Last week at this time I had the fresh and unsettling memory of another visit to Walter Reed Hospital. It is now considerably spruced up...hardly any nook and cranny is missing a snazzy, new sign proclaiming the pride and importance of the persons who pass through the facility. That number has slowed although there are still enough to warrant three busloads of patients a week on in-bound flights from Landstuhl Hospital, the layover site in Germany for those coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The whole system is inured to sacrifice. We have settled into the normality of young families staying at Malogne House, Mom smiling brightly, standing watching the kids play on a state-of-the-art jungle gym, Dad, a double amputee, staring, trying to look engaged, as he sits in his wheelchair. His twin stumps indicate that he is waiting for new prosthetic legs.
All of this brave, glad spirit is their gift to us. But is it also assigned to them? To be sure, Americans have a genius for accommodation. Give us an upsetting circumstance and we respond to it, but there is soulless quality to turning everything over to a Walt Disney treatment to make things OK. The dreadful things that have happened are tidied up so it appears, and we feel, it is rectified. The brainless quality of this war which we will rue for generations is the interior damage it has caused so many.
Chaplain Randy Haycock, our chaplain at WR, has a sensitivity to that. He winces when a young soldier receives his/her automatic $100,000 TSGLI “reimbursement” from the government for the loss of a limb and promptly goes out and buys a Humvee with this new found fortune. "I feel awful when that happens, like I'm colluding in some nightmarish skit to reclaim wholeness," he said.
The day after my visit Chaplain Haycock was chaperoning a fishing trip for wounded warriors--they don't get off the compound unless he can invent something--and he has plans to bring wounded veterans to the National Cathedral for sessions of healing in the Memorial Chapel. "It's a place where there is a history of stories of sacrifice and a safe place to complete some more." This man will never get a job at Disneyland. +gep
Friday, June 20, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Not Preciously Episcopalian
This past weekend culminated an interesting trip to Walter Reed Hospital (which deserves its own blog later) and then out to the Midwest to visit friends followed by a longish stay at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. (Photo, three Episcopalians, other saints. Front row: l to r, Kathy Miller, Rosemary Mallan, Vanessa McMillan, Elizabeth Smith. Back row: Ken Miller, me, David McMillan, Scott Smith. )
Somehow in all my travels I had never made it to "Wood", as they call it, so I was eager to go. Isolated as it is on Route 44 midway between Springfield and St. Louis the Army has plunked down a significant investment on this real estate. In case you weren't looking besides Basic Training, the engineer, chemical, and military police schools have been moved here. It's called "maneuver support" and it makes for a busy place.
My guide, Chaplain David McMillan, was generous with his time showing me not only state-of-the art classrooms but also the combined museums and "memorial groves" where newly trained officers and NCOs swear a kind of allegiance to their branch. I thought that part was little overdone and curiously Masonic but as David observed, "it is another time they ask for a chaplain." The real interest for me was the continuing congregation there. Four lay persons valiantly continue on with or without a ready supply of Episcopal chaplains. In this instance they received a significant boost from Chaplain McMillan who deserves his own story.
David is a Reformed Episcopal Church chaplain. Not one of mine. His church split from the Episcopal Church in 1878 over a doctrinal issue and have been faithful to their own evolution ever since. In truth, the service I visited last Sunday was a Reformed Episcopal rite though you'd never know the difference since they use the BCP with a preference for Rite I.
What to make of this? I am grateful for Chaplain McMillan's leadership and his pastoral presence. Somehow David had brought together the combination we had been striving for in this episcopacy: a continuing faith community in support of many trainees. One could make the argument--indeed I did to Bill Humphreys about a supply priest "from a less than Episcopal background" for Ramstein a few years ago--that this is an adulteration of an Episcopal congregation. But what, I ask you, is the definition of that? I am nearing a decade in this job and the boundary between our sister denominations and us seems very indistinct to me in an operational area.
Oh sure, when I go to House of Bishops meetings I receive a fresh view of how a good tightening up of things will add definition and clarity but when I'm in the field with committed persons trying to reserve a building and time slot for Sunday worship things get down to basics. You abide with friends and do the best you can. It's not the time to be unilaterally Episcopalian.
So, such a realization came to me on Sunday at Specter Chapel, Fort Leonard Wood in a celebration with four lay Episcopalians, about 60 basic trainees from a multitude of faith groups, and the Reformed Episcopal chaplain David McMillan and his wife, Vanessa. It was billed as his service, i.e., Reformed Episcopal, but he graciously had invited me to celebrate and preach. At least his generosity was not lost on the shoals of being preciously correct.+gep
Somehow in all my travels I had never made it to "Wood", as they call it, so I was eager to go. Isolated as it is on Route 44 midway between Springfield and St. Louis the Army has plunked down a significant investment on this real estate. In case you weren't looking besides Basic Training, the engineer, chemical, and military police schools have been moved here. It's called "maneuver support" and it makes for a busy place.
