Speaking to Duke University students in 2010, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented that “for a growing number of Americans, service in the military, no matter how laudable, has become something for other people to do.” (Wash Post 10/9/11 A1)  When I was a student, I volunteered for the National Council to Repeal the Draft.  At the end of the Vietnam War, Congress allowed the draft to expire.  Looking back, it was a hollow victory. As Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, an Army psychiatrist, put it in November 2009, “never in the history of our republic have we placed so much on the shoulders of so few on behalf of so many” (NYT, 11/12/09 C5).

We all “support our troops.”  But we don’t ever see them or think about them. Our country now has the all-volunteer army I wanted as a young man between eighteen and twenty-six.  Our soldiers and their families make up a very small percentage of the population.  We never see the two wars they have been fighting on our behalf over the past decade. To the vast majority of us, soldiers are invisible. Veterans returning to civilian life from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are even more invisible. 

We are here today to begin to admit our responsibility to the soldiers we have been sending to fight in our names.  We are here to begin to make spaces in our churches where veterans do not feel invisible, where churches are prepared to hear what veterans have to say, and to walk and confess and lament with them. Liturgy strikes me as an obviously powerful place to do this.  And yet, strangely, it seems, we don’t have liturgies for returning soldiers.  This talk explores why we might want to have such liturgies and the resources we might use to create them.  It has three parts: 1) Listening to Soldiers’ Voices, 2) The Power of Ritual, 3) Christian resources for imagining veterans’ liturgies.

I

Listening to Soldiers’ Voices – For just warrior or pacifist, war’s moral costs have never been more clearly on view.  Our country has been at war for a longer period than at any time in its 235 years.  Most soldiers serve in support roles and never see combat, but for those who do, deployed, re-deployed, re-deployed again, the toll in spiritual wounds has grown higher with each year we remain at war.  In recent years, soldiers have begun to break the silence their honor seemed to require and have spoken publicly of their struggles.

Before asking if liturgy can help in healing their moral and spiritual wounds, it is important to hear their voices.  I still read newspapers and for the past five years, I have been clipping stories that testify to war’s invisible wounds. My random collection of clippings tells a lot about the recognition, gradually dawning in the military, if not in the churches, as multiple deployments escalate, that, even if they don’t bleed, war’s invisible wounds are real. 

Early in 2007, the Washington Post ran a series called “The Other Walter Reed.”  It was about the treatment of returning soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda.  This exposé helped to improve conditions there. (Seewww.washingtonpost.com/walterreed.)  More articles followed in the spring.  One featured Army Spec. Jeans Cruz, a Puerto Rican soldier from the Bronx, described as having served in the elite unit that captured Saddam Hussein.  He returned to New York as a hero but soon began to experience the symptoms of PTSD.

Estimates say that 20% of returning soldiers suffer some form of PTSD with its “daytime flashbacks of frightening images they saw in combat, hyper-arousal and hyper-vigilance to threats to themselves or others, poor concentration, and fear and withdrawal from crowds and other people … often accompanied by any one or several of a host of addictions, attempts to relieve mental pain.”  Traumatic Brain Injury often involves early Alzheimer-like memory loss and ongoing depression (David A.Thompson and Darlene Wetterstrom, Beyond the Yellow Ribbon, Ministering to Returning Combat Veterans [Abingdon, 2009], 32-33).

We have long used terms such as “shell shock” and “battle fatigue.” But it was not until 1980, in the wake of the Vietnam War, that the DSM recognized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a real medical diagnosis.  Our government followed suit. Much of the long feature article about Jeans Cruz focused on the “bureaucratic confusion over PTSD” that made it difficult for Cruz to get help from a backlogged and understaffed Veterans Affairs.  Spec. Cruz had served at the beginning of the Iraq war.  As the decade of war dragged on, stories about PTSD became more frequent. Often they appeared in May around Memorial Day or in November in connection with Veterans Day.  On November 5, 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hassan shot and killed thirteen people and wounded many others at Fort Hood, Texas  This ignited another round of articles in the press on PTSD. 

