Author Archives: padresteve

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About padresteve

I'm a Navy Chaplain and Old Catholic Priest
December 5, 2012 · 23:44

The Easy Baking Bachelor of Christmastide

I am not a cook, a baker, a candlestick maker. However I do make a mean pizza and apart from that pretty much stick to things that grow in cans, boxes or the produce aisle. Basically I am pretty much a little evolved hunter-gather much as were my Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestors.

This week our Board of Directors at the Naval Hospital is having its annual cookie baking exercise where each of us brings 8 dozen or more homemade cookies that we invite our hospital employees, military and civilian to partake of as we wish them the warmest seasons greetings, Christmas, Chanukah or whatever religious or even non-religious custom our employees celebrate. The idea is simply that we desire to wish people well while adding to their caloric intake of the holiday season.

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There is only one problem in this for me, I am a simple hunter-gatherer who due to the necessity of military life am living apart from my wife, who takes materials that I hunt and gather and turns them into wonderful cookies. This is something that I am capable of doing but would take a much greater expenditure of time as well as effort to actually make them from scratch. I would have to buy things that I would not use again, such as large mixing bowls and food items such as eggs and real butter. I would also have to wash all the dishes and since my apartment has no automated dishwasher save me, that is a lot of work.

Now we on the board do have options. If we want to go to a bakery that actually bakes cookies we can purchase them, however the only place on the island that I live on that bakes cookies is the gourmet dog food store. Molly my dog assures me that these very tasty looking morsels are quite good. However, I don’t think that they would appeal to my co-workers, though I did take a small bite of one myself to see what she saw in them. After tasting it I think I might be able to get away with it but all it would take is one person to figure it out.

I was in a real pickle. I could try to fake it and pretend that I baked the Oreos myself, but that wasn’t going to fly. Neither would the gourmet dog cookies. So I did the math. I figured the cost, time and effort required to buy all the, bowls, utensils and ingredients, find a recipe that I could follow and successful execute in the allotted time and knew that this would be a futile effort.

Now since I am a very rational person who is relative adept in the use of the English language and the definitions of words I went to work. I figured that if I prepare something at home it becomes homemade. When it comes to homemade it really is about what your definition of is is.  Even if I buy something that is a pre-made, pre-packaged bunch of mass produced ingredients at a supermarket and prepare them in my rather modest kitchen it still counts as homemade.  It is “homemade” just as my ancestors did when they looted French towns and took the mutton and porridge home to eat, only pausing to warm up the items over the open hearth. So apart from a minor amount of actual work I was able to bake 10 dozen chocolate chunk cookies in about the amount of time that it would take to loot Boulogne or any other coastal French town during the 100 years war.

Now I would have had 12 dozen cookies. However, I forgot that a batch of cookies was in the oven when I went out to the local distributor of cheap goods to buy plastic Christmas plates, as I have few plates of my own to take the homemade cookies to work on Friday. Needless to say when Molly, who went for the ride with me and I got home we returned to a smoky kitchen and two dozen charcoal cookies, sort of the same kind condition that my ancestors would leave coastal French towns in after a looting expedition back in the day.

So this bachelor has successfully tackled one holiday mission of the season and on to the next. Decorating the office door tomorrow. I have bought the materials and plan on assigning my junior minion to actually do the work. I love Christmas decorations, especially when someone else puts them up.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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December 4, 2012 · 23:42

An older post of mine about Pearl Harbor as we approach the 71st anniversary of that “Day of Infamy.”

padresteve's avatarThe Inglorius Padre Steve's World

Arizona Leading the Battle Line

“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost.” Except of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor Speech December 8th 1941

Today is the 68th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and as we were then we are at war.

A Date that Will Live in Infamy: USS Arizona Burning

I remember reading Walter Lord’s “Day of Infamy” when I was a 7th grade student at Stockton Junior High School back in 1972.  At the time my dad was on his first deployment to Vietnam on the USS Hancock CVA-19.  As…

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December 3, 2012 · 22:00

Laughing All the Way: Padre Steve’s Favorite Christmas Films and TV Shows

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“Where do you think you’re going? Nobody’s leaving. Nobody’s walking out on this fun, old-fashioned family Christmas. No, no. We’re all in this together. This is a full-blown, four-alarm holiday emergency here. We’re gonna press on, and we’re gonna have the hap, hap, happiest Christmas since Bing Crosby tap-danced with Danny Kaye.”

