If you lived in Southern California during World War II (I did not, but my parents did), you likely remember the Japanese-American internment.  As the war raged on, the U.S. government forcibly evicted roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and locked them into various internment camps around the state of California.  It was cruel, it was illegal, it was a travesty.  It left a dark stain on America, the supposed land of the free and home of the brave.

    That notwithstanding, I recall my parents talking to me about the injustice of it all, and how much we should work to avoid such a thing ever happening again.  Agreed.  That's why as I read Mananzar, a widely praised memoir of a young girl's (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston at the time of her death earlier this year at the age of 90) time in the camps, originally published in 1972, with a very heavy heart.

    I was particularly moved by the author's account of her return visit to Manzanar,  decades after her confinement.  She wandered through the silent and decaying camp (it is now a national historic monument), remembering her time there.  Then she came upon a barbed wire enclosure containing about a dozen graves, the final resting places of those who had died in the camp.  Inscribed on a stone in the enclosure was “A Memorial to the Dead.” 

    We humans are capable of much material greatness, but it is perhaps only when we grieve and remember that we reflect most poignantly and acutely our creation as personal beings in the image of God.

    Grief is meaningless in an impersonal world.