The Golden Ass

Here continues my meditation on why I left in the middle of the worship service this Memorial Day weekend and had to pray afterwards. SEE LINK for Part 1, which was more of a presentation of the problem, the break, the trauma, the exile. Part 2 more wholly accomplishes my act of reaching out towards those I left behind.

Whether it’s wars that have shaped our history and present in ways that are difficult for us to come to terms with, or the cross that we have a hard time admitting was committed by the military we honor, or simply the distorted and disfigured image we inherit from Adam and Cain born by the God-man on said cross, I am often left wondering if we are able to embrace Jesus in any way other than through fragments of conceptualized and disjointed ideas that distance us from the flesh and blood concrete reality of the trauma born by the one who showed us what sacrificial love is, the one we say we honor and love in our worship while at the same time, during that very worship, honoring our forces that sacrificed him? In such moments, I am left wondering who we’re really loving?

“Maybe the worst of Tom’s symptoms was that he felt emotionally numb. He desperately wanted to love his family, but he just couldn’t evoke any deep feelings for them. He felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though his heart were frozen and he were living behind a glass wall. That numbness extended to himself, as well. He could not really feel anything except for his momentary rages and his shame…
The only thing that occasionally relieved his feeling of aimlessness was intense involvement in a particular case…It was like being in combat, he said – he felt fully alive, and nothing else mattered. The moment Tom won a case, however, he lost his energy and sense of purpose. The nightmares returned, as did his rage attacks – so intensely that he had to move into a motel to ensure that he would not harm his wife or children. But being alone, too, was terrifying, because the demons of the war returned in full force. Tom tried to stay busy, working, drinking, and drugging – doing anything to avoid confronting his demons.” – p. 14

Another reason I felt the need to pray after leaving church this weekend was because I wanted to love my “church family,” but, in that moment, I was having a difficult time with that. I needed to confront some demons. I was driving away from what could potentially offer a sense of energy and purpose. That, of course, would require a sense of home and belonging.

Being an exile – being, like a warrior, torn from a home I can’t return to - can bring up memories of painfully alienating wounds that brought great shame for me. Like a survivor of trauma, who has only fragments of memories and is unable to coherently narrate what happened with a well-ordered story with beginning, middle, and end, I’m not always conscious of the ways the past shapes how I react in the present.

It has required a miracle of God for me to be able to function in a way that anyone might refer to as resembling healthy. It’s somewhat of a miracle that I even had any concern for relating to the church and its leaders in any meaningful way after leaving in the middle of church this weekend.

“In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships.
As we know, war is not the only calamity that leaves human lives in ruins. While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop serious posttraumatic problems…” - p. 20

So, see, what I have presented here hopefully is appearing now as a fragmented tapestry with which, as I begin to try feebly to re-weave our story, I can at least glimpse what it is we honor on Memorial Day. It’s an unfathomable sacrifice that no one foresees before it’s made. Perhaps I can even identify with it, to some degree. Paul didn’t completely eschew his Roman citizenship or friendships. With that in mind, I appreciate those who serve. Because of the nature of what’s being protected or expanded, those who make it back are still left with the mark of sacrifice, a mark that isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

What I simply can’t get on board with, then – what I can’t give my trust and allegiance to – is where and when a community “honors a military calling” within the particular context and meaning of Christian worship. What sorts of lies do we have to tell ourselves, or what horrors do we have to fling from our consciousness, to embrace the (at best) half-truth that God “used the military to advance his Kingdom”?

“[H]uman beings are experts at wishful thinking and obscuring the truth…’The greatest source of suffering is the lies we tell ourselves.’” – p. 11 (and p. 26-27)

Considering my own ongoing bondage to wounds that pale in comparison to Tom’s, I really wonder about the nature of this “freedom” we say is the reason for these holidays. Do we really imagine that such trauma to the ground of our history leaves us “free” from the blood that cries out from it?

What image of humanity and of God – not to mention of Christian community that is the context and foundation of discipleship - do we have if we are left reaching and grasping for the military for our sense of what “service” means?

“We have…begun to understand how overwhelming experiences [of trauma] affect our innermost sensations and our relationship to our physical reality – the core of who we are. We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.
Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manages perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.” – p. 21

I am left wondering if the reason we can’t tell the truth about the trauma of war is because we are shaped by the trauma of war.

“Impeccable in his war uniform and outwardly composed, McNair sits on the porch of his parent’s home in Virginia, anonymous behind a mask he made in an art therapy session. ‘I was just going through pictures, and I saw the mask of Hannibal Lecter, and I thought, ‘That’s who I am…He’s probably dangerous, and that’s who I felt I was. I had this muzzle on with all these wounds, and I couldn’t tell anyone about them. I couldn’t express my feelings.” – Quote from Marine Cpl. Chris McNair (Ret), who is photographed above. SEE LINK HERE.

So, though I am not at all myself unaffected by the brokenness of Cain, by the war and violence that rages in the groundwaters of our communities and society, I cannot, in truth and good conscience, let this moment of Memorial Day pass without asking a few potentially difficult questions. Does Tom’s story really sound God honoring? Like the advancement of God’s kingdom? Like God’s fruits of “service” to Him?

As I mentioned, I had to pray after leaving in the middle of church today, because I felt an urge to cut myself off - in a particularly unloving way. In prayer, I was able to work through what I was feeling and re-turn to a desire for connection and community with the people I was, in a sense, leaving behind. This is Grace.

I don’t doubt that God is at work in the precisely the way the Coast Guard officer interviewed at church this Memorial Day weekend said. I don’t doubt that God is using military service to begin to give him an image of what it means to die to self and serve a higher purpose and larger community. The Centurion’s position and purpose really did give him some insight into the authority Christ holds over his “army.” And, God really did use the position of Cornelius the Centurion to allow him to play a major role in moving the narrative of God’s justice and peace to “the nations” of the world.

Because I can’t give my trust and allegiance to what I regard as false worship, however, I still don’t regret leaving in the middle of church this weekend. In Paul’s cosmology, the people of God is a fundamentally different entity from America. Just so, serving one master is fundamentally different from serving the other. You can’t serve both faithfully. Christ’s kingdom functions in such a way that he purposefully DOESN’T command his “army” to fight in the PRECISE moment when it would make the most sense to do so. And, I regard God’s use of a figurehead of the enemy to advance His kingdom in much the same way that he teaches us about His faithfulness by transforming an enemy like Paul into an apostle or the shame of the cross into His ultimate victory.

For anyone I “left behind” who would actually like to connect more with me and talk about anything I’ve shared here, I’m down. You know how to find me.

*Note: all of the previous quotes, with the exception of the last one, are from a book called The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M..D.