Sin: The Great Forgetting

Some of you know that I am now working as a chaplain in a hospital psychiatric ward. This is during the days, and one night per week I stay over at the hospital, on-call, and respond to emergency pages on all the wards (ER, ICU, etc.)

In a brief time, I have learned, or re-learned, a lot about the web of life that surrounds each one of us, the complex relationships that are all affected when something happens to any one of us. When a fatal car accident happens, for example, it is not just the individual that dies, but the family, the friends, and the community. All those fine connecting strings get pulled and many lives are permanently altered.

And that is if everything is going well and healthy in all those relationships. I have already seen what happens when all is not well and the same relationships are strained. A child dies, and the divorced parents haven't even been on speaking terms for years. Who knows how it began, but worlds we try to hard to separately maintain come crashing together, through whatever walls we put up. And perhaps the result can be true reconciliation, or even further destructive pain.

I am thinking quite a bit about the fragility of life these days, and here is a thought:

Sin is the great forgetting.
Forgetting how short our days are on this earth
and how precious other human lives are to us;
as we lash out and grow impatient,
greedy and hateful, vengeful,
and then, all too suddenly,
one of us is lost
and we are jolted

God, shall we ever perfectly remember?

Could a Human Rights Worker Ever Become a Military Chaplain?

Could a former human rights worker ever become a military chaplain?


Those of you who know me know that I am an entering M.Div. student at Chicago Theological Seminary. After returning from Iraq, I received my MA in Christian- Muslim relations, and I hope to build an interfaith team-based human rights organization. Tom Fox, who was one of the four CPT hostages in Iraq, and who was killed this spring, replaced me on the Christian Peacemaker Team there when I returned to the US to begin seminary studies.


So it was with great interest that I attended CTS' spring Ministerial Institute on "Democracy, Patriotism, Faith: What Is Faithful Witness in a Time of War?" which featured an active military chaplain explaining the appropriateness of his chosen path for leaders in a progressive church body.


I have to say that our speaker had me won over on several valid points:
--that we must be in ministry to the real world, even when it conflicts with who we are;
--that the same people whom we taught as children that God is gracious and merciful need representation of that same God even when they join a military and go to war; and
--that we can't afford to say the military isn't a good place to do ministry because while we liberals are looking down our noses at it, plenty of conservative chaplains are there in our places--and we can't do anything about it unless we become part of it.


So I began to think that even I, as a peacenik and human rights worker, who spent four years in the Middle East (Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan), and even spent most of a year in Baghdad investigating prisoner abuses prior to the Abu Ghraib scandal, might do well to consider military chaplaincy. In fact, it wouldn't be so incongruent. In my time with Christian Peacemaker Teams, I found myself providing occasions of pastoral presence to young and frightened soldiers standing at checkpoints. All of us did. I am also reminded that even Reinhold Niebuhr considered doing the same for World War I. And perhaps working from within is the best way to work for peace in these times.


And still, I realized that I myself could not. Not anymore for the reason of disagreeing with this war or disagreeing with military force altogether, but because so much of my life is still dedicated, in present and future years, to the efforts of interfaith and international peacemaking. And that necessitates not just working from within but reaching out in order to build trust where trust is shattered. I realized that were I to engage in roles associated with the U.S. military, even as a chaplain, it would present such a conflict of interest (even if only perceived) that I would not be trusted again in these communities and these roles. At least not in this generation.


So, I can now affirm the worthiness of the call to military chaplaincy and I would no longer discourage a colleague from doing so. I do still see and am deeply concerned for the human and spiritual needs of our soldiers in the field and at home. Perhaps the best way for me to aid those needs is to focus on soldiers returning, using my own first-hand experience of living in war to be a more empathetic ear. And to continue traveling to these countries in my human rights capacity; working in search of a time when I will not have to choose.