Sermons

Minister: Rev. Margaret A. Beckman | READING “The Meaning of Memorial Day” (excerpt) by Rev. David Pyle, Chaplain, U.S. Army Reserve and member of the UUA Congregational Life Staff, New England Region
It began as “Decoration Day”, a day when families and friends would go to cemeteries and place flowers and flags upon the graves of those who had died in the Civil War. From those graves they heard, and they remembered the cost of war. I want to return to that spirit, so that the memory of the true costs of war is fresh in our minds, renewed annually… so that perhaps we can honor our dead by sending no more to join them.

Keep your Memorial Day plans, if you have them, but remember the “reason for the season”. We do not honor the casualties of war with flowers and speeches, but by truly and deeply remembering the cost of war when we contemplate sending our service members of today into harm’s way. We honor them by remembering that war is a hell that should rarely, if ever, be unleashed.

Remember.

Yours in faith, Rev. David Pyle

 
READING “The Long Road Home” for Muhammad Ali by Walker, Alice. Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. Simon & Schuster.
The Long Road Home
for Muhammad Ali

I am beginning to comprehend
the mystery
of the gift of suffering.
It is true as some
have said
that it is a crucible
in which the gold of one’s spirit
is rendered,
and shines.

Ali,
you represent all of us
who stand the test of suffering
most often alone
because who can understand
who or what
has brought us to our feet?

Their knees worn out
ancestors stood us up
from the awkward position
they had to honor
on the floor beneath
the floor. 

I have been weeping
all day
thinking of this.
The cloud of witness
the endless teaching
the long road home.
Walker, Alice. Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

 

SERMON
It began as Decoration Day – a time to honor those who died in the American Civil War and to place flags and flowers on their graves. Now, Memorial Day is a day to remember all those who died while serving our country.

Here is a short quiz for you. The Category is “By the Numbers- Approximately.”

I give you the number. You tell me what it means.

850,000
Military casualties in the American Civil War

416,800
Military fatalities in WWII

52,220
Military fatalities in the Vietnam conflict

16,652
Active duty and mobilized reservists deaths 2006 to 2018

 

Active-Duty Military Deaths (in all Countries), 2006-2018

Table 1. U.S. Casualty Category
Non-OCO
OCO
Sum of Category
Category (as % of Total)

Accident
4,827
478
5,305
31.9%

Self-inflicted
3,579
284
3,863
23.2%

Illness / Injury
2,791
119
2,910
17.5%

Killed in Action
6
2,704
2,710
16.3%

Died of Wounds
1
885
886
5.3%

Homicide
479
41
520
3.1%

Undetermined
267
17
284
1.7%

Pending
148
2
150
Less than 1%

Terrorist
18
2
20
Less than 1%

While Captured
0
4
4
Less than 1%

Total
12,116
4,536
16,652
100%

 

Memorial Day honors and remembers those who died fighting for our country, and we are right to set aside this day and this time to reflect on the human costs of war and armed conflict.

There will be time for that tomorrow. Each of us will pause and contemplate and remember and express our gratitude.

As I’ve been thinking about Memorial Day this year, the words of David Pyle and Jennfier Granholm have stuck with me.
We do not honor the casualties of war with flowers and speeches, but by truly and deeply remembering the cost of war when we contemplate sending our service members of today into harm’s way. We honor them by remembering that war is a hell that should rarely, if ever, be unleashed. —David Pyle, Chaplain, US Army Reserve.

Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well. —Jennifer Granholm, former Attorney General and Governor of Michigan
In all the wars and armed conflicts of our country, we have lost hundreds of thousands of young people who were sent into harm’s way and who did their duty and lost their lives doing it. So, yes, it is important that we have our ceremonies, our parades; that we support the families of the fallen and continue to offer our prayers and our solemn remembrances.

And, it is also true that we must not glorify war and we must not think of our dead merely as heroes fighting under the flag of our country.

We must keep before us always the fact that war is hell. There is no such thing as a good war. If I had all day and next week too, I might launch a tirade about the impossibility of any war being a “just war” despite what heads of state might say to assuage their guilt and lessen the responsibility for sending our young women and men into battle where many will come home in pieces or caskets. Some may argue that there are times when war is necessary, but there is nothing that makes war just. Ok.

Of the 16,652 service members who have died since 2006, over 12,000 perished in non-conflict situations and 4,500 in conflict operations.

Personnel died in over 70 countries, but the vast majority died within the United States. More fatalities occur during training than on deployment. Our military is very skilled at fighting a war without suffering many deaths among our personnel.

I wanted to find out more about what really happens to our modern all-volunteer service members after we send them into battle. And I wanted to know more about what David Pyle means when he says that we need to remember the cost of war—I don’t think he means dollars; I think he means lives—the living as well as the dead.

Since the Vietnam conflict, we have known that there are many more injuries than fatalities. For the soldiers who are grievously wounded, the long road home can be torturous.

“But deaths do not tell the entire story. Since 2001, more than 53,700 US soldiers and sailors have been officially listed as wounded in the major post-9/11 war zones.

Many other US soldiers have become amputees. From the start of the wars through mid 2015, there were 1,645 major limb amputations for US service members associated with battle injuries in the major war zones.

