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.

On Having Voice

Joy asked: Do you really think that you do not have a voice?

My response: When it really counts, no, I don’t think that I do.

Being outspoken is not necessarily the same as having a voice. Voice is being heard and having a positive impact on a given situation. There are many barriers to voice; mostly, they are the dangers threatened to one’s own well-being: threat of personal violence or violence against one’s family, of work or housing lost, of reputation destroyed, of education denied, of deportation. The risk for some to speak is greater than for others.

You can have a voice in some spheres but not others. As a white U.S. citizen and as a human rights worker, I clearly had voice when I spoke. I saw that others heard my words and were influenced by them. As a student, or as a future church leader, it is not so clear to me that I have a voice at all.

One great difference I see in my own voice between then and now is that while I was in the Middle East, although I was surrounded by war and violence, I was so rarely the recipient of it. That is quite different from my experiences now.

I have also observed, while in the same role, you can have a voice with some and not others. How many times did I hear from classmates these past two years that I had to keep speaking, not because I was at all effective with the administration, but because my words were life-giving for those who were even more voiceless than I?

That is a difficult role to be in. Although buoyed by the encouragement and care of friends, in trying to speak my truth I found I nearly lost my life. And I have in many ways lost much of my self in these two years, in paying the price for speaking in this context, although I am now finding it coming slowly back as hope returns and some level of freedom is near.

You can be heard enough that people will try their damnedest to silence you. Then your words are having some impact, true, but is it enough? Or is it useless martyrdom?

Still there is that quote from Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.” I doubt that this is always true, but it encourages one to go on. It also indicates that once you speak, even if you are attacked, you are compelled to see it through to the end.

I think the key is to not be any more silenced than you have to be. That is, to recognize that while it may be too dangerous for you to speak in some places, there are many more where you have the power and influence to do so, and for good. Those chances and that privilege should not be wasted.

Although I may not have sufficient voice to improve my own situation as a student here and as a participant in my denomination, I still have voice to speak to many on human rights and interfaith work and the loving of one’s international enemies. I have to cultivate that. I may even have more voice than that, and I have to keep testing where the walls of silence lie. And I think I also ought to keep giving voice to pain, insofar as it becomes words of healing and encouragement for others who continue to struggle.

To do otherwise is to be yourself condemned by the voices left to die within.