Combat soldiers have to be tough to stay alive and help their comrades stay alive.  They have a “No excuses, Sir” ethos encouraging them to “ruck on” and “embrace the suck.”  Such a culture of honor and shame attaches a heavy stigma to seeking help for wounds no one can see.   Over the past few years, military commanders have worked hard to convince soldiers and sometimes themselves that getting help for combat stress is not a sign of weakness.  The pervasive stigma attached to mental illness often prevents soldiers from getting timely care.  The 2007 Washington Post feature cited Lt. Gen John Vines, “who led the 18th Airborne Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan,” on the effects the stigma has on officers.  “All of us who were in command of soldiers killed or wounded in combat have emotional scars from it.  No one I know has sought out care from mental health specialists, and part of that is a lack of confidence that the system would recognize it as ‘normal’ in a time of war.  This is a systemic problem.” (Wash Post, 6/17/2007, A11).

More than a year later, USA Today carried a front page story about Gen. Carter Ham, now a four star general, who when he returned from Iraq to the Pentagon in 2005, with his wife’s encouragement, sought early treatment for combat stress to keep it from developing into PTSD.  This was a significant public admission by a high ranking officer.  In the same article, Brig. Gen. Gary Patton discussed his own experience of combat stress (USA Today, 11/25/08, 1A-2A). 

In April 2009, the Pentagon released Department of Defense Personnel and Procurement Statistics.  After eight years of war, disturbing numbers generated a new round of articles.  “Alcohol abuse by GIs soars since 2003,” USA Today announced on its front page.  Army soldiers enrolled in alcohol dependency and abuse treatment had “nearly doubled since 2003.”  Adm. Michael Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commented, “I can’t believe the stress our people are under after eight years of combat isn’t taking a toll.” The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, urged that treating substance and alcohol abuse would help prevent suicides which rose dramatically in 2008 and 2009 (USA Today, 6/19-21/09, 1A).

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon, in an extraordinary move, gave $3.7 million to an independent production company called Theater of War.  They travel around the country doing dramatic readings of Sophocles’ plays “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” for military audiences. In addition to writing plays, Sophocles also served as a general in the citizen army of Athens.  Theater of War performances are intended to reduce the stigma attached to PTSD, to help soldiers put their experiences in historical context and feel less alone.  After a post-performance discussion panel, one Iraq combat veteran from Brooklyn knew he could relate to Sophocles. “I’ve been Ajax,” he said.  “I’ve spoken to Ajax” (NYT, 11/12/09, C1, C5).

By the end of 2009, the number of medical discharges for mental illness such as PTSD increased by 64% from 2005.  The Army’s statistics show “a clear relationship between multiple deployments and increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD” (USA Today, 7/23-25/10, 1A).  By October 2009, Gen. Chiarelli was “obsessed with the science of PTSD and traumatic brain injury.”  They are not, he insisted, “phantom conditions exhibited by weak soldiers trying to get out of a deployment.”  Convinced it is more of an injury than a disorder, Chiarelli dropped the D from PTSD. He sought to erase the stigma of mental illness by controversially advocating awarding Purple Hearts to troops suffering from PTS.  He was unsuccessful.

A recent blog post reported that “on average 17 veterans end their own lives every day and there have been more active duty suicides in the past two years than there have been combat fatalities” (http://www.redletterchristians.org/join-the-growing/conversation/). Back in 2009, Gen. Chiarelli recognized them as battle casualties by instructing Army commanders to give soldiers who commit suicide full memorial services.  A sidebar tells the story of Army Staff Sgt. Thaddeus Scott Montgomery who died by his own hand in Afghanistan during his third deployment.  His memorial service is described in gut-wrenching detail (Wash Post, 7/18/10, A1, A6-A7).

Through the efforts of Gen. Chiarelli and others, PTSD and TBI have been thoroughly medicalized.  Recent articles about them come complete with colored diagrams of changes in the brain and chemical accounts of the physiological changes when a traumatized person encounters a trigger stimulus.  To the extent that it allows soldiers and veterans to get the help they need, this medicalization is a great advance in removing the stigma of mental illness in the military. But it risks hiding from view what is moral and spiritual about war’s invisible wounds.   

