HOW TO SEND YOUR CHILD TO WAR WITHOUT CRACKING UP PART II
This entry was posted on 6/3/2007 5:58 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
In my first post on how to send your child to war without cracking up, I wrote about what a service mom or dad or the spouse of one who is deployed can do to keep sane while living with almost unimaginable fear and anxiety.
But lately, my conversations with deployed families also tends to run more to, How can I help my child or loved one survive war without watching HIM (or her) crack up?
Helping a loved one deal with the aftermath of war has been the subject of many articles and books. A new one is due out around the 4th of July, and I will post a summary of what it says when that book comes out.
But for now, I think I would rather come at the question from a spiritual perspective. We pray for our loved ones to return safely. We pray for their buddies. And they don't all make it back. Some come back, like my friend Jamie's son, brain-damaged beyond recognition. Others come back so riddled with rage that we hardly recognize them. Others are crippled by depression.
I think, in a situation like that, it is natural for the sufferer, and their family, to rage at God, to shake our fists to the heavens and say, How could a loving God allow this to happen?
A recent article in a newsmagazine, (I can't remember which so won't try to provide a link just now)--followed the progress of an army chaplain over a harrowing and bloody deployment in which he suffered a severe crises of faith. He struggles with it still. And his wife, frightened by the doubts and questioning of her minister-husband, doesn't know how to cope.
I think these kinds of questions echo because most attempts to answer or deal with them are just flat-out insufficient. People rely on platitudes and cliches--people, I might add, who have never had anything worse happen to them than a bounced check. They do not understand the depths of despair that can wash over someone who has crossed over into the netherworlds of a place so dark they can't find their way out of it. They don't realize that, at a time like that, even favorite Bible verses don't seem to help.
This is because platitudes are invented for the comfort of the ones spouting them--not the person receiving such worn-out wisdom. We don't know how to handle this strange new person in front of us and so we say these useless things to make ourselves feel better about our own inadequacy.
And in so doing, we make things infinitely worse for the sufferer. This is why they so often refuse to speak to ANYONE about what they are feeling.
And it is this hopelessness and helplessness and powerlessness that is the foundation of so much of the rage felt, not just by the returning soldier or Marine but by their families.
It's a desperate feeling of INADEQUACY in the towering face of evil.
Because war is evil. What man does in the name of war is evil. And what war DOES to man, in the face of it, is evil.
Even worse, I think, is the curiosity so many feel when confronted with the aftermath of war. Every single returning combat vet I know gets asked the two following questions:
1. Did you kill anybody?
2. What does it feel like to kill someone?
Again, such appalling insensitivity has absolutely nothing to do with the returning warrior and everything to do with the unseamly and sordid curiosity of those who have never confronted evil in their lives beyond the latest popcorn-thriller, and so ask the questions because they lack the imagination to think through how distressing that question is to someone who does not want to talk about it, least of all to idiots.
So, how do we help our loved one cope with this and other stresses of coming home from war? How do we help them when their deployments are extended and they are forced to deal with these doubts and questions in a place very far away from home?
Back in April of '06, when my son was deployed with the Marines in a deadly area of Iraq, and it was long and bloody and miserable, I made the following post over at my old blog, and I drew on the wisest book I have ever read.
Back more than 25 years ago, the Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a simple little book called, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.
In all of my life, I have never found another book wiser or more helpful. I have sent copies to people coping with terminal illness, with the death of a child, the death of a spouse, depression, and violent crime. Not long ago, I sent a copy to my friend Jamie to read in the hospital bed while her son battled to survive a traumatic brain injury.
And in each and every case, I have been told that nothing--no book, no advice, no counseling, NOTHING--has provided as much simple grace and comfort as this one little book.
When Rabbi Kushner published the book, he said he was hopeful that it would at least sell to a few people who knew him. Now, 25 years later, it has sold millions of copies worldwide and has gone into untold numbers of printings.
I reread the book not long ago, and after all these years, I can STILL think of nothing that expresses more cleanly the answers to all those questions.
This book is available in softcover at places like Amazon.com for something like 15 bucks, brand-new. It is an excellent book to send along to your deployed loved one. It is short, easy to read, and I guarantee, more comforting than you can imagine. I think everyone should read it once, and tuck it away in their hearts for the bad times.
Here is the post I made back on April 20, 2006. Feel free to print this up or copy it over into e-mails and send out anywhere, to anyone that you think it might help.
