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Music Cues: Worcester Firefighters
December 11, 1999
The six Worcester, Massachusetts, firemen who were buried with honors this week will always be remembered as heroes. This is one of the few times in which that word is not only deserved, but ennobled by the bravery of six men who raced without question into a burning warehouse and died looking for people who may have been left inside.
Their act was not only brave, but good. Any human frailties they may have had shrank into nothingness when they gave their lives for others. As the Bishop of Worcester, Daniel Reilly, said, "Love and sacrifice like theirs cannot go unrewarded ... They would have done it for you, they would have done it for me. That was their vocation. What an example, what a legacy they give us."
And, as Frank Raffa of the Worcester Firefighter's Union said most simply, "They answered the alarm."
Sacrifice is often not nearly as evident in this holiday season as generosity, joy, and indulgence -- even excess. But sacrifice is often a kind of celebration. It even becomes a source of joy.
It might be a good season to also remember the sacrifice of David Sanders. He was the Columbine High School gym teacher who died last spring when he was shot in the hallways of his school as he tried to calm and direct terrified students as bullet shots banged through their classrooms. And just a few months before, Shannon Wright, a sixth grade teacher at the Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, died when she threw herself into the path of bullets being fired at her students.
Earlier this year in Kosovo, we reported on men and women from Cambodia who were trying to defuse mines and bombs that are the live detritus of war. It is hard to convey the bravery of people who venture from halfway across the world to pluck bombs out of the lives of people they have never met and try to give them peace.
All of these people sacrificed for strangers.
There are, of course, others who could be named, and many more whose names are more difficult to discover. Other teachers, police officers, firefighters, soldiers, clergy, who choose vocations of sacrifice. And others who devote their lives to teaching, ministering, counseling and working to lift up the lives of others.
They may be among those whom E.M. Forster might have had in mind when he said that he believed in an aristocracy.
"An aristocracy," he wrote, "of the brave and the gentle and the good." Such an aristocracy, he said, would not be an association of blameless saints, but so-called ordinary people who summon uncommon courage." As we admire their lives in this season, they may remind us of something we hope to find, one day, in ourselves.
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