In the fourth century CE, a French soldier named Martin encountered a poor man begging for bread. The weather was frigid, and the beggar had no coat. Martin’s comrades urged him to ignore the beggar and continue with their mission, but his conscience prevented compliance. Compounding his seemingly insurmountable dilemma, Martin’s military obligation precluded him from giving up his own coat lest he freeze and become a casualty. Unwilling to behave uncharitably, he was at grave risk for dereliction of duty. Inspired by soldierly ingenuity and the Holy Spirit, he cut his cloak in half to share its lifesaving warmth with the stranger.
War is fertile territory for moral conflicts like the one Martin faced. In A Terrible Love of War, Hillman (2004) criticized the religious community for shirking its responsibility to take on the challenge of thinking deeply about violent conflict. “Philosophy and theology,” he wrote, “the fields supposed to do the heavy thinking for our species, have neglected war’s overriding importance” (p. 2). Theology, understood as the study of faith, God, or religion, and philosophy, the study of ideas about knowledge, truth, and the meaning of life, are more than academic disciplines. They offer ways of thinking and talking about things that matter deeply to individuals, families, and communities. Delving into life’s contradictions, explicating its complexities, and challenging war’s apparent intractability are daily tasks for theologians and philosophers alike. Reflecting on who we are to be and how we are to live in light of imperfect solutions such as war are the heartbeat of theology and philosophy.
Practical theology and philosophy are best done in conversation with other people who challenge our assumptions, expand our limited experiences, and help us wrestle with big questions that inform lives well lived (Greitens, 2016). Healthy, religious congregations provide conversational space for working out the big questions of life and growing spiritually. Faith-based communities emerge from and participate in religious traditions that are rich in rituals and beliefs. These traditions, rituals, and beliefs can help prepare warriors for battle, ease them back home, and reintegrate them into their families and communities (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Tick, 2014). In civilian houses of worship and military chapels, warriors and veterans find communities in and with which to have hard and fruitful conversations about faith, meaning, war, values, and purpose: the stuff that is life itself.
Spiritual fitness has emerged over the past decade as an important concept in human performance optimization and is included among holistic approaches to developing and maintaining fit fighting forces. Spirit has etymological roots in pneuma (Greek), ruach (Hebrew), and spiritus (Latin), evoking images of life-giving breath. In Hindu tradition, breath, life, and spirit are synonymous (Prashna Upanishad 2:3). In Judeo-Christian tradition, the first human is brought to life by God’s breath blown into a dirt figure’s nostrils (Gen. 2:7). The Veterans Administration (VA) chaplaincy refers to the linguistic relationship among spirit, inspire/expire, and inhale/exhale to explain spirituality as that which is and is not life-giving (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2016, p. 9).
Australia’s elite 2nd Commando Regiment captured the idea of breath in its discussion of human performance and spiritual fitness. The commandos define “spirituality” as a “sense of aliveness” and regard spiritual health as “an essential line of operation” that undergirds health, well-being, intra- and interpersonal connectedness, purpose, and personal values. The commandos associate this with participation in something that transcends one’s self, contributing to acceptance of human foibles, celebration of diversity, ability to maintain personal integrity, and be at peace (Koss & Holder, 2015, pp. 6–7). Distinct from yet interrelated with emotional well-being and psychological health, “spiritual fitness” has proven difficult to define. Early attempts to clarify the concept led to circular definitions, such as “fitness of the spirit or soul, especially from a religious aspect” (Hufford, Fritts, & Rhodes, 2010, p. 75) and “an individual’s overall spiritual condition” (Sweeney, Rhodes, & Boling, 2012, p. 37).
Spirituality is unique to each person, is often related to religious beliefs and practices, and is oriented toward growth throughout a person’s lifetime. Spiritual fitness is about wellness instead of pathology and resists clinical measurement (Mason, 2014). These characteristics challenge institutional efforts to define, assess, and improve spiritual fitness. A workable definition will be broad enough to accommodate a variety of spiritual experiences while specific enough to be useful in efforts to strengthen individual military community members’ spiritual fitness.
Examining and defining spiritual fitness from a relational perspective can move us beyond a circular and unhelpful approach to spirituality and well-being. Defining spiritual fitness as relational examines spirituality as the feeling of connection to something greater than one’s self—a purpose, a movement, an organization, a mission, a belief system, a family—that is, experienced through intentionally developing relationships with self, others, one’s environment, and one’s source of ultimate meaning (Koss & Holder, 2015; Van Epp, 2016). Many service members and veterans find their source of ultimate meaning in the God of their personal faith. For these, encouraging spiritual fitness through faith-based programming supports overall well-being and performance.