In the articles I collected, the moral and spiritual came through most powerfully in what combat veterans said about killing.  Soldiers are trained to kill the enemy and most combat trained soldiers expect to do just that.  But they aren’t necessarily prepared for the deaths of people who are not supposed to die, children and especially fellow soldiers.  Still, it is hard to believe that even justifiably killing enemies doesn’t eventually take a toll.  Writing in the aftermath of the shootings at Fort Hood, one veteran of World War II put it this way: “Most soldiers are decent people and cannot bear the moral burden placed upon their mind and spirit by this act of killing another human being.  Neither psychiatry nor other forms of medicine diminish the terrible emotional and ethical pain the returning soldier feels.  Before we can help that soldier, we must recognize what we have sent him or her overseas to do: kill another human being” (NYT, 11/10/09, Letters to the Editor, A30). 

Speaking of the injustices he thought made war morally necessary and the evils entailed in the conduct of even a just war, St. Augustine wrote in the City of God, “And so everyone who reflects with sorrow on such grievous evils, in all their horror and cruelty, must acknowledge the misery of them.  And yet a man who experiences such evils, or even thinks about them, without heartfelt grief, is assuredly in a far more pitiable condition, if he thinks himself happy simply because he has lost all human feeling” (XIX, 7).  “Heartfelt grief” is Henry Bettenson’s translation in the Penguin Edition for the Latin animi dolore, more literally “sorrow of soul.”  For Augustine, this deep soul-sorrow or heartfelt grief is the ordinary human response to what happens in war.  It is a lament of the virtue that might justify killing another human being.

Spec. Jeans Cruz told The Washington Post in 2007 that he was haunted by the images of Iraqi children.  “I’ve shot kids,” Cruz confessed, “I’ve had to kill kids.  Sometimes I look at my son and like, I’ve killed a kid his age.  At times we had to drop a shell into somebody’s house.  When you go clean up the mess, you had three, four, five, six different kids in there.  You had to move their bodies” (Wash Post, 6/17/07, A12).  In 2004 in Anbar Province, Iraq, Brig. Gen. Patton, then a colonel, lost 69 men from the 4,100 in his brigade.  Many more were wounded.  “You also have the trauma of seeing loss of life,” he said in 2008, “Iraqi citizens, innocents, being blown up by suicide bombs.  You had the trauma of killing another human being.  We killed a lot of terrorists and insurgents in direct combat and gunfights” (USA Today, 11/25/08, 2A).

But not everyone is buying such stories.  A powerful riposte came from Paul Kane, a Marine veteran of Iraq who went on to a fellowship at Harvard.  Responding to the New York Times’ coverage of the 2009 shootings at Fort Hood, he objected that “articles that reinforce some people’s narrative that combat veterans are poor souls forced to war, broken in spirit by its horrors and mostly victims are simply wrong, unhelpful and not clarion calls to action.”  He accused Vietnam veterans of “appropriating the current wars to revisit their own lives and war.”  He concluded with a plea to the Vietnam generation: “Could we please have our own war?” (NYT, 11/10/09, Letters to the Editor, A30).

And yet, even if we assume that only 10% of soldiers are trained for combat and 80% of those return home to reintegrate successfully into society as Paul Kane did, in two wars that have lasted more than a decade, the real numbers of soldiers with the invisible wounds of PTSD and TBI, not to mention “heartfelt grief,” remain staggering.  And these wounds are not simply clinical.   “War is an inherently moral enterprise,” writes Edward Tick, “and veterans in search of healing are on a profound moral journey.”  Tick goes on to say that by taking responsibility for sending soldiers out in our name, we might help lighten their burdens (Edward Tick, Bringing our Wounded Warriors Home, www.Soldiersheart.net, 2008, 3).  As a Christian and a theologian, I have to think that the churches are here and now called to walk with returning soldiers on this moral journey. 

But good intentions only go so far.  Michael Jernigan, a Marine veteran who lost both eyes to a roadside bomb In Iraq in 2004, tells of walking to class at Georgetown four years later.  He stopped to get his bearings when someone grabbed his arm to “help.” “My reaction is quick and angry,” he wrote, “I jerk my arm out of his hands and spin on my heels with the bearing of a United States Marine. ‘Get your freaking hands off me.  You think you can grab me?  Try it again and I’ll break you down shotgun style.’”  Jernigan recognized his reaction as a common one for those who have PTSD.  He ended on a note of hope.  “Throughout history, warriors have been taught not to speak of their emotional struggles … ”  But if returning soldiers shared those struggles, “when the worlds of the soldier and the civilian meet, they’ll come together not collide” (“The Minefield at Home,” NYT, 10/26/09, A?).

