A couple of weeks ago, Macha and I attended a one-day interfaith event
in the San Francisco
East Bay
called “Beyond Memorial Day: Understanding the Hidden Wounds of War”. The conference was aimed at educating clergy about the spiritual problems of returning vets and helping to connect clergy with the resources that are out there. Macha and I had been part of the planning
group for this event – she acting on behalf of the Marin Interfaith Council and
me on behalf of the Interfaith
Center at the
Presidio. Main organizer Carrie Knowles
has written a fine account of the event (available on the ICP website at http://www.interfaith-presidio.org/BAIC/baic_articles12.htm#beyond)
and Macha has written on the [AIR] e-list of the Covenant of the Goddess about
the moving personal stories we heard.
I’d like to address the aspects of the event that I found problematic as
a Witch.
We knew going in that the program would be based in a
pastoral model of congregations. This
was due to the overwhelming presence of Christians (with a few Jews) in both
the planning group and in the resources available to us in the form of vets,
active service people, printed documents, etc.
Mach and I had a number of vague issues and concerns about this, but the
experience of the conference brought them into focus. We were two of only three Pagans at
the event, at which there were very few non-Christians.
First, on the positive side, I learned a lot about the issues. A key problem of which
I had been unaware is how much more the problems of vets are magnified among
members of the Reserve and National Guard.
These folks have been called up repeatedly in unprecedented numbers for
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike regular duty personnel, Reservists and
Guard members leave combat and go straight home, where they are 1) dispersed,
2) away from the understanding community of peers, and 3) further away from
easy access to veteran support services.
Another thing that makes these recent wars unlike previous
ones is the ease of communication with folks back home through sat-phones,
text, email, etc. One minute you can be
a Dad arbitrating a dispute between your kids and the next be suiting up for
combat. This is like coming home and
shipping back out every few hours. It
makes coming home for real less real.
And when you do come home, it takes just a few hours, not a long boat
trip among comrades during which you can decompress. As a result, vets have to decompress on the
fly while already back home.
Over and over again we heard about how the voluntary
military has resulted in the creation of a warrior caste, in which certain
families send their sons and daughters into service generation after
generation, while most of us remain unaffected.
We heard many calls for, if not a draft, at least some form of national
service.
Where I had difficulty relating to the material being
presented was when the speakers addressed the “moral & spiritual wounds of
war” and how to respond to them. I
couldn’t help feeling that both the problems and the solutions were being
exacerbated by the Christian and Jewish (maybe “Biblical”?) context that was
being assumed.
Rev. Ed Hatcher, author of Care for Returning Veterans,
talked about the problem of confronting evil.
How young people who have grown up believing in a loving, omniscient,
omnipotent God are brought face to face with “evil” in the arena of combat in
the form of torture, rape, killing of civilians, etc. No one used the term, but this is familiar to
the student of religions as “theodicy” (lit. “justifying God”) or “the problem
of evil”: If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, then how can evil
exist in the world? Christian
theologians and scholars have written volumes on this, but Witches don’t have
the same problem in the same way. (Gus
diZerega has an excellent discussion of a Pagan view of evil in his Beyond the
Burning Times, Lion Books, 2008.) Our personified
Gods don’t combine the qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, and
benevolence. We don’t believe in the
existence of evil as an active metaphysical force. To the extent that evil does exist in the Wiccan
worldview, it is in the actions of some humans.
I don’t know if Wiccan soldiers would experience this problem in the
same way or to the same extent as Christian soldiers (except, of course, to the extent that we are all products of an overwhelmingly Christian over-culture).
Ed said that “killing is not a natural human act and there is
a price to be paid for it”. I believe
that this view comes out of the Old Testament, in which an originally perfect
humanity “falls” into its current, sinful state. Most of the Witches I know accept the theory
of evolution and have no problem seeing humans as killers under the right
circumstances. In fact, it was an
essential part of the process that led to modern humans. The Warrior Ethic found in some forms of
Paganism makes killing a virtue when circumstances demand it. While killing is usually a breach of the
social contract that requires some sort of repair, once again, I don’t know if
we would have the same sense of fundamental “wrongness” that Ed assumes.
Ed spoke of the need to understand the spiritual side of
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a “spiritual disruption in a person’s core
belief system”. This can lead to an
unwillingness to discuss the problem with members of the clergy since the
clergy are representatives of the system that’s been disrupted. I have trouble seeing what core Wiccan
beliefs about the world would be disrupted by the experience of combat, or
would result in an unwillingness to turn to one’s fellow Priests &
Priestesses for support. The disruption
we would most likely share with Christian vets would be that of the usual sense
of home, trust, and cooperation that living in the US permits us to enjoy.
Ed said that he prefers a “guilt-ridden” vet to a
“shame-ridden” vet because the guilt-ridden vet will seek redemption while the
shame-ridden vet will hide from the world.
That’s fine, unless you don’t come from a guilt-based or shame-based
system. In my experience, Witches reject
this dichotomy and tend to be more honor-based than anything else.
I don’t know. I am
not a veteran, nor have I known any family members or close friends who have been
in combat. Also, I am one of the few
Witches I know of in my generation who was not a practitioner of another
religion before becoming a Witch. Wicca
is the only religious tradition I have ever known. So, my view might not be representative, but
I can’t help feeling that the issues that confront Witches in combat are
different than those confronting Christians and Jews. If that’s true for us, than it is probably
also true for many other non-Abrahamic religions.
All this being said, I think Ed’s basic advice, and the
advice we heard reiterated by speaker after speaker, was sound and valuable:
1) Don’t
sit in your office; go where the vets are.
2) Build
personal relationships with vets.
3) Do this
before and during deployment, not just after.
(Several service people nodded when it was pointed out that a clergy
person should NEVER just go knock on the door of a family with a member who’s
been deployed. They will always assume
the worst!)
4) Be
prepared to pass various informal “tests” before being accepted. Can you stomach the horror stories? Do you know what you are talking about? Will you stick around? etc.
5) Don’t do
it alone; have peers you can rely on for support.
6) Listen!
Once we process that feedback from this event, we plan to
hold more, similar events in other parts of the SF Bay Area. Macha and I will work to ensure that the
structure and content will be more inclusive as we go.
Blessed Be,
Don Frew
National Interfaith Representative
Covenant of the Goddess
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