This is the time of year that a lot of Christmas movies are shown on almost every television outlet known to humanity.  Of course there are many that are absolutely timeless such as Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and its derivatives and It’s a Wonderful Life.

There are also ones of various religious themes, usually involving the birth of Jesus, like no duh, it’s Christmas. Unfortunately most of these films as classic as they are bore me to tears.  Yes they have nice messages and tug at the heartstrings but without wanting to sound too much like Scrooge I get bored by them, frightfully bored.

I guess part of this is a generational thing.  The ones set in the 1930s and 1940s are from a different era, an era that I know from history books and family members but not something that is a part of my life.  It’s like the film The Bell’s of Saint Mary’s is about the Roman Catholic Church of a half century ago, not the one that I know or that exists now.  They are fictional and while touching are indelibly tied to their time.  The religious themed films tended often to be major productions of the Hollywood Gospel genre, not very faithful to Scripture or the teachings of the church, not that there is anything wrong with that.  But it is certain to me that Cecil B. De Mille did not write the 5th Gospel, or the 6th Book of Moses (You have to know your Luther Bible for that one) thus I have a hard time with films that use the nativity or for that matter the passion of Christ for a quick buck.

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However, every year, there are several Christmas movies and television shows that I cannot live without seeing.  Of the television shows my all time favorite is A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.  As a kid I had a deep affinity for both Charlie Brown and Linus. The frustration of Charlie Brown with the commercialization of Christmas was something that resonated in me at a young age and still does today. If you want to see this just look at my articles on Black Friday.  Likewise Linus’ reading of the Luke’s account of the Angel’s message to the shepherds always brings tears to my eyes.  There is something about the sensitivity of Linus to the actual Gospel message that resonates in my heart.

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As for the Grinch, and I mean the television Grinch where Boris Karloff voiced the part of the Grinch not the Jim Carey movie version, it has always been a favorite of mine.  I find the plot of the Grinch to steal Christmas from the Whos of Whoville to be a masterful account of how the message of Christmas can touch even the smallest and coldest of hearts.  Of course I absolutely loved the Grinch’s dog “Max” a dog whose loyalty to the Grinch reminds me of my dog Molly.

As far as movies are concerned I watch Scrooged staring Bill Murray and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation staring Chevy Chase with almost a religious reverence every year.

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I relate to the main characters in both movies.  That’s not necessarily a compliment to me. Bill Murray’s Character in Scrooged pricks my cynical nature and there are times that I almost need to cover my eyes when in Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold kicks the decorative reindeer and sleigh across the lawn when he can’t get his house lights on.  His rants when his Christmas Tree goes up in flames and when his family tries to leave the house are so close to the way that I can act under the stress of the holidays that is scary.  Since Judy says this is the case I know that I am not imagining this.

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Three other films that get me are Home Alone and A Christmas Story and though it is not really a Christmas story Trading Places staring Dan Aykroyd whose Christmas season meltdown is at the center of a film about the greed of certain parts of the American financial sector.

These are what I grew up with and which were the films about Christmas as it takes place in the United States that I became an adult in that typify my era, not that of my grandparents.  I think that is why they are my favorites and not the classics of a bygone time.

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Of course there is the Festivus episode of Seinfeld that is almost scary because of how close to home it hits. There are times that I think we only lacked the “feats of strength” and the Festivus Pole to complete the picture.  Sticking to Seinfeld I always feel a twinge of sympathy for George when makes up a fake charity called “The Human Fund: Money for People” to give to his co-workers at Kruger Industrial Smoothing. There are times that I am tempted, but thankfully never will do something similar.

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Finally I like the X-Files Christmas episode How the Ghosts Stole Christmas where Ed Asner and Lilly Tomlin played ghosts in a haunted house that Agents Scully and Mulder get trapped in while investigating a case. When I go shopping anywhere this time of year I am quite fond of Agent Scully’s comment to Mulder: “Sorry. Checkout lines were worse than rush-hour on the 95. If I heard “Silent Night” one more time, I was gonna start taking hostages.” 

Okay, so these are not the classics of a bygone era, but they are my classics and I will enjoy Charlie Brown, Linus, the Grinch, Clark Griswold, Frank Cross, the Costanzas Agents Mudler and Scully and the rest of my warped favorites as I continue to rediscover the joy and hilarity of Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States. After all, to quote Clark Griswold “We’re all in this together.”

