When I was a kid during
the Second World War, there was a returned veteran who lived up the street from
our house. He was often seen out on his
porch raving at nothing, or at a bunch of us kids who were playing baseball in
the field behind his home. The rumor in
the neighborhood was that he had been “shell shocked” in the war and we didn’t
think much more about it. Shell
shocked. That is really how we dealt
with post traumatic stress disease back then, and indeed to this present
day. There isn’t really much that we do
for the veterans who come back to us having suffered very much in the wars that
we have fought in our lifetime; not only the world wars, but also Korea, Viet
Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan as well as the “little” wars such as Grenada and
Somalia. War wounds are not only of the
flesh, they have taken a terrible toll on the minds of many of our veterans,
and we continue to do very little about it.
I think we need to acquire new eyes
when we look at our veterans. We need to
see the beauty of who they are and understand the suffering that they have
undergone. When we do that, we can
participate in the resurrection of many good people who have suffered for all
of us and become heroes, even if we don’t really seem to appreciate it. That man who lived up the street from us who
had come back from the war wasn’t only shell shocked, he was ignored. That isn’t on him, it is on the rest of us
who have let it happen. May God give us the grace to do better for the veterans
who live among us at the moment.
When I worked at Western Penitentiary, there was a group
of Viet Nam veterans who got together a couple of times a week to deal with
their own stress that had been caused by the war. I became convinced that many of these men
were in the prison because of the crimes that they committed after coming home
from that unpopular war with their stress and discovering that there was little
concern on the part of the general public about their condition. I know that often it led them into acts that
they would have never contemplated before going to war. Viet Nam was also the last time that we sent
draftees in to military engagements.
Being drafted has an involuntary aspect to it. I was drafted back in the fifties, before
Viet Nam, but it still upended my life and my plans. I certainly recovered from that, and found my
time in the army to be a benefit, but I saw no military action and I escaped
without stress.
I think that caring for one another is one of the basic
cornerstones of our faith. That there
are people hurting all around us ought to cause us some concern. That these hurting people are mostly ignored
by the rest of society is a terrible travesty at best. It is also a cause of a lot of turmoil not
only in families, but also in our communities.
The fact that benefits for veterans are cut without thinking very much
about it in order to reduce deficit spending is a terrible crime. If we spent a fraction of what we spent on
our military crusades on taking care of our hurting veterans, we could produce
a great benefit to them and to our society.
When Nicodemus came to Jesus to talk to him about faith,
heaven and healing, he got a magnificent response from our Lord, who told him
that one could not understand the things of heaven without being born
again. This is a wonderful phrase that
has been taken out of context by a lot of religious people and construed to
mean that one has to have some kind of emotional religious experience in order
to qualify to be one of the elect. That
isn’t what Jesus meant at all. What he
was trying to say to Nicodemus is that one needs to have eyes that look beyond
this world in order to see the majesty of Heaven. According to the scriptures, Nicodemus
acquired these eyes. He was one of those
who took Jesus from the cross of his death to the tomb of his resurrection.
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