“Faith-based” implies emerging from religious traditions or institutions, and “program” denotes the government has authorized and appropriated funds to facilitate service delivery. Most civilian congregations and other private sector religious organizations are rooted in particular faith traditions with theological or ethical guidelines that help inform and shape their programs. Federally organized faith-based programs, however, have a different set of ground rules stemming from religious freedom provisions set forth in the First Amendment of the Constitution. The “free exercise clause” guarantees Americans the right to freely exercise (or not exercise) religious beliefs and practices of their own choosing without undue interference from the government. This is the aspect of the First Amendment that permits and may in fact require the federal government to provide religious support to persons whose freedom of movement it limits through military service or incarceration. The “non-establishment clause” denies the government the right to establish religion. Nonestablishment precludes the United States from having an official religion and is the intellectual foundation for the pluralistic environment in which faith-based programming is made available to military service members and veterans.
The federal government has established chaplaincies in the military services and the VA as the authorized vehicles through which faith-based programming is delivered to service members and veterans. Military chaplaincy is primarily workplace ministry, although military hospitals as well as some outpatient clinics have staff chaplains to provide pastoral care and religious support to patients as well as staff. VA chaplaincy is designed as clinical health care ministry, and VA chaplains are trained and equipped to care for veterans in the same ways chaplains in civilian hospitals minister to their patients.
Title 10, U.S. Code (USC), Sections 3073, 5142, and 8067, provide for appointment of officers as chaplains in the each of the military services. “Chaplain” is the term applied to the clergy who minister in an institutional or community environment rather than in the context of a religious community or organization. Although schools, prisons, corporations, and other organizations employ chaplains, the term itself originates from the military and from the potential spiritual conflict inherent in fulfilling military and religious duties simultaneously. To remember the sacrifice by the French soldier who became St. Martin of Tours, priests carried capellas, or symbolic cloaks, into battle. The title “chaplain” is derived from cappellanus—custodians of St. Martin’s cloak (Bergen, 2004, pp. 45–46).
The first recorded U.S. military chaplain was Samuel Stone, a pastor who joined his congregants and fellow settlers when they responded to an Indian raid in 1637. The Continental Navy, established in 1775, required divine services to be conducted shipboard, which implied the need for and existence of chaplains. Seventeenth- and 18th-century chaplains were, like Stone, local clergy who picked up their weapons along with their prayer books to join the fight or were already in the ranks and given supplemental pay to function as chaplains. The Navy informally required its chaplains to be ordained ministers as early as 1823 but did not formally require such credentials until 1842 (Budd, 2002).
Clarification and modification of chaplains’ roles and functions are a theme in the history of military chaplaincy. In addition to their religious duties, they have functioned as intelligence officers, supply clerks, morale officers, education officers, and commanders’ secretaries (Herspring, 2001). During the Civil War, the chaplaincy underwent historic changes. Until 1864, many chaplains were active combatants and intelligence gatherers, roles that came to be seen as incompatible with their primary pastoral role. President Abraham Lincoln advocated protecting the pastoral role as part of the Lieber Code, the antecedent of the Law of Armed Conflict and parts of the Geneva Conventions. The Lieber Code included the provision that captured chaplains were to be retained persons to care for fellow prisoners and were not to be classified as prisoners of war; neither were they bound to resist and escape (Odom, 2002).
Today, military chaplains are unequivocally noncombatants set apart to provide religious support. Chaplains are commissioned officers, attend military schools, deploy to combat zones, and meet general readiness requirements. They must have specific educational credentials, in most cases be ordained clergy, and be certified by a recognized religious body. They are ineligible to act as commanders or function outside of their pastoral role. The religious support chaplains provide includes worship, sacraments, religious education, pastoral counseling, spiritual care, relationship enhancement services, and ethical advice to leaders.
VA chaplains meet the same educational and certification standards as their military counterparts and provide religious, pastoral, and spiritual care in medical centers and clinics. The Veteran’s Health Administration directive governing spiritual care is explicit that patients determine the sort of chaplaincy care to be provided: “the type and extent of spiritual and pastoral care provided must be commensurate with the needs, desires, and voluntary consent of the individual Veteran” (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2016, p. 2). This is consistent with a VA-wide emphasis on patient-centered care that makes the patient the primary expert about his or her own care plan.
