an old friend, but not sleeping is bad for my brain. What's that? You
don't care? Just get on with the Update? You've got it.
This morning, after work, a group of night-shift folks and I went to a
required briefing. It was the first of many, many post-deployment,
Warrior Transition Program briefs. This is a program designed to
lessen the strain of going from deployed life to home life, to ease us
past the bumps of possible PTSD. (Cultural note: Spellcheck wants me
to make PTSD into POTSDAM.) It's not a bad idea. As concepts go, it
probably has value, but in this case it was a waste of time. It was
run by a chaplain, for some reason, possibly because chaplains don't
have very much to do, specifically, the whole Warrior Transition
Program is under the auspices of the military chaplains.
So, at this brief, as part of the program, we went through 8 minutes
of guided meditation. (Yes, this is something tax dollars pay for;
take it up with someone, by all means.) I had spoken to the chaplain
before the brief started and he was telling me about his life and we
were talking about the Japanese earthquake and it was OK. He seemed
like a nice guy. He made some anti-fortune teller comments that I
thought made him seem a little be fundamentalist, which I appreciated.
But then he led us in a guided meditation. (Goofy New Age music and a,
"feel yourself relaxing" spiel.) And it made me think about the
differences between universal and specific.
(Private message: Rona, if you're going to hide out in the bathroom
and read this, at least restock the toilet paper.)
In the military, and in American culture these days, we try very hard
to be universal. Everything we say has to avoid giving offense, our
audience is an audience of everyone. Specific beliefs or standpoints
are not welcome, they detract from the universal nature of our hoped
for approval. There are things about this that are good, generally I
think that this gives us a very live and let live attitude towards
people and things. But there are problems with it, too.
If we are all things, if we universalize our message and mix
everything together into a multi-cultural stew, then we lose
specificity and sharpness. We blur things that might be important, if
clear, into opacity. The military chaplain is a good example of this.
The chaplain has to be a spiritual adviser to all religions. He has to
embrace being an ecumenical miracle. All faiths, religions and creeds
need to be able to be expressed by one guy. That's a real savings, in
a way, but it is a pretty lackluster individual who takes the job. He
can't express favoritism to his own beliefs, which means that he can't
be a specific assist to, say, the Methodists around him. He has to
also be a balm to Bahia and the interlocutor for Islam. And by being
all things to all people, he is then of little value to any of them.
He is no longer a man of specific Faith, but a man who can reflect and
random faith back at you.
To put it another way, and to reflect another aspect of military life,
the chaplain is like a Clif bar. He is always there, always edible and
while he might not taste like what you want to eat, nor might he
satisfy your actual hunger or desire for a meal, he is at least
something to put in your stomach for now. (And he might look like a
turd, the way that Clif bars always do,) There is value to a chaplain,
but not as much as there might be if he was one thing or another.
All things to all people is the same as nothing to everyone. It's a
sad truism and it worries me that it is something that the military
has embraced. It worried me because there IS a need for spiritual
guidance. We DO have people coming in who are in massive, massive pain
and want someone to guide them, in a spiritual way. It's an
interesting thing. You hear these guys come in, blown up, and crying
out in pain, and there is no one to help them. They say that there are
no atheist in foxholes, well there are REALLY no atheists in foxholes
that have been hit by an RPG.
In Bethesda there is a Franciscan friar, he is one of the chaplains
there and he is non-military, which means that he can BE a Franciscan.
He's a nice guy and when Margaret and I were dealing with our son
dying, he is who I went to, to ask about services and prayers and what
we should do. He, being a civilian, was not going to be at the
hospital overnight and so he offered to send up whoever the on-duty
chaplain was. It ended up being a military woman, vaguely evangelical.
She was nice, but militarily bland, with prayers to "whichever God."
She was less than comforting and we just wanted her to leave. Now, I'm
not a Catholic, I'm not a Franciscan, I just liked that there was
someone who really, specifically believed something to talk to.
I guess what I am saying is that Universal is the bane of specific.
And as a result, Universal ends up being nothing. And I think that
people who are looking for something outside of themselves aren't
looking for Nothing. They are looking for something Specific.
Anyway, that's all of that. In other news, the team has left, tonight,
to go to England and train up our replacements. It's only a matter of
time now. Everyone here is very excited. This is one of those things
that, at the beginning of the process, we viewed as the last great
milestone before we made it home. There is still time out here, but
it'll be over before we know it now, and everyone is happy about that.
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