One place where these two worlds might meet, where soldiers might share their silent burdens and carry them to God is the liturgy.  But, as far as I know, churches have never done this before on any scale large enough to be recorded for us to consult.  The task of imagining how it might be done staggers me.  No doubt different church traditions would instinctively approach this differently.  In the second and third parts of this talk, I want to identify some resources to help us think about liturgy as a safe and sacred space where spiritual wounds buried in silence might be spoken, shared, and brought to God.

II

The Power of Ritual - In their deepest moments of life, human beings seem naturally to respond to ritual.  No one understands this better than the military.  Soldiers are together in life and in death, even across generations, with an uncommon intensity.  Last winter I got a small glimpse of this.  I went to the funeral of my wife’s Uncle Bill in Massillon, Ohio.  Uncle Bill was a baker and served in a support role in World War II.  I was one of his pall bearers.  Two young soldiers in dress uniforms met us at the cemetery.  The ground was covered with snow.  After the prayers at the graveside, with what I can only describe as reverence clipped and deep, they folded the flag that had covered his casket.  One took it and clasped it for long moments to his chest.  Then he presented it to Uncle Bill’s daughter.  Then the other soldier played taps, clean like an archangel.  They never spoke, never changed their solemn facial demeanor. To the graveside of an old soldier they never knew, they brought powerful trans-generational rites.  They honored him and connected his family to something big and significant.  These rites took place alongside the Christian rite of burial and all but overpowered it.  Part of me thought it was idolatry and the other part of me wished that the church could do its own rites half as well.

Their ritual silence imitated the silence of soldiers down the centuries. Only taps gave expression to what would not be spoken.  Such a rite does not give sufficient voice to the silent wounds of “heartfelt grief.”  But the ritual sensibility of the military, its soldiers, and the chaplains who have accompanied them into battle are indispensable in thinking about liturgy for returning soldiers.

The ancient Greeks too knew the power of ritual.  Theatre has its their origins in religious rite.  To the Athenian citizen soldiers who saw “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” performed, Sophocles offered what Aristotle called “catharsis,” a cleansing or purification of soul.  Now Theater of War offers it to contemporary soldiers. In Sophocles’ play, Ajax plots fratricidal murder of Athenian generals who have dishonored him and finally dies by his own hand. Recall the words of the combat veteran from Brooklyn, “I’ve been Ajax.  I’ve spoken to Ajax” (NYT, 11/12/09, C5).

To psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s brilliant re-readings of Homer in Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America, Caroline Alexander has recently added The War that Killed Achilles (Viking, 2009).  She argues that in Homer’s hands the familiar story of the Trojan War ends “not as an epic extolling martial glory but as a dark portrayal of the cost of war, even to its greatest and most glorified hero” (96).  She shows Homer carefully establishing Achilles’ character.  Those who watched the epic performed saw Hector undo Achilles’ character with his battlefield slaying of Achilles’ comrade Patroklos. Homer describes their relationship with terms that have “no true counterparts in the civilian world” (147).  

Alexander argues that in his portrayal of Achilles’ rage after Patroklos’ death, Homer knew what contemporary psychiatrists mean by “combat trauma”(169).  Much more could be said about this book, but noteworthy here is that Achilles regains his character, returning Hector’s body to his father for burial, only after the extravagant celebration of Patroklos’ funeral rites.  These are followed by the “ritualized pseudo-military performances” of athletic games” (197).  A retired Marine general blurbed Alexander’s book as “a must read for all who aspire to command.”  In their wisdom, the ancient Greeks knew that soldiers could have wounds in their souls. They knew that these wounds needed cleansing, and that ritualized story had this purifying power.

