Catholic town of St. Louis, to Guantanamo Bay, to Spain, to the Holy Land, to Bahrain, Afghanistan, and back home again. Through eschatological excitation, fervent hope, doubt, despair, agnosticism, grief, resignation, and cautious belief, what brings me back to Mass are the words, the familiar words.
Thursday, November 9, 2017
America will celebrate one of its high civic holy days--Veteran's Day
A Catholic veteran searches for meaning after war
"The
world seemed so certain that being a veteran meant knowing something,
but I was convinced my own military experience hadn't taught me
anything."
In
the beginning, there was the word. And the word was with God, and the
word was God. My faith journey has taken me around the globe. From the
Catholic town of St. Louis, to Guantanamo Bay, to Spain, to the Holy Land, to Bahrain, Afghanistan, and back home again. Through eschatological excitation, fervent hope, doubt, despair, agnosticism, grief, resignation, and cautious belief, what brings me back to Mass are the words, the familiar words.
Catholic town of St. Louis, to Guantanamo Bay, to Spain, to the Holy Land, to Bahrain, Afghanistan, and back home again. Through eschatological excitation, fervent hope, doubt, despair, agnosticism, grief, resignation, and cautious belief, what brings me back to Mass are the words, the familiar words.
Sometimes I repeat the old words, a stubbornness that was hardened in me during my time in the Marine Corps. Kyrie eleison. One in being with the Father. Agnus Dei. Peace be with you, and also with you. Wherever I have been in the world, and wherever I may go, the universal words, the catholic words, are the same.
In
a few days, America will celebrate one of its high civic holy
days--Veteran's Day. I'll get free food at restaurants, text messages
from friends thanking me for my service, posts on my Facebook wall. I
represent something that is honored in America--military service and
sacrifice.
Americans try to find the sacred in military
service members, in military virtue. We struggle to perfect that ritual.
I've been watching it play out in the debate over the president's phone
calls to a Gold Star family, in John Kelly's speech in front of the
White House Press Corps, and over Bowe Bergdahl's sentencing. Americans
are desperate for military service members to act as the nation's
priests, to guide the country to patriotic grace and to be a conduit of
American sacraments, bestowing civic spirit. It is this search for the
sacred that elevates debate on these issues to fever pitch.
But
as one of those veterans in whom America vests its patriotic hopes, I
haven't been able to find for myself the peace which Americans seek. I
looked for it in the Marine Corps. I prayed it would come to me in
Afghanistan. Now I'm searching for it out in the mountains of Montana,
and I'm still looking. That journey started nine years ago, in 2008,
when I left my home in St. Louis as an idealistic, rash 19-year-old for
Marine Corps Recruit Training in San Diego.
Faith
sustained me during my first years in the Marine Corps. At boot camp,
services were the single escape from the constant oversight of our
intense drill instructors. When I got in trouble in Guantanamo Bay and
was placed on restriction, I was still allowed to go to Mass
unaccompanied. I remember that Christmas in 2009; the Filipino people
who worked on the base sang Christmas carols in Tagalog.
But
as I clung to the familiarity of the Mass, the comfort of the words, I
was also being indoctrinated deeper and deeper into the faith of the
Marine Corps, the near religious fervor of brotherhood and violence. I
came to love the Marine Corps, the institution complete with its own
rituals and rich history of martyrs and heroes. John Basilone and Chesty
Puller became as familiar to me as Paul of Tarsus or Ignatius of
Loyola.
A young infantryman, I grew to believe in the
redemptive, transformative power of violence as deeply as I believed in
my own Catholic faith. The two intermingled with one another, each
amplifying the other. I wanted to be born again, not just in Christ, but
in kill.
I prayed for the opportunity to prove
myself in combat, to fully join the brotherhood of the Marine Corps.
Just as the grace conferred in baptism had to be affirmed at
confirmation, I was baptized into the Marine Corps during boot camp, but
it would take my conduct in war to confirm that identity.
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