Military and VA chaplains provide similar services in health care settings, participating in ethics committees and processes, offering sacraments and pastoral offices to patients and families, advising clinicians and administrators on how religion and spirituality may affect patient care, and facilitating communication among patients, family members, and medical staff. They offer educational programs, worship services, prayers, blessings, and community programs. VA and military chaplains alike are interested in having excellent relationships with their behavioral health colleagues and informing spiritual care with evidence-based practices, and more and more chaplains are engaging in interdisciplinary research examining relationships between spirituality and health outcomes.
Providing structured faith-based programs is one approach to developing spiritual fitness and harnessing spirituality and religion for healing. Such programs can offer ways to develop resiliency, assess moral injuries, and address moral injuries’ impact on life. The military services and VA hospitals and clinics use a variety of programs, some evidence-based and some not, some locally developed and others from outside vendors, in adopting this approach. Following are three sample programs employed to support service members and veterans in their path to develop, retain, and restore wholeness and well-being: Moral Injury Reconciliation, Building Spiritual Strengths, and Ultimate Spiritual Resiliency and Relationships.
War literature is replete with portrayals of men and women directly involved in or facing moral injury as a result of war’s violence. The preponderance of scholarly work concerning spiritual, moral, and psychological effects of war focuses on trauma, usually experienced in direct combat or as a victim of military sexual assault. Traumatic experiences such as killing, failing to prevent one’s friends from being killed, or being victimized whether by trusted comrades or strangers can damage one’s spiritual well-being (Harris, Park, Currier, Usset, & Voecks, 2015; Rosenheck & Fontana, 2004). This damage to one’s spiritual well-being may result in moral injury.
One aspect of moral injury is psychic wounding that disrupts confidence in one’s own ability to make moral decisions or in the justness or morality of society or social institutions. It is a wound that damages the sufferer’s ability to trust self, God, others, institutions, and ideas and manifests emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Harris et al., 2015; Jensen & Childs, 2016; Litz et al., 2009, 2015 Shay, 2013; Sherman, 2015).
Trusting is a dangerous business. It implies certainty, expectation, confidence, and reliance. Individuals disappointed in love or swindled in commerce are often derided as fools for having taken others at their word: “trust but verify” is a military maxim; “expectations are premeditated resentments” is a wisdom saying from the recovery community. Trust placed in individuals and institutions to navigate complex and ambiguous situations without causing unintended harm or transgressing implicit shared values creates the context in which moral injuries occur.
A U.S. Navy SEAL who became a clinical chaplain as well as therapist following 25 years of military service designed Moral Injury Reconciliation (MIR) based on his experiences caring for fellow veterans. He wanted to provide a spiritually and clinically sound program to address the fractured trust and broken spirits of his morally injured patients. Inability to trust self, others, and God may be related to an inability to give or receive forgiveness. Barriers to giving or receiving forgiveness together with the potentially therapeutic efficacy of pardon underlie MIR’s theoretical framework.
MIR addresses the capacity to forgive through a three-phased, holistic treatment process over the course of nine weeks. The target population is service members, veterans, and others suffering from trauma-related episodes. Using evidence-based therapies, psychoeducation, experiential exercises, communication skills development, and self-care techniques, MIR empowers the individual to discern where forgiveness of self and others is needed and then practice forgiveness in daily life.
Reconciliation is intended to happen within the individual and, when appropriate to the person’s belief system, with God or other source of meaning. Reconciliation with the person, persons, or institution whose actions caused the breach requiring forgiveness is not required for healing. Forgiveness implies a change in feeling and/or attitude on the part of the injured party and may or may not involve reconciliation with the offending party. Results from the six pilot MIR groups are promising and indicate that classic understandings of forgiveness facilitating healing continue to be valid (L. Lee, personal communication, July 25, 2016).
Building Spiritual Strength (BSS) utilizes a format of eight sessions and a workbook and takes an interfaith and experiential approach to facing trauma. The goal of the program is to reduce trauma’s negative effects on spiritual fitness and focus on full optimization of positive spiritual practices and resources. Through this optimization, spiritual fitness becomes a means of meaning-making and reframing trauma. The program focuses on utilizing spirituality in a community setting of fellow trauma survivors, facilitating recovery through both personal and social resources (Meredith et al., 2011).