Peace,

Padre Steve+

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December 2, 2012 · 23:44

Advent and Life: God Loves the Real World

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O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death’s dark shadows put to flight.

(From O Come O Come Emmanuel) 

Today is the fist Sunday of what we in the liturgical Christian world know as the season of Advent.

Advent is the beginning of the liturgical year, in a sense the opening day of a new season of faith, as much as the Opening Day is in Baseball. It is a season of new beginnings, of hope looking forward and looking back. It is a season of intense realism. It is a season where the people of God look forward to their deliverance even as they remember the time when God entered into humanity.  It was not simply entering the human condition as a divine and powerful being inflicting his will upon people but deciding to become subject to the same conditions know by humanity. As Paul the Apostle, wrote about him: “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,  but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death– even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5b-8) 

In the incarnation Jesus Christ shows his love and solidarity with people, humanity, the creation, reality. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.” 

That simple fact is why Christ came.

He didn’t come to found a government. He did not come to exemplify “Christian” virtues or to condemn people that religious people condemned as sinners.

The meaning of the incarnation, and the hope of the season of Advent is that God loves people, even those that some that presume to be his spokesmen and women despise.

In the next few week there will be much written and said about Jesus. Much of it will not actually deal with Jesus or the people that he came to save but instead about the worldly power and influence of those who seek the profits of being “prophets.” Some of them will talk fervently about the “war on Christmas” as if somehow God and Christ are so small that they need government sponsored displays in the public square in order to be real, relevant or or for that matter important. What a small God they must have.

Somehow the message of Advent, the coming of Jesus is contradictory to the message of the for profit prophets. Certainly the early Christians had no government backing of any kind. They simply lived the life and showed God’s love to their neighbors, often at the cost of their lives and paradoxically the message was not crushed, but spread and overcame an empire. It was only when they became co-executors of government power that the message of reconciliation became a bludgeon to be used against those who did not agree with the theology of the clerics beholden to the Empire.

The Christ of the Season of Advent, the one who came and who promises to come again is not captive to the capricious message of the for profit prophets and their political and media allies. I would dare say that God is much bigger than them or those that they believe will somehow end the Christian faith as we know it. But then maybe the Christian faith “as we know it” is more a reflection of us and our need for temporal physical power over others than it is of Jesus.

All I know is that the simplicity of the message that “for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” is more powerful than any political-religious alliance. Likewise the two things that Jesus said to do in order to “inherit the Kingdom of God” were to “Love God with all your heart and love our neighbors as ourselves,” and similarly the words of the old Testament minor prophet Micah, who asked “what does the Lord require of thee? To love show justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.” But then there is not much money or political power in that is there?

But despite the inconvenience of a direct temporal profit or power which is so central to most churches, I do think that the message that God loves the real world is worth repeating. In fact I think that because the message of God’s great love for those deemed “repulsive” is so distasteful to the “for profit prophets” of our time that it is not only worth repeating, but actually believing.

It is a good reason for me to during this season of Advent to look forward to our celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation, the coming of the God who “emptied himself” and took “the form of a slave” in order to save his people.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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December 1, 2012 · 20:48

For the Naval History buffs out there on the day that the current USS Enterprise was decommissioned and a new Enterprise announced…

padresteve's avatarThe Inglorius Padre Steve's World

Enterprise CV-6 circa 1940

This is the last of a three part series about the USS Yorktown Class Aircraft Carriers. It is the story of the USS Enterprise CV-6, the legendary “Big E” and possibly the most celebrated American warship of the Second World War.

The USS Enterprise CV-6, the second ship of the Yorktown class was ordered by the Navy on 3 August 1933 as authorized under the National Industrial Recovery Act of 16 June 1933.  She was laid down just under a year later and launched on 3 October 1936 at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, Newport News Virginia.  She was commissioned on May 12th 1938 to begin one of the most celebrated careers of any US Navy ship in history.  Displacing 25,500 tons full load Enterprise like her sister ships were designed for fast carrier operation working in conjunction with other carriers not tied to…

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December 1, 2012 · 14:55

“Let’s Make Sure that History Never Forgets the Name Enterprise” USS Enterprise Inactivated at Norfolk

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51 years of service and 26 deployments after she was placed in commission the USS Enterprise, CVN-65 was decommissioned at Naval Station Norfolk.  In a ceremony attended by 12,000-15,000 people, many former Sailors and Marines who served aboard her the ship was officially inactivated.