That is, after all, why we are all here.
WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE:
These events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random…Fate, not God, sends us the problem…The God I believe in…gives us the strength to cope with the problem.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his groundbreaking bestselling book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"
In my true-crime book, Faces of Evil, which I wrote with forensic sketch artist Lois Gibson, the first chapter dealt with a horrific case. The body of a six-year old child, starved and shrunken and covered with old scars and breaks, had been dumped like so much garbage in a mud puddle in a bad area of Houston. Lois had been asked to reconstruct the face in a forensic sketch because investigators couldn't identify the body.
Because that sweet child was murdered just three days before 9-11, it took detectives over a year to even find out who she was, because the media coverage of the terrible events in New York City and Washington, D.C. pushed the homicide of a little black girl in Houston onto the back pages. It took many months for the investigators to be able to finally get the media attention they needed that did, at last, land in the living room of that child's grandmother, who identified her. In the meantime, they had taken to calling her, "Angel Doe."
It took several more months for them to track down the miserable lying psychopathic sadists who called themselves Angel's parents, for investigators to find justice for that baby, who had been locked in a closet for the last two years of her life, starved, beaten, tortured with cigarettes, and denied access to a bathroom. If any of her siblings attempted to sneak food to her or bring her a spot of comfort such as a blanket or a baby's potty, they were beaten as well.
After her parents killed her and threw her away, they threatened her siblings with the same fate if any of them ever mentioned having had a sister. In court, they denied even knowing her at first, until one older sister, who had been kind to the child, suddenly threw her head back and wailed, a keen of grief so shattering the judge had to recess the court.
Her rotten parents are rotting in jail as we speak.
I chose to open today's post with Angel Doe's heart-wrenching case because I woke up this morning with a newspaper clipping in my mind. It was a clipping carefully cut out and saved by one of the investigators of Angel's murder. She had kept Angel's forensic sketch pinned up in her office for more than a year and worked tirelessly to find out who the child was and get her a decent Christian burial, which both detectives attended. At the time, her parents--the prime suspects--were on the run.
As the devastated grandparents and other family members wept, the preacher said something to the effect that, "God took her because He needed another beautiful flower in his garden."
Those words, meant to comfort, seemed to reach out from that yellowed newspaper clipping and slap me in the face, because I remember sitting alone in my office reading them, and leaping to my feet, and shouting out loud, GOD HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!
I raged at that clueless minister, who thought he was helping. But anyone with a tiny smidgeon of common sense KNOWS that a merciful loving God almighty would never, EVER, choose to take an innocent child out of this world in such a terrible, lonely, horrible way.
I hear such rationalizations all the time, when tragedy strikes. I hear people utter the same tired old platitudes over and over that are meant to comfort, such as, God had a purpose for this, we just can't know what it is, or, If the hurricane took the lives of your wife and children, God must have spared you for a special reason, or, The tsunami wiped out 250,000 people because most of them were not Christians and God was punishing them, or, You must have lost everything because God is testing you, but don't worry, He never gives you more than you can bear, or, Your baby must have been born deformed because God wants you to develop a special sensitivity to others so that you can help others.
The minister's attempt to give God credit for having "taken" Angel Doe could not have made any sense to those who must have felt shame and guilt for somehow not realizing what was going on right under their noses, and did nothing to ease their terrible grief at her needless suffering.
In his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Kushner, whose own son died a long, slow, lingering, painful death at the age of fourteen, says that such platitudes assume that GOD is the cause of all our suffering, and that these are weak attempts to somehow defend God, or otherwise provide some sort of explanation as to why He would do such a thing.
But what this often does, instead, is cause the suffering person to then BLAME GOD for their suffering, and turn away in rage and grief from the very fount of comfort that might have been available to them.
Rabbi Kushner states instead that: Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God.
Like Rabbi Kushner, I have also asked many times, what does it MEAN, There but for the grace of God go I?
If the plane crashes, killing 250 people, and I had a flat tire on the way to the airport and was spared, does that mean that God has some sort of select, special dispensation for me, but that He's decided it's time for all those other people to die, leaving behind countless orphans and widows and grievers?
What possible purpose could GOD have had for allowing the Holocaust, or the attacks on the World Trade Center?
The answer is: none.
God did not have a purpose for those terrible events but MAN did. Man is responsible for much of the evil in the world, simply because our Creator has endowed us with the exquisite freedom to choose: We fly the plane into the tower or we don't. People die, or they don't.
Hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and so on…the natural laws governing this planet and universe were ordained by God, and in the natural order of things, sometimes, things go wrong. Our bodies are part of that natural order, and sometimes, our bodies break down, something goes wrong at the cellular structure, or we inherit a bad gene. It's nobody's fault.
Accidents happen. Sometimes they are caused by human error and sometimes they just happen. Tectonic plates under the ocean's surface grind together, causing a wave that takes out a quarter of a million people--NONE of whom were being punished for ANYTHING.
My son is at war. He chose to enlist, and the Marines chose to send him to Iraq. Sometimes he is in situations where bullets fly. Do I believe that those bullets leave their gun barrels with some Marine's names on them and some not? Do I think God hand-selects who will get shot or blown up by an IED on a given day and who will survive?
No.
Those young men and women are well trained, and they do what they can to survive, each and every one of them. They all want to go home to their families. Some get that glorious privilege and some do not.
Does that mean I don't pray that my son will be one of the ones who comes home?
Of course not. I pray every day, every moment.
The question is…WHY? Why do I pray for my son and his buddies, for my nephew and his friends, for our friends sons and daughters in this awful endless war?
If God does not hand-pick who's going to live and who's going to die, then why pray?
We pray because GOD IS THERE. He shadows my son's every step. If my son gets a sudden instinct to duck down--even though he can see no danger--how do I know it is not the Spirit of God, as the Bible says, whispering in his ear, saying, This is the way, walk in it.
I want my son to duck. For all I know, God sees the danger even if he doesn't, and sends a warning he should heed. I know Dustin feels the same way, because he has said so. He doesn't question it, he just acts on it.
Do I believe miracles occur? Absolutely.
Recently, there was a much-publicized scientific double-blind study in which a group of heart patients were prayed for, along with traditional medical treatment. It's been much in the news lately that the prayers didn't seem to help because the patients didn't recover any faster or any better than the ones who weren't prayed for.
But how do we know? Maybe in quantifiable ways, the prayers could not be measured, at least not in physical terms. What we DON'T know, what the scientists DIDN'T measure, was what happened to those patients SPIRITUALLY.
Maybe, just knowing people were praying for them lifted their spirits and gave them the energy to take care of themselves. Or maybe, if their bodies were beyond fixing, they were able to rest in the peace that THEY WERE NOT ALONE.
Rabbi Kushner says, Fate, not God, sends us the problem. When we try to deal with it, we find out that we are not strong. We are weak; we get tired, we get angry, overwhelmed. We begin to wonder how we will ever make it through all the years. But when we reach the limits of our own strength and courage, something unexpected happens. We find reinforcement coming from a source outside of ourselves. And in the knowledge we are not alone, that God is on our side, we manage to go on.
When terrible things happen to those we love, it is not our job to explain it. As Rabbi Kushner says, those who are suffering don't need explanation, they need consolation.
Sometimes, in their clumsy attempts to "help," some people actually blame the victim. I knew of one young lady who was brutally raped on her way back from class in college one night, and her family scolded her for being out at that hour, as if she'd had some sort of choice over the sadistic designs of a predator. Rabbi Kushner says, those who are suffering don't need scolding, they need holding.
Terrible things happen. Most of the time, it's not anybody's fault. To say that He never gives us more than we can bear is foolish because He didn't send the problem in the first place, and sometimes, things happen that people just can't bear. Marriages break up, families are disrupted, sometimes, people take their own lives because the pain is just too much for them.
I love a quote the Rabbi gives in the book, from a nineteenth-century rabbi, Menachem Mendel of Rymanov, who said, "human beings are God's language."
"That is," adds Rabbi Kushner, "when we cry out to God in our anguish, God responds by sending us people."
We don't always know WHY bad things happen to good people, but God can speak to the sufferers through our presence, simply holding them, praying for them, cooking a meal or babysitting for them, sending a thoughtful card, or just listening to them. That's all anybody really needs when bad things happen to good people, they just need to know they aren't alone.
And miracles DO happen. The miracle is that God is there, God is always there, in us and all around us, always and forever. It's not God's fault when bad things happen, but His overriding presence can give us almost superhuman powers of strength and courage and healing that can strengthen and sustain us, encourage and empower us.
Through the guidance of Spirit, we can FIND meaning where no meaning exists. We can MAKE a purpose out of the unimaginable.
Through the grace of God, we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and fear no evil.