Vets Journey Home, a national program founded by a Vietnam veteran and based in Mount Airy, Maryland, builds a rite of reconciliation into its program of “safe weekends for [veterans] to express their emotions” to each other and to staff.  At the end of the week end, each veteran writes two “letters of forgiveness,” one to himself and one to someone, often from the war, that he thought he had let down.  In a concluding ceremony, the letters are folded into a flag that is then sent to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington where the letters are archived.  Some of the veterans who participate in this program are in their 70s and even 80s.  “I feel compelled to mention my inherent cynicism and skepticism about such events,” said a twenty-six year old Iraq veteran who participated in one these week ends.  “I felt I could handle things that happened to me on my own.  But at the suggestion of some people, I came.  I think real progress was made in the company of other veterans.”  Central to this program is that the ritual of reconciliation with letters and flag is preceded by something like a week end retreat in which deep emotions can be voiced and heard (Frederick New Post, 5/24/2009, C1, C3; vetsjourneyhome.org).

III

Liturgies for Soldiers Returning from War: Christian Resources – Turning to Christian history, we find almost no explicitly liturgical resources, but a recurring insistence through the first millennium that war’s acts, killing, bloodshed, and the attendant emotions, even when they are not sinful, somehow wound a soldier’s spirit.  This gives rise to the need for cleansing or purification and reconciliation.  St. Augustine’s sense of “heartfelt grief” is central in this period.  He was the first really to theorize about tensions between the practices of war and Jesus’s Gospel love commands.  Augustine’s thinking about exhibits pastoral concern for the moral status of the soldier who fights.  He did not break completely with the peace tradition that precedes Constantine but tried to interiorize it.  This seems agonizingly difficult. A Christian soldier must kill his people’s enemies for the sake of justice and with peace in his heart.  Because he has peace in his heart, he feels grief.  I have often thought that only the ascetical practices of something like a Christian version of Jedi knights could make this possible in ideal form.  It is more likely that with real combat comes some degree of what Augustine calls the libido dominandi (e.g., in City of God, XIV, 28), expressed in emotions like hatred, vengeance, and even battle rage.

Medieval Carolingians (9th to 11th centuries) tried to surround warfare with rules, such as attempting to ban crossbows as savage weapons and limiting fighting to certain days and seasons.  Likewise, their penitential practices tried to limit the libido dominandi and cleanse soldiers from its effects in a Germanic-Christian combination of Aristotelian catharsis and Gospel repentance.  Rowan Williams finds their attempts to limit war as combining “naïve earnestness and cynicism” but takes their marriage of the comic and the theologically profound as a type for Christian peacemaking in today’s world (The Truce of God [Eerdmans 2005], 25, 32-35).  

Penitential books of this time often invoke God’s promise to Noah that God would require an accounting for human blood.  “If anyone sheds human blood, by humans shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God have humans been made” (Gn 9.6).  The medieval canons refer more to the shedding of blood, a kind of violation of ritual purity, than simply to killing.  Perhaps this also reflects the state of medieval military technology and the closeness of combat.  A penance of 40 days was required of those who had shed blood or killed in battle with the added requirement that they not bear arms again.  Pre-Christian Germanic warriors regarded killing another in battle as a special moment, giving added significance to penitential practices.  Penance varied but, in addition to prayer and almsgiving, a penitent soldier often went without arms, without wine, without flesh, without his wife, and was excluded from Communion.  At the end of forty days, the penitent was readmitted to Holy Communion.  In the East, St. Basil the Great, writing in the years just after Constantine, admonished those “whose hands were unclean,” i.e., had killed in battle, to abstain from Communion for three years!

On at least three occasions, most famously after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, bishops or local councils imposed general penance on soldiers who had participated in these battles.  Medieval soldiers would have found a penance of 40 days relatively light, compared to, say, three years for murder or adultery.  And these penitential practices were very difficult to enforce.  Nevertheless, they clearly retain something of Augustine’s sense of “heartfelt grief.”  The period of forty days provided a healing threshold between combat and the return to ordinary life.  There is no evidence of any public penitential rites for soldiers.  Penance was a solitary practice which allowed warriors who voluntarily embraced it to bring their “heartfelt grief” to God.  They returned to Communion feeling purified rather than punished, having, in the terms of Gn 9, given an account to God for the human blood they shed in battle.