In the first session, members of the group build rapport through sharing personal history. For military communities, this specifically focuses on sharing both spiritual and military histories. Once rapport is built, goals for spiritual fitness are developed and recorded in the workbook. This not only creates a cohesive support group but also provides achievable goals to set as targets and thus build spiritual strength over time. After completing rapport building and goal setting, the program moves into second and third sessions focusing on experiential practices of spirituality. Over the course of a couple of sessions, the group prays and meditates together and individually and maintains individual logs of reactions to the exercises. Once these exercises are complete and reflections recorded in the members’ logs, the fourth session brings the group together to discuss and expand their understanding of theodicy, such as why evil exists or why trauma occurs.
From this point onward, the program transitions from rapport building and spiritual exercises to developing resources for building and maintaining spiritual strength. In the fifth session, the logs are examined to see where avoidant spiritual coping practices are occurring, and members work with the group to discern spiritual practices that are active coping instead of avoidant. By discerning and naming these spiritual practices, the group members are then able to move forward to the next session with new tools and skills to address trauma. The sixth and seventh sessions take the spiritual practices and discernments of the previous session and implement them to address the need for forgiveness and resolving conflict. As this is a key component of moral injury, the strength of this program is that it develops the practices and spiritual fitness needed for forgiveness as an ongoing act of self-care and healing. After implementing the spiritual practices in the forgiveness process, the program concludes with the eighth and final session. Debriefing and planning for future spiritual strength building are vital to the continued success to this program and provide an avenue for trauma survivors to engage future moral injuries (Harris et al., 2011).
Ultimate Spiritual Resiliency and Relationships (R&R) is a four-lesson spiritual growth program using John Van Epp’s Relationship Attachment Model (RAM). R&R focuses on helping participants develop a clear understanding of their own spiritual beliefs and how these beliefs help them navigate relationships at work and at home. This approach is multidomain and accommodates diverse learning and processing styles. R&R teaches how relationships with self, sources of meaning, others, and the environment can be conceptualized through knowing, trusting, and relying (cognitive and emotive processes). Participants put this into action through committing and touching (behavioral processes). Normally taught by chaplains in a group setting, R&R’s outcomes include the ability to articulate one’s personal beliefs, increased interest in spiritual matters, and use of the RAM as a tool to assess and improve relationships with self, God (or other transcendent source of meaning), others, and the environment.
The RAM is a model for considering, monitoring, and adjusting thoughts, feelings, and actions relating to self, others, circumstances, and God or other focus of spirituality. It can explain the connections in four key relationships of life: how one relates with oneself, others, circumstances, and spirituality. The model proposes five distinct and interrelated systems of self that occupy unique spaces in the functioning of self and relationships. First, the sensory system contributes awareness within the self of knowing others. Second, the cognitive system contributes beliefs within the self of trusting others. Third, the emotional system produces emotions within the self of relying on others. Fourth, the volitional system produces a will within the self to make and strive to keep commitments to others. Finally, the tactile system contributes actions and expressions within the self that touch others. The first two, knowing and trusting, relate mostly to cognitive processes (thinking). The third, relying, relates to emotive processes (feeling). The last two, committing and touching, relate primarily to behavioral processes (acting/behaving).
R&R invites military members and veterans to identify and consider how they think, what they feel, and what they do in their relationships with self, others, and transcendent sources of meaning. This invitation creates opportunities for conversation among service members and veterans as well as with their chaplains. It creates intentional space to engage in meaning-making and can give both religious and nonreligious people a new language for talking with one another about spirituality. R&R also exposes participants to 12 classic spiritual disciplines: solitude, silence, fasting and abstaining, celebration, sacrifice, service, worship, prayer, confession, submission, fellowship, and study. These or similar spiritual practices are found in most religious traditions as well as some secular programs. R&R’s format for introducing spiritual disciplines encourages seeking and finding common ground among diverse participants. Since R&R is presented as an educational, personal development program, it functions as an invitation to spiritual growth that can open the door to lifelong well-being (Van Epp, 2016).
Many of us assume that all moral human beings despise war and that every person who must take part does so with some degree of regret. Yet chaplains meet and work with faithful and religious service members who have planned battles, ordered killing, killed enemy combatants, and have felt no agony. Chaplains also serve warriors who thought they would kill without regret yet found they needed to repent of doing violence to fellow humans who were labeled “enemy.” No two situations are alike, and none of the people involved in them are spiritually or emotionally identical, making hard-and-fast rules regarding war and peace impossible. One thing is certain: as long as societies engage in violent conflict and employ men and women to wage war on their behalf, they are obligated to provide faith-based programs to develop spiritual fitness, prevent as much moral wounding as possible, and help spirits heal when harmed.
