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Responses to 'Reflections on praying for our armed forces'
Bishop George Packard, the Episcopal Church's Bishop Suffragan for Chaplaincies, and two former Episcopal military chaplains, the Rev. George Clifford and the Rev. Bill Mahedy, offer responses to Chandler's article.
By Bishop George Packard
[Episcopal Life] The following article was recently posted and reflects how far things have deteriorated in our country. I am so exasperated by this kind of reverie it is hard to compose a response. Mr. Chandler is certainly entitled to his quandary but to exercise it as an embargo in prayer for troops who find themselves -- through no fault of their own -- in an ambiguous situation is the height of effete self-absorption.
What have we come to? Perhaps the author should accompany me to Iraq the next time and [witness] the occasions when soldiers turn to the following prayer (page 118) in "A Prayer Book for The Armed Services" and ask me to pray for their enemies:
"O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
On one occasion I recall a young Marine requested this prayer after a sniper had been firing at him for more than an hour. We would do well to expand our sense of prayer; those serving seem to be way ahead of us in that regard.
-- The Rt. Rev. George Packard is the Episcopal Church's Bishop Suffragan for Chaplaincies.
By William P. Mahedy
[Episcopal Life] The problem lies not with the prayer, which nowhere calls for the destruction of enemies -- as one finds occasionally in the Psalms. The prayer asks for daily grace, for strength in trial and temptation and courage to face perils and closes with a plea for a sense of God's abiding presence. This is the kind of prayer that one could pray for anyone, including oneself.
To the author's objection that this prayer "necessarily entails a prayer that sooner or later those who are against our troops will be injured or killed." As an army chaplain with a combat unit in Vietnam I remember well the religious dilemmas of combat. At that time, a song was popular with the troops by The Animals, the refrain of which was: "We've gotta get out of this place if it's the last thing we ever do..." I used that with the troops as a prayer, connecting it to the Lord's prayer ... "deliver us from evil." This is theologically not the same thing as the other type of prayer common at the time: "Let me kill a commie for Christ." In this difference lies the theological arena of American civil religion, exceptionalism, and the like.
Being a philosophy professor, the author of the above piece is doubtless aware of the "Just War Tradition." He may not like it; he may, as I do, prefer the Christian moral high ground of pacifism. The just war tradition deals always with the lesser of two evils. War is never a good. The just war tradition holds that combat soldiers of both sides are a mutual threat to one another and may, with no moral reprobation, take the lives of combat soldiers on the other side. The killing of unarmed civilians, excessive use of force, is another whole issue, dealt with under the ius in bello aspect of just war. Thus the work of the individual soldiers in Iraq, i.e. killing enemy soldiers, is, however repugnant, morally legitimate.
The entire nation, the author of the above article included, is as morally responsible as are the troops in the field for the ius ad bellum. Do those members of the church who, quite rightly repudiate the war, have the courage to withhold a portion of their taxes as a protest and a means to bring about an end to it? Does "duty," Kantian or otherwise, go that far? It is quite true that Christians should pray for our enemies. Troops in the field included. I have found after years of working with combat veterans as a VA chaplain that prayer for and forgiveness of one's enemies is required for spiritual recovery from the terrible moral and religious scars of war. It may be a little difficult to get the troops in the field to so right now because they are still engaged in the heat of combat. But God works over the long haul.
The real problem with the article is the author's commitment to Kantian philosophy. However you cut the Kantian cake, all the categories, including the moral "categorical imperative" remain locked up as abstractions within the knowing subject. The duty which drives the Kantian moralist is still self-contained within the knower. Indeed other people are "ends" not means as Kant says, but moral activity has more nuance to it than Kant's abstractions would suggest. Biblical theology holds that all people are created in the image of God. To the question "who is my neighbor?" the New Testament gives a dramatic example which requires action. The troops serving in Bush's war have been subjected to policies based on lies and deceptions to which we have all been complicit. The very least we can do is to pray for them. Then we must then help them to return to civilian life and be willing to pay taxes to support their rehabilitation which we seem unwilling to do. These people are our neighbors. They are from our cities and towns and farms. Let us at least pray for them, Immanuel Kant and his disciples notwithstanding.
"Postmodern" thought, has a lot of nonsense contained within it, but one encouraging aspect of it is its deconstruction of the sweeping, overarching intellectual abstractions of the so-called Enlightenment thinkers. Perhaps we will be able to see our way clear once again to embrace once again a truly Incarnational approach to life and morals.
Grant, O Lord, to our enemies, to our troops deployed in combat and to ourselves, "a sense of your abiding presence."
-- The Rev. Bill Mahedy, Diocese of San Diego, served as an Army chaplain with a tour in Vietnam, worked for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and served as a university chaplain. He is the author of several books, including: Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets.
By George Clifford
[Episcopal Life] In one sense, David Chandler's observations about the Book of Common Prayer's collect, "For those in the Armed Forces of our Country," are correct. I strongly suspect that in the minds of many as they recite that prayer are ill intentions towards the enemy, something that Mark Twain powerfully parodied in his "War Prayer:"
"Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it. … We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."
However, for those who recite the collect attentive to the words and truly concerned for all of God's people, that is not what the Book of Common Prayer collect actually intends. The collect asks not for victory but for the safety of the armed forces, something possible only in peace. The collect then asks God to grant military personnel the strength and courage to remain faithful. Together, these requests paraphrase the fifth and sixth petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Are these not requests that we make on behalf of all every time we say the Lord's Prayer with its first person plural pronouns? Finally, the collect requests that God grant service members an abiding awareness of God's presence. If one is a pacifist, as is Yoder, then requesting that members of the armed forces have an abiding sense of Prince of Peace's presence with them is in fact a request for God to turn hearts from violence toward peace.
In my three decades of ministry and almost quarter century as a Naval chaplain, I have regularly encouraged people to carefully think about the words they prayed in order to avoid what my free church colleagues criticized as the vain (i.e., meaningless) repetition of stale prayers. Indeed, one free church chaplain learning that I would soon transfer to the Naval Academy as the senior Protestant chaplain lamented that the Academy's main Protestant Sunday worship service only had one real prayer. Having examined the order of service, I inquired what he thought of the other six prayers, including a slightly modified version of the Prayer Book's collect for the Armed Forces. Those six, he explained, were not real prayers, both because they were written and the congregation mindlessly repeated the prayers every week. That chaplain was critical of our Eucharistic prayers for the same reasons, underscoring the importance of thinking about the words of our prayers as we say them.
The Book of Common Prayer's collect for the Armed Forces, prayed thoughtfully, avoids the un-Christian message of Twain's poignant satire. The collect is also a prayer that all Christians, pacifists and others, can pray together because the prayer neither endorses nor condemns war. We Anglicans, after all, are a people united by common prayer rather than a common theology. Some of us are pacifists; many of us, standing in a long tradition that began with Augustine, rely upon some form of Just War Theory to help us know when war is a necessary last resort. Praying for the men and women of our armed forces is the very least that we should do to support them, whatever our views about a specific war or the morality of war in general.
-- The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for 24 years, with tours at sea, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains, on exchange with the Royal Navy in London, as the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and as the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School.
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