In the final years of the 11th century, holy war or crusade pushed the tradition of penance aside.  With modern warfare in the West, Augustine’s “heartfelt grief” faded from both the theology and statecraft of just war.  In 1961, in War and the Christian Conscience, Methodist ethicist Paul Ramsey conditionally urged a return to the medieval practice.  If just war doctrine is addressed to states rather than to individuals, and, “if also penance is good for anything, consideration should be given to reviving the requirement of forty days penance following participation in any war” (133).  Ramsey wasn’t willing to say that penance was good for anything and, in any case, no church body has dared take up his proposal.  But if “heartfelt grief” has faded from just war thinking, it lives still in the voices of soldiers like Jeans Cruz, Carter Ham, and the unnamed GI at Anzio whose cry has been echoed by innumerable veterans since 1944, “I wish to God I hadn’t seen that” (NYT, 5/25/09, Editorial, A20).[1]

Shift scenes now from Carolingian Europe to the small town of Gulu in Northern Uganda, long wracked by civil war. A rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has kidnapped young children and turned them into child soldiers, forcing them to brutalize and kill their own people.  Older and having escaped or defected, many have sought forgiveness from the community in a “cleansing ceremony” that combines traditional tribal rituals with Christian prayer.  They step on an egg symbolizing “clean life not yet contaminated by sin,” jump over a farming tool, representing a productive life, and then pass through the leaves of a pobo tree “whose slippery bark captures dirty things.”  These ancient rites conclude with a blessing from a Catholic bishop or priest who offers prayers of forgiveness.  “The elders told me I should go through the cleansing ceremony,” said one former child soldier, “and I did that … After this, I felt released.”  The ceremony is a communal one, including as many as 800 people at once and causing a shortage of eggs in Gulu.  Unconventional as it may seem, this Acholi cleansing rite, concluding with Christian prayer, is as close to a Christian liturgy for retuning soldiers as I have been able to find (Balt Sun, 8/28/05, 1C, 6C).

What might a veterans’ liturgy look like?  In the absence of clear historical precedents, we are left to imagine it on our own, guided by the worship practices and traditions of our churches. The proclamation and praying of Scripture are central to all forms of Christian worship.  In the task before us, the Scriptures, especially the Old Testament, are a potent resource.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me …?”  In his hour of deepest need, Jesus turned to the psalter, Israel’s prayer book.  The opening words of Psalm 22 gave voice to his agony on the Cross in the awesome meeting between death and life that took place there. “Far from my prayer, from the words of my cry?, Psalm 22 continues.  “O my God, I cry out by day, and you answer not; by night and there is no relief for me.”  This is a classic Scriptural lament or complaint to God, one of the starkest and most powerful forms of prayer in the Bible.  Before it rises to the praise of God in the second half, Psalm 22 descends to the depths of abandonment, the kind of isolation a soldier might feel who returns to civilian life with heartfelt grief that has gone unattended and un-cleansed.

The Old Testament as a whole can be testimony for both returning soldiers and the community who sent them to fight, and, if need be, to kill.  “There is no healing from the wounds of war – the horrors of war – until we speak them.”  The poetry of prophets like Nahum, Isaiah, and Jeremiah testify to the visible wounds of war, “sights and sounds and smells, heaps of bodies, the clatter of wheels and weapons, bloody wounds, the shame of captivity and defeat.”  Jeremiah’s soul-shaking prayer amid the ruin of Jerusalem voices a survivor’s lament (Lam 1-3). 

The psalms can give voice to more hidden wounds of heartfelt grief. “I am numbed and severely crushed. I roar with anguish of heart. But I am like a deaf man, hearing not, like a dumb man who opens not his mouth.  I am become like a man who neither hears nor has in his mouth a retort.” (Ps 38. 9, 14-15).  The heart-wrenching laments of Psalm 77 and Psalm 102 know the pain of those who grieve for God’s compassion and receive no answer.  The plea that God turn not God’s face from us echoes through the psalter. “How long, O Lord?  Will you utterly forget me?  How long will you hide your face from me?” (Ps 13.2; 102.3).  Like Achilles in the Iliad, some may have been overcome in battle with the libido dominandi and committed sinful acts of hatred and revenge.  The penitential psalms such as Psalms 51 and 143 offer scripts for a confession that might otherwise be too difficult.  The words of the psalmist suggest that he knows the kinds of things returning soldiers know.  With the platoon leader at Anzio, he could have said, “I wish to God that I hadn’t seen that.”  With the cleansed child soldier in Northern Uganda, he could have said, “After this, I feel released.”