The inactivation is the first step in which the gigantic 1123 foot long 93,000 ton behemoth will have her 8 nuclear reactors, de-fueled and then removed prior to her being towed to Bremerton Washington where she is slated, along with other previous nuclear warships to be scrapped.

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Enterprise spent the first half of her career in the Pacific until she returned to the East Coast in 1989 to have her nuclear reactors refueled after which she was home ported at Norfolk.

She served in action in the Vietnam War, during the Cold War, against the Iranians during the 1988-89 Tanker War, where her aircraft sank one Iranian Frigate and damaged a second, the 1998 Operation Desert Fox which attacked Iraqi military targets,. She also made deployments in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In July 1964, she along with the USS Long Beach CGN-9 and USS Bainbridge DLGN-25  formed Task Force One, for Operation Sea Orbit, a 63 day voyage around the world.

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She is a part of American popular culture. Named after the most combat decorated carrier of World War II she served as a symbol of American Naval Power and ingenuity. Her name was appropriated by Gene Roddenberry for use in the now legendary Star Trek television and movie franchise. She was also the setting for the films Top Gun, The Hunt for Red October and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, however since she was not available for filming her place was taken by the USS Ranger.

The name was used for the first Space Shuttle and will always be a part of American Naval lore and popular culture. Today on her decommissioning day the Navy announced that it will name the next carrier to be built after the new Gerald Ford CVN-78 class ships, USS Gerald R Ford and USS John F Kennedy will be the USS Enterprise CVN-80.

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I saw the Enterprise for the first time as a teenager when she was stationed at NAS Alameda. She was so much larger than the other carriers at the pier it was a sight to see. I often saw her at Norfolk and I know as she is stripped down at Norfolk and Newport News that I will see her again.

As Captain Jean Luc Picard said in Star Trek the Next Generation “Let’s make sure history never forgets the name Enterprise.” 

Peace

Padre Steve+

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December 1, 2012 · 14:37

In honor of the inactivation of the USS Enterprise. A look back at a history making moment…

padresteve's avatarThe Inglorius Padre Steve's World

Iconic Photo of USS Enterprise CVAN-65,USS Long Beach CG-9 and USS Bainbridge DLGN-25 during Operation Sea Orbit 1964

Note: This is the first of four articles on the US Navy’s Nuclear Surface Force. Future articles will deal with Task Force One and Operation Sea Orbit, the Nuclear Cruisers and the Nuclear Carriers.

In the 1950s the US Navy recognized the Nuclear power could play a key role in the future Navy.  The operational flexibility of Nuclear powered ships which would not be dependent on underway replenishment provided by tankers or port calls to conduct high speed operations over vast expansions of the world’s oceans.  Orders were placed in the mid-1950s for an attack aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise CVAN-65, cruiser the USS Long Beach CLGN-160 and later CGN-9 and the USS Bainbridge DLGN, later CLG-25.  These ships would become the prototypes of a Navy which early advocates of nuclear propulsion…

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November 30, 2012 · 23:53

A Place of Peace: Where My Iraq Meets the Atlantic

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Where Iraq Meets the Atlantic

I have talked about things bring me peace amidst the struggles of life in recent days and in one post I briefly mentioned that while running on the beach in Emerald Isle it was the place where in that moment “Iraq met the Atlantic.”

It has been nearly 5 years since I left Iraq in February of 2008 but there are times that it feels like I have never left and times when I would like to be back there. I have always loved the ocean and the desert. For some reason the vast expanses of barren desert and the untamed ocean draw me to them like nothing else.

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I have struggled with a lot over the past 5 years. However as I mentioned recently it seems that things are coming together in ways that I have never could have fathomed even a few months ago. On Wednesday I needed to take a day off to reflect and gather my thoughts after a particularly cathartic sequence of events. One of the things that I did that day was to rest, but then to run along the beach where I live.

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I mentioned to a couple of people that it was like Iraq met the Atlantic and they didn’t understand, until I showed the pictures. I guess though that the juxtaposition of the Western Desert of Iraq, sometimes known as the Syrian Desert and the Atlantic Ocean would seem strange to most people, unless they have experienced both in their stark beauty.

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I ran about seven and a half miles Wednesday along the beach and it was breathtaking. The deep blue skies and seas met with the desert tan of the sands of the beach. There were few people out that day so the beach was nearly deserted and I was alone with nature and God. It has been many years since I felt that depth of peace in my soul that I felt on Wednesday.

