we see all the terrorism and threats to democracy, or a formerly democratic country like Venezuela being forcibly turned away from peaceful democracy by its leader and countries like North Korea and Russia blatantly provoking the peaceful world order, we know that the political reality of our world is often complicated.  How do we work for peace when violence and crime are so common in American society today?  In working for peace, we often must make decisions in our reality where none of the options are ideal. 

      We remember the works in our Lord in our lives.  We remember our history and our journey of faith. Let us pray that the Lord continue to lead us and guide us.