My guide, Chaplain David McMillan, was generous with his time showing me not only state-of-the art classrooms but also the combined museums and "memorial groves" where newly trained officers and NCOs swear a kind of allegiance to their branch. I thought that part was little overdone and curiously Masonic but as David observed, "it is another time they ask for a chaplain." The real interest for me was the continuing congregation there. Four lay persons valiantly continue on with or without a ready supply of Episcopal chaplains. In this instance they received a significant boost from Chaplain McMillan who deserves his own story.
David is a Reformed Episcopal Church chaplain. Not one of mine. His church split from the Episcopal Church in 1878 over a doctrinal issue and have been faithful to their own evolution ever since. In truth, the service I visited last Sunday was a Reformed Episcopal rite though you'd never know the difference since they use the BCP with a preference for Rite I.
What to make of this? I am grateful for Chaplain McMillan's leadership and his pastoral presence. Somehow David had brought together the combination we had been striving for in this episcopacy: a continuing faith community in support of many trainees. One could make the argument--indeed I did to Bill Humphreys about a supply priest "from a less than Episcopal background" for Ramstein a few years ago--that this is an adulteration of an Episcopal congregation. But what, I ask you, is the definition of that? I am nearing a decade in this job and the boundary between our sister denominations and us seems very indistinct to me in an operational area.
Oh sure, when I go to House of Bishops meetings I receive a fresh view of how a good tightening up of things will add definition and clarity but when I'm in the field with committed persons trying to reserve a building and time slot for Sunday worship things get down to basics. You abide with friends and do the best you can. It's not the time to be unilaterally Episcopalian.
So, such a realization came to me on Sunday at Specter Chapel, Fort Leonard Wood in a celebration with four lay Episcopalians, about 60 basic trainees from a multitude of faith groups, and the Reformed Episcopal chaplain David McMillan and his wife, Vanessa. It was billed as his service, i.e., Reformed Episcopal, but he graciously had invited me to celebrate and preach. At least his generosity was not lost on the shoals of being preciously correct.+gep
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Glad for the Embarrassment
I'm happy to report a new enthusiasm to meet the needs of military families by congregations and dioceses...though it takes some getting used to.
Recently at Province III the agenda of the annual meeting of a cluster of six dioceses was energized for news about the impact of deployments and what everyone could do about it. My office was not ready for this excitement. The picture here is of Charlotte Gresson, Navy spouse and mother of two, who brought an unanticipated--and welcome--exuberance to that time. Our presentations to this provincial audience were OK but they didn’t match the readiness for mission in the room.
On a recent occasion an estimation of a diocesan periodical went completely off the rails when--to our surprise--the Diocese of Atlanta's "Pathways" quarterly journal not only dedicated an entire issue on the subject, "The Church at War", it packed in all manner of on-line goodies for soldier support. Much to our chagrin a too-quick appraisal of that magazine’s pages had to be corrected when a careful reading revealed, after all, a bounty of information! Please see, http://www.militaryministrydioatl.org/. This embarrassment brought us like Gilda Radnor's character Emily Litella, to exclaim, "Oh, never mind!."
Someone asked me if our office sanctioned a new and novel program for soldiers. Thankfully that morning I'd had an important dose of centering prayer and responded quickly with, "There's no permission necessary for any means to make a soldier and his/her family whole." These ideas will come from anywhere and this is the hallmark of the Home Support Team Program (HOST). There’s even a version of it at All Saints, Waterloo, Belgium. The Holy Spirit is leading us and it’s important to be ready and not to get in the way.
A faux pas is more than an embarrassment it's a confirmation God acts despite our expectations. +gep
Recently at Province III the agenda of the annual meeting of a cluster of six dioceses was energized for news about the impact of deployments and what everyone could do about it. My office was not ready for this excitement. The picture here is of Charlotte Gresson, Navy spouse and mother of two, who brought an unanticipated--and welcome--exuberance to that time. Our presentations to this provincial audience were OK but they didn’t match the readiness for mission in the room.
On a recent occasion an estimation of a diocesan periodical went completely off the rails when--to our surprise--the Diocese of Atlanta's "Pathways" quarterly journal not only dedicated an entire issue on the subject, "The Church at War", it packed in all manner of on-line goodies for soldier support. Much to our chagrin a too-quick appraisal of that magazine’s pages had to be corrected when a careful reading revealed, after all, a bounty of information! Please see, http://www.militaryministrydioatl.org/. This embarrassment brought us like Gilda Radnor's character Emily Litella, to exclaim, "Oh, never mind!."
Someone asked me if our office sanctioned a new and novel program for soldiers. Thankfully that morning I'd had an important dose of centering prayer and responded quickly with, "There's no permission necessary for any means to make a soldier and his/her family whole." These ideas will come from anywhere and this is the hallmark of the Home Support Team Program (HOST). There’s even a version of it at All Saints, Waterloo, Belgium. The Holy Spirit is leading us and it’s important to be ready and not to get in the way.
A faux pas is more than an embarrassment it's a confirmation God acts despite our expectations. +gep
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