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I really can’t explain it and most people will probably never understand and I have learned that such a lack of understanding is okay. There is a big part of me that is still in the Iraqi desert and will always be there. There in the land of Abraham, amid the barren deserts, the rich valley of the Euphrates river valley, the battered cities and town of war torn Al Anbar Province many of my hopes and dreams still live. When I ran along the beach that day it was like I had returned, but instead of being traumatic it was peaceful.

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I pray for the people of Iraq, especially those in Al Anbar Province and the Iraqi military. I pray that they will know peace and that their country, so long victimized by tyrants, devastated by war and torn by terrorism and civil-religious strife will be a place of blessing.

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As T.E. Lawrence wrote about 85 years ago: “We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.” 

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Peace

Padre Steve+

 

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November 29, 2012 · 00:01

Horizons, Tapestries and the Possibilities of Different Futures

Captain Picard: I sincerely hope that this is the last time that I find myself here. 

Q: You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. 

Captain Picard: When I realized the paradox. 

Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence. 

Yesterday I wrote about epiphanies that were occurring in my personal, spiritual and professional life. As I mentioned yesterday they were brought about during a rather cathartic session with my Doctor regarding my PTSD. I think that it was a breakthrough type session because so many new horizons seemed to open at once. Last night it was hard to put it all into words or to sort things out. So after I published that article I went to bed and was subjected to the most intense night of dreams that I have ever experienced and that is saying a lot because my dreams are often frighteningly real. They are like super high definition to begin with because my brain goes into warp drive when my eyes are closed, but last night even more so.

It was like past present and multiple futures intersecting around the them of roads taken, roads not taken and the possibility of different roads home. They spanned my life and many dealt with my time in Iraq while others seemed a blend of many experiences. It was positively surreal. So much so that when the alarm rang I was absolutely exhausted having not slept the previous night because I had left all of my sleep medicines in my gym bag that I had taken to work. So I made a direct call to my Commanding Officer to let him know what was going on and that I needed to take a personal day to rest and reflect on the flood of spiritual, emotional and existential things that I had experienced in the past day. If I had to give an example of what last night was like, it was like the final episode of the Star Trek Next Generation series as Captain Picard kept switching between different realities of past, present and future while being relentlessly grilled by the being simply known as “Q”.

So this morning I rested, spent time with my dog Molly, pretty much avoided the computer and television and then went out and ran about 7.5 miles on the beach. The weather was wonderful and the tide conditions were such that the nearly deserted beach was optimal for running. As I ran the brilliant blue of the sky, the calm waves of the deep blue Atlantic lapping upon the tan sands of the beach. It was as if I was running where the sands of the Western Iraqi Desert met the Atlantic. I was at peace and the images of the previous night began to make sense.

They were about roads, paths, possibilities and the journey to home, wherever or whatever that it is. They were a juxtaposition of past, present and future and variations of each. People, places, images and actions blended together in ways that were at times comforting and other times terrifying. But they were all about possibilities new and unimaginable and as Q told Picard “charting the unknown possibilities of existence” and not being trapped in the past that we cannot change, that even if we could would make us less than we are now.

In another episode of Next Generation called Tapestry, Picard has a death experience where he is confronted by Q and regretting decisions that he made which helped cause his death Q offered him a chance to go back and make it different. When Picard found that the Picard that played it safe was not a person that he would want to be he confronted Q.

LT. j.g. Picard: You having a good laugh now, Q? Does it amuse you to think of me living out the rest of my life as a dreary man in a tedious job?

Q: I gave you something most mortals never experience: a second chance at life. And now all you can do is complain? 

Lt. j.g. Picard: I can’t live out my days as that person. That man is bereft of passion… and imagination! That is not who I am!

Q: Au contraire. He’s the person you wanted to be: one who was less arrogant and undisciplined in his youth, one who was less like me… The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the Ambassador; or take charge of the Stargazer’s bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe – and he never, ever, got noticed by anyone.

It is funny that those two episodes of Star Trek TNG came up a number of times this week with different people. I think what I am discovering is that life is a limitless set of possibilities and that our past, as tangled and messy as it may be at time is part of a tapestry that is who we are but not what we can become. As Picard noted to Counselor Troy after his resuscitation:  There are many parts of my youth that I’m not proud of. There were… loose threads – untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads – it’d unravel the tapestry of my life.