We have a blessing in in these books in the Bible. “Those who claim these books as Scripture can hold this book in their hands and know that it contains all the horror that they know.  This book that is from God, this book they share with believers through the centuries, speaks the pain and terror that they are not always able to speak.  And whatever horror they have seen or done or felt, it is not too horrible to speak before God.  It is contained in these books.”[2]

The Easter Vigil remembers Jesus as having engaged on Calvary in a bloody combat between death and life.  As the Lamb who was slain, he is a conqueror. But, unlike biblical heroes such as Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, David, Judas Maccabeus, or the very Lord of Hosts at the Red Sea, Jesus was not a warrior.  He performed no feats of arms.  He did welcome sinners and heal the tormented and afflicted. In this connection, “Legion” (Mk 5.9), the Gerasene demoniac’s military name, offers fruit for reflection.  For the kind of liturgies under consideration here, Gospel texts that describe Jesus’s ministry of healing and forgiveness of sins would speak a much needed word.

Liturgies often begin with some kind of penitential rite asking God’s mercy and forgiveness of our sins.  One of the conditions Paul Ramsey attached to his proposal to revive the medieval practice of penance, “if penance is worth anything at all,” suggests our contemporary ambivalence about penance.  But Ramsey also emphasized that it is about purification or cleansing rather than punishment.  Its Scriptural warrant in Gn 9 as well as the importance of cleansing or catharsis in some of the examples we have seen suggests a possible role for penance in some adapted form, in the rite or before or after it.  At least it is worth considering.

For Catholics, opportunity for sacramental Confession, and, most likely, the Eucharist would be part of such a liturgy.  But, as we have seen, a Scripture-based liturgy without Confession and the Eucharist would not be difficult to put together.  As suggested above, liturgies for returning soldiers would have to match the ritual seriousness of the military’s own powerful rites.  The voices of veterans and the chaplains who have accompanied them into battle would have to be heard on the possibility and nature of liturgy for returning soldiers.  Such liturgy need not have only one particular shape.

There are serious pastoral questions about how a veterans’ liturgy might best be presented to the church, to the veterans themselves, and to the communities who have sent them and whose participation in the rite, at some point, seems indispensable.  One pastor I consulted suggested that it might best take the form of a “weekend type of retreat/healing/mourning.”  This proposal recalls something like the week end program of Vets Journey Home.  Through the words of Scripture and the prayers of the church the emotions shared during this week end might become testimony, lament, and confession before God.  But such a form means that community participation would be limited.  Veterans and congregation, for example, would not be taken up together in the swell of praying a psalm of lament or penance as one. And perhaps that is the way it must be.  It would be interesting to see if churches around the country this Veterans Day week end are tailoring their Sunday worship to welcoming veterans home. 

Conclusion - As years pass, it becomes increasingly clear that with “heartfelt grief” St. Augustine was on to something.  So were the Carolingian Christians who tried to cleanse “heartfelt grief” with penitential practices. Contemporary soldiers, including high ranking officers, have broken the silence their honor once seemed to require. Their voices confirm the ancient wisdom.  A decade of war has made increasingly clear that, in addition to medical injuries and complicating them, war often injures human spirits.  These interior wounds need to be cleansed and healed.  Tending to such wounds has always been part of the ministry of the church.  The liturgy is one of the church’s most powerful gifts from God.  The time is ripe.  Let us bring all our resources and ask God’s help to make this happen.

William L. Portier

University of Dayton

Veterans Day, 11/11/11

For my Dad, Uncle Roy, and Uncle Bobby

[1] My treatment of medieval penitential practice relies on David S. Bachrach’s Notre Dame doctoral dissertation, “Priests at War and Soldiers at Prayer, A History of Military Religion from the Concilium Germanicum (742) to the Fourth Lateran Council (1215).  I am grateful to Professor David Fagerberg of Notre Dame for bringing this work to my attention and getting a copy of it for me.  Thank you also to John Allen, my research assistant, who tracked down and annotated the references from Bachrach’s work.

[2] My remarks on the Old Testament are heavily dependent on unpublished notes of Dr. Anathea Portier-Young which she shared with me and are paraphrased and cited with her permission.