The Fourth of July is a good day to remember the Rev. John Boyle, warrior turned healer, who left this world not long ago.
 
During WW II, John was a 19-year-old sergeant in the U.S. Army fighting in Germany. He wrote this remembrance, in a draft of a book on forgiveness we had been working on together:
 
On April 29 [1945], I was with one of the units that helped to liberate the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, a few kilometers northwest of Munich. After a fierce firefight with fanatical SS troops in charge of the camp, the camp was surrendered. The sights and smells that engulfed me upon entering the camp initially stunned me into a stupor of disbelief that anything so horrible, so brutal, so obscene  could have happened at all, much less have been perpetrated by human beings upon other human beings. Corpses of inmates of the camp lay strewn on the ground, in railroad box cars, stacked helter-skelter in piles. Before me in a panoramic display of carnage was bitter proof of the end result of anger, prejudice and hatred, when pushed to their logical conclusion. 

Then came the surge of outrage and the desire to strike out, to somehow even a score that could not be evened, to kill the killers…But would I have been so different from those who were now the object of my wrath? God forgive me, I thought. God forgive us all. 

I experienced God’s call in the silence of the corpses in the box cars, and in the silent hollowness of the eyes of the emaciated, half-dead inmates who survived the horror of the camp. It was a call to be on the side of whatever was the antithesis of that horror, and that, for me, was the church.
 
John Boyle heeded that call. He became a Presbyterian minister, a seminary chaplain, and founder of a counseling center at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, where he tended people reeling from the horrors of violence, abuse and grievous loss. It was work to which he was well-suited.
 
John died on June 8, 2013 at age 87. He had outlasted Hitler, who took his own life the day after John helped liberate Dachau, by 68 years.
 
At John’s memorial service, the congregation sang this hymn: For all the saints, who from their labors rest…. As I sang those words, it struck me that, though John was one of my saints, he would reject that label.  He steadfastly refused to think of himself, or our country as all good, or the guards from Dachau he helped take prisoner, or the nation he fought as all evil.
 
Read the words of some of his prayers, given in church and preserved for posterity for their depth and power.  John’s patriotism sounded like this:
 
Help us…O God, not to treat…the world like vicious children with a toy we have broken, pouring out our rage upon it so as to make sure it knows who owns it even though we cannot make it work. Remind us that our lives and your world are not ours to own but are gifts to be used not for our own aggrandizement but in order to serve and bless others. (6-16-2002)
 
God of the governed and of those who govern, grant that transitions to power also be transitions to service, lest without the latter the former lead to corruption and without the former the latter be anemic. Grant to leaders at all levels of government and to us as citizens the courage and conviction necessary to resist the enticements of the idolatries of self, power, and perfection and of the other gods of greed, bigotry, war, violence, and exclusivism.  So may we be led and so may we follow…. (11-16-2008)
 
After the congregation sang For all the saints, two young soldiers in dress uniform folded the American flag that draped John’s coffin and handed it to John’s widow, Kathye, saying the familiar words, “This flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation…”
 
A lone trumpeter played “Taps,” austere and elegant. The last note soared up among the Gothic arches of the church until at last it faded into silence. That was the moment my throat knotted with grief and pride. I looked out and saw men wiping away tears. We who were gathered on those pews were ambassadors of that grateful nation, giving thanks for John Boyle, who served his country, and God’s beloved, so honorably and so well.