In its most recent report, issued in 2015, the Congressional Research Service found that more than 300,000 troops have suffered traumatic brain injuries.

Suicide is also an urgent and growing problem among the veterans of the post-9/11 wars. Although it is difficult to tell how many of these suicides are by post-9/11 war veterans, because the VA does not disaggregate by war, there were more than 6,000 veteran suicides each year from 2008-2016, a rate that is 1.5 times greater than that of the non-veteran population.”[1]

I will not minimize the tragedy of our service members who die. For their family and loved ones, it is horrible and never-ending.

For the service members who return in pieces, it is horrible and sometimes never-ending. The Military and VA Hospitals are stressed to the breaking point in trying to care for the wounded. According to the US Veterans Administration, we have about 18 million veterans, 4 million are classified as disabled and over 1 million are totally disabled. I’m not sure which kinds of disabilities are included in these numbers beyond physical injuries and traumatic brain injuries. What is much harder to quantify are the emotional, psychological and spiritual injuries that our service members sustain and then suffer from long after they take off the uniform. We are learning more and more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injury and the staggering number of personnel who have one or even both of these injuries. Now, we are learning about another devastating injury – Moral Injury. I don’t think there are any statistics on how many military members suffer from moral injury, but it is a big number.

Several of us were in Bucksport on Thursday evening to watch the film Almost Sunrise. We learned about moral injury and met two veterans who carry deep spiritual wounds from their time in uniform. I’m just beginning to learn the extent and the damage of Moral Injury. I’m quite certain people have suffered from moral injury as long as we have been thinking and reasoning animals, but as a war-induced injury that is destroying the lives of veterans and their families, we still know too little.

Most of us have a pretty good idea of what PTSD is – at least as lay people. Moral injury is different. Very different. Definitions vary a little bit, but I will offer two descriptions.

In his book, Killing From the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War, Robert Emmet Meagher credits Dr. Jonathan Shay with the term “Moral Injury.”

“In fact, it was Dr. Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD—a pioneer and luminary in the effort to address the all too often catastrophic inner wounds suffered by military men and women in conflict—who first entered this term into public discourse. His definition of moral injury—“betrayal of ‘what’s right’ in a high-stakes situation by someone who holds power”—was much more inclusive than that operative in most public forums today.”

Meagher, Robert Emmet. Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (p. 15). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Rita Nakashima Brok and Gabriella Lettini offer a slightly different description in their book, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War.

Moral injury is not PTSD. Many books on veteran healing confuse and conflate them into one thing. It is possible, though, to have moral injury without PTSD. The difference between them is partly physical. PTSD occurs in response to prolonged, extreme trauma and is a fear-victim reaction to danger. …….

Moral injury is the result of reflection on memories of war or other extreme traumatic conditions. It comes from having transgressed one’s basic moral identity and violated core moral beliefs.

Brock, Rita Nakashima. Soul Repair. Beacon Press. Kindle Edition.

My more complete sermon on moral injury will wait for another day – I need to learn a whole lot more and it is a topic that deserves careful consideration that I cannot give this morning. Let me simply say that I am becoming increasingly convinced that moral injury will be the defining spiritual malady of our time.

People who suffer from moral injury need a spiritual intervention to help them recover.

And that brings me to us: to church, to faith and faith communities.

Who better than us can be instrumental in offering a safe and welcoming place for spiritual struggle and recovery?

I don’t mean to be glib here. It would be a tremendous undertaking for faith communities to discern and accept their role in walking beside people with moral injury on their long road home to wholeness and happiness.

A United States Veteran dies by suicide every 70 minutes. 22 deaths by suicide every day.

The connection between moral injury and suicide cannot be ignored.

In the film, Almost Sunrise, the two veterans who walked from Wisconsin to California both found some peace and healing from their internal and life-threatening moral injury. It wasn’t easy. It was not until they faced the reality of what they had done and engaged in deep work around guilt and shame and anger and betrayal and finally acceptance and forgiveness that they could begin to feel hope and imagine a future with them in it.

I want us to consider how Unitarian Universalists – even UUs here in Castine – can be part, even a tiny little part, of the healing and soul recovery or repair for veterans suffering from the moral injury inflicted upon them.

I don’t have any answers, but I want to engage in the question and the potential answers and opportunities we might find together.
Senator Bob Kerrey, a Navy Seal in Vietnam, confessed that “I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don’t think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that’s the memory that haunts.” It is imperative for us to ponder these words, to listen to our veterans, to stop using the convenient rhetoric of just wars, and to heal the wounded and the haunted.
Meagher, Robert Emmet. Killing from the Inside Out: Moral Injury and Just War (p. 143). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

 

It’s Memorial Day. We honor our dead by treating our living well. We honor our dead by contemplating the true cost of war and remembering that war is hell. We honor our dead by loving our broken and damaged veterans who return from war but whose healing requires deep spiritual work that will take time. May we be a help and support as they travel where only they can go. May we offer a nonjudgmental and comforting place for them to rest and pray and sing and dance and restore their souls. Theirs is a long road home. May they never walk alone.

Blessed Be. I Love You.   Amen.

[1]  Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency   November 2018   Neta C. Crawford   WATSON INSTITUTE International & Public Affairs/ Brown University