Holy Joe’s Café is a ministry developed and managed almost single-handedly by a member of a congregational men’s ministry in Wallingford, Connecticut. Holy Joe’s mission is to make sure every chaplain in a combat zone has a good cup of coffee to share with the troops in his or her care, because meaningful conversations happen over coffee. Over the years, chaplains have shared Holy Joe’s coffee and tea in most deployed locations around the world, many garrisons in the United States and abroad, as well as in some VA hospitals and clinics.
In one of those deployed locations, an army squad engaged in a firefight, and the squad leader and a subordinate soldier were wounded. The younger soldier was seriously injured, and his leader felt responsible, guilty, and just plain bad. A faith with a tradition of confession and absolution might have been helpful to him. Many religions and other spiritual programs include some kind of ritual confession of shortcomings and misdeeds, often leading to an absolution or forgiveness pronounced by clergy or fellow penitent. This soldier did not have such a tradition and was seeking a means of finding forgiveness. He talked with the chaplain who suggested they go together to have a cup of coffee with the younger, more seriously injured soldier.
The squad leader held the coffee pot and three cups in his lap, while the chaplain pushed his wheelchair to the young man’s hospital room. The threesome drank coffee and talked over what had happened. In the end, the soldiers agreed that decisions had been made correctly, and they began to talk about what military service was going to be like for the younger of the two, who now had only one leg. He continued to look to his sergeant for leadership, and the sergeant continued to provide it. In the middle of all that, they talked of forgiveness even though no one was at fault. Mutual respect, the chaplain’s expertise, and a good cup of coffee facilitated spiritual fitness through a secular form of confession, repentance, and absolution.
Thousands of miles from that bedside, a severely disabled veteran had come to resent many chaplains over the years. He was tired of them pretending to be interested in him when they really “just wanted to shove Jesus down his throat” (Anonymous, personal communication, December 11, 2011). The new chaplain didn’t know this about the veteran and visited him several times a week, enjoying his acerbic observations and dry sense of humor. She never talked about religion and didn’t offer to pray; she just visited him. She got some coffee from Holy Joe’s and asked if her new friend would like some. He hesitated, so the chaplain asked if he would prefer something else. “No,” he said, “I like coffee. I’m just wondering if this is when you try to get me to be religious.” The chaplain was stunned. It hadn’t occurred to her to do anything but be his friend. It was obvious he wasn’t interested in traditional religious, spiritual, or pastoral care. When she shared her dismay with the patient, he was equally surprised. They drank their coffee in silence, pondering what these disclosures might mean to their relationship.
The following week, the chaplain was called to the same veteran’s ward. The nurse who had cared for the patient for almost a decade asked the chaplain, “What did you do to him? He actually asked to see you! Before he’s always told us to keep the chaplains away.” The veteran wanted to talk about how to improve his marriage, how to forgive his wife for not visiting him as much as he wanted, and how to ask her forgiveness for not being the best husband in the world. Something about not being evangelized over that cup of coffee opened that veteran to forgiving and seeking forgiveness. Holy Joe’s seems to have it right—meaningful conversations happen over coffee.
Tim O’Brien has a great story about a soldier who doesn’t like church but thinks about becoming a pastor because he just wants to be nice to people (O’Brien, 1990). Is a pastor the only category of person permitted to treat others with kindness? Perhaps, if the context is war.
One lovely day almost 10 years after 9/11, a helicopter touched down outside a combat hospital. Four black-clad soldiers nimbly jumped out, faces covered and automatic weapons at the ready. It was such an incongruous sight that some of the hospital staff—those who weren’t running to pull the inbound patient off the chopper—chuckled. After their patient was safely inside the trauma bay, the soldiers nervously settled on their haunches outside the Emergency Department doors. The chaplain brought them cold water and folding chairs and encouraged them to get comfortable.
One of the soldiers spoke English and so became the spokesperson for his team. After 15 minutes or so of cajoling by their hosts, the team pulled down their baklavas and allowed their faces to be seen while they drank water, ate cookies, and sipped tea. The patient, an “Enemy Prisoner of War,” survived and spent several weeks in the hospital. The apprehending forces were responsible for providing guards for the duration of the prisoner’s stay, so the soldiers were stuck at the hospital too. Over time the visitors’ wariness toward the hospital staff melted into warmth and friendship. Many times they said, “You can’t be military! You’re too nice! You’re too nice. Not military!” The soldiers wanted badly to get back out and hit the streets. There were bad guys to find and capture. They had joined the military to fight, they said, reiterating that the hospital staff couldn’t possibly be military—they were too nice! Their worldview did not allow for nice people in the military. These medics and chaplains simply did not fit in their system.