Past, present and future. Dreams and reality, hopes and fears, things real and things imagined. A future unexplored and hopeful so long as we are willing appreciate our past without being trapped by it, to live in the present and imagine the future that we have yet to chart.

But to do this we have to be willing to take the risks, be authentic and realize the possibilities that God in his love and grace imagines for our future.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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November 28, 2012 · 00:52

Epiphanies: PTSD, Life, Leadership, Lawrence of Arabia and the Gospel

I have been going through a process lately in preparation for some treatment of my chronic insomnia, nightmares and other PTSD symptoms which has caused me to have to be very deliberate and reflective in examining the various parts of the often tattered tapestry of my life.

Part of this has involved my experiences in military, religious and civilian institutional settings and how those experiences have helped shaped me as a Priest as well as a Naval Officer. Today was one of those days where a convergence of thoughts came together in a number of encounters juxtaposed with some reading of B.H. Liddell Hart’s book about T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

While I was waiting for my doctor late this afternoon I was reading the book on my Kindle and as he came into the waiting room I had just finished marking this passage.

“The rare man who attains wisdom is, by the very clearness of his sight, a better guide in solving practical problems than those, more commonly the leaders of men, whose eyes are misted and minds warped by ambition for success….”

Somehow this little passage in a book that I am about halfway through reading and which I have already made numerous other annotations really struck me as profound. It encapsulated close to 20 years of experience as a military chaplain and over 30 years in the military as well as civilian professional work, and it struck me especially in regard to my experiences both in Iraq and after my return. Before, during and after my time in Iraq I had come to see Lawrence as a kindred spirit, someone that thought outside the box and went to places that no one else wanted to go. My job in Iraq to me to those places that few Americans and almost no other chaplains went or had the chance to experience with Iraqi Arabs and the Bedouin.

Those that read my posts regularly know that the impetus for my writing came about during my time in Iraq around Christmas of 2007 in the western Iraqi Al Anbar Province while on the Syrian border. At that time I wrote a short article for my former denomination’s website and a little more than a year after my return to the United States  I began this site I modified that article and published it here under the title of God in the Empty Places. It was a catharsis for me because I going though a tremendously ark period of my life where I had for all practical purposes become an Agnostic struggling to believe in God again. It was published a couple of months after I walked out of a church on Christmas Eve 2008 and walked an hour home in the dark and cold of that night.

During the interregnum of returning from Iraq and now I experienced a number of additional traumatic life events, both personal and professional. Following my assignment to my current post where I supervise a number of chaplains, pastoral counselors and support personnel I made it my goal in life not to let things that happened to me at the hands of some senior chaplains happen to others, especially those struggling with life, health, spiritual or emotional issues.

I have been asked by a number of people in the past couple of weeks, how in light of things that could leave me embittered and cynical could I embody grace to others. I admit that I still hurt and have issues of anger and some bitterness towards some people who I thought used me and betrayed me both in my old denomination as well as some senior chaplains. That is a given, though I try to live in a state of forgiveness toward them there are times that I do get upset the things that happened during that time. It is something that I deal with and I don’t always do well. I have my bad moments in which that grace doesn’t come out well,  but my path to healing has involved a conscious effort to see the good in people and to embody something different than I experienced.

A couple of people made the comment as we discussed these experiences as well as their own that “you do the Gospel it by living it.” I think that is what Jesus did, he taught yes and he did miracles, but the biggest miracles were those that he did when he rocked the religious-political establishment of his day by hanging out and caring for the people it despised. In fact Jesus surmised the entire law in two commandments, love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself. The prophet Malachi noted what God required “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Those two passages have been tremendously important as faith returned after what I refer to as Padre Steve’s Christmas Miracle faith began to return in a way that I never expected.

So the past few weeks have served as an epiphany to me about wisdom can evade leaders whose “eyes are misted and minds warped by ambition for success…” My eyes are opening in more ways to the bigness of God, the grace of God, the love of God and the mercy of God. My ambition is simply to care for the people that God allows me to care for and show that grace, love and mercy to those who some would attempt to destroy because they themselves have become prisoners of the institutions and their offices and ambitions.  I have resolved in daily life to do all I can to avoid becoming a prisoner of my office or ambitions and simply to be real. One of the senior leaders of the hospital that I work noted that he saw me as not just as the senior chaplain but a “real person.” I can live with that.

Well that is enough for tonight.

Peace

Padre Steve+

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