While the hospital personnel were indeed kind, many found taking care of detained persons and enemy prisoners of war exceptionally stressful. In some cases, the same team cared for both a wounded comrade and the person who had done the wounding. Workshops on caring for the enemy, healing and forgiveness rituals, and individual pastoral counseling helped resolve the spiritual conflicts naturally created by working in the midst of active combat.
Supporting and encouraging spiritual growth among the military and veteran population require openness, diversity, and flexibility beyond any one chaplain’s ability. There are as many spiritual paths as there are individuals; even people who practice the same faith in exactly the same way experience it differently. In one deployed location, in addition to traditional chapel-based ministries, unit-based worship services and Bible studies, and chapel-hosted Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, two unusual group activities notably fostered spiritual growth.
The first, South Park Sunday School, was developed and led by a chaplain-layperson team. They selected South Park episodes with religious and theological themes, wrote discussion questions for each episode, watched one per week with a group of 20–30 deployed service members and civilians, and led discussion based on the questions they had prepared. People who never went to any chapel or chaplain-sponsored activities attended faithfully and participated actively. They shared stories of religious and spiritual struggle in a safe space, and about a third of the group sought personal spiritual direction from the chaplain. South Park, a television series known for religious satire and somewhat crude humor, became a vehicle for effective faith-based programming for spiritual fitness (D. Christiansen, personal communications, February 20, 2011, and March 6, 2011).
The second, a theodicy study group, chose to tackle the tension in which its members were living and working. Theodicy engages the question of how evil can exist in the face of an all-powerful and good God. The group’s chaplain selected scholarly articles on theodicy and related topics such as just war theory and led a small group in discussion. The group was organized because of requests from service members who wanted to give deep thought to their own beliefs and practices in light of war and other evils that plague humanity. The theodicy study group was a powerful spiritual fitness program for its half dozen members (J. Johannigman, personal communication, May 24, 2011).
Faith is not something that bulletproofs us. Rather, it makes us open to the joys and pains of living and allows us to grow from both. Humans seem to have been created breakable and invincible in equal measure, making us needful of care as well as able to care for others. For many, it is the God of our understanding that chose to create us that way. For others, it is just the way it is and there are no supernatural factors or powers involved in the natural world or in human affairs. Whatever our personal belief system, life is mysterious and painful and sometimes, when human or divine love enters the mix, beautiful. We may be God-created, but as Solovy (2016) reminds us, we and our souls are on a human journey:
My soul needs a human journey.
Sometimes, I wish it weren’t so.
Sometimes I wish that pain and suffering
Had no purpose and no meaning.
Or—if nothing else—G-d would
Share that purpose with me.
But, no, I must find that meaning
Myself.
Sickness and health.
Disaster and trauma.
The steady drumbeat of death
From the moment of birth.
My soul needs a human journey.
I embrace my fear
With an open heart.
I embrace my hope and my yearning
Never knowing G-d’s answers,
Releasing the vain notion that
G-d will show up to explain
How the foundations of earth were built.
My soul needs a human journey.
Here is where love resides.
Here is where holiness and the mundane dance.
Here is where I encounter you, my friends.
Here is where I encounter You, my G-d.
Yah, Shecinah, Makor Hayiim,
Source of All,
Fountain of mystery,
Bless the hidden and the revealed.
Bless our moments and our years.
Bless this human journey of souls.
The human journey is beset with conflict, and sometimes conflict erupts into the violence of war. In all conflict, violent or nonviolent, the spirit suffers and struggles. Fortunately, the human spirit, even under the most extreme distress, can endure. Faith-based programming for spiritual fitness manifests hope that the military and veteran spirit can and will endure, grow, and flourish.
Life is in delicate balance
Here on a spinning ball
Blue-green algae growing
On a sea-cliff wall
Man too is a mortal substance
Bound to a hurtling rock
How can the fragile suffer
Shock on shock?
What is it of the spirit
That clings to any ground
Enduring as dark cliff algae
Sea waves pound (“Blue-Green Algae,” by J. Allan Lind, 1960)
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