Leading the Blind: UK Soldiers Make Difficult March for Charity

Inspiring picture and caption from the MOD news service:



Soldiers from 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh head out onto the local streets as they take part in a 50-mile (80.5km) walk from their home barracks in Chester to Llandudno - blindfolded. About 30 soldiers from the unit took part in the gruelling fundraiser for St Dunstan's, a charity which gives physical and emotional support to blind and visually impaired ex-servicemen and women. [Picture: Sergeant Alison Baskerville RLC, Crown Copyright/MOD 2012

Miliary Goats in the News: WW1 Goat Unearthed

The Daily Mail is calling it the "Pompeii of the Western Front". Recently, construction on a highway near Carspach, France, discovered a group of twenty one German soldiers from the First World War, who were buried suddenly by an explosion which collapsed their underground shelter in 1918. These unfortunates and their possessions remained well preserved and undisturbed until archaeologists were called in to excavate the site.

Readers of Mad Padre will know that this site maintains a keen watch for all mentions of that most intrepid and unsung of creatures, the military goat. There is a goat angle to this story, since while excavating his trench system the archaeologists also unnearthed the skeleton of a goat. The goat is "assumed to be [have been]a source of fresh milk for the soldiers".



German soldiers with goat in World War Two (sadly, no pictures of Great War Germans with goats are available to my knowledge).

This story does throw some light on the everyday life of soldiers in the trenches, and hints at a practical use for the strange custom of the goat as a unit mascot. While it gives me no pleasure to imagine the horrible last seconds of these men's lives, it does give me some pleasure to imagine that their last days were made more pleasant by the company (and milk) of that most noble and sagacious of creatures, the military goat.

Westfalia Wistfulness

Last week the housing people at CFB Suffield served notices that garage tenants had to empty them in prepartion for new doors being installed. That gave me the perfect excuse to pay a call on Kaiser Bill (short for Wilhelm) where I had parked him in fear of a winter that, so far, has never come (I am not at all convinced that the money spent on this garage as been worth it). I hadn't turned the key since I took him there on 11 November, and was afraid that cold weather might have killed the battery, but after a few growls he started up and now sits parked behind the base chapel.

Driving Bill around the PMQ patch a few times to perk him up a bit made me start looking forward to warmer weather and a chance to bash around Alberta and parts further, which may explain why, after seeing a 20mm model of a VW Bug on the Guild Wargamer's site, got to wondering if there was a 1/72nd model Vanagon out there, maybe something diecast, to sit on my desk and cheer my winter thoughts.

Haven't found one yet, but did find a great discussion on the Car Lust website of the lovable and quirky Vanagon, with this amazing video. Check out the awesome 1980s lettering, the strange choice in music (especially the creepy final lyrics) and the handsome bearded gentleman who may have a romantic companion joining him, or possibly just lives in hope.



So all this has me thinking that there's still time before winter's over to get the replacement propane tank purchased from GoWesty installed, and maybe a few other touches, like replacing the broken fridge with a storage unit, before this year's Westy season.

Roll on spring.

The Price of Healing: A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday After Epiphany

A sermon preached at Christ the King Chapel, CFB Suffield, Ralston, AB, 12 February, 2012

Proper 6, Lectionary Year B, 2 Kings 5:1-14, Psalm 30, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27, Mark 1:40-45

Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, "I do choose. Be made clean!" (Mark 1:41)

Our readings from scripture today, especially from 2 Kings 5 and Mark 1 (and, I suppose, Psalm 30), invite us to think about healing, which is especially significant given how many of you in our small chapel community work or have worked in the profession of nursing. It's also a happy coincidence since our chapel cycle of prayer this morning remembers our Canadian Forces base surgeons finishing and starting tours here, and asks for skill and care for them as they treat their patients.

There's nothing wrong with praying for healing. I don't know of a church that doesn't include intentions for the sick and for the suffering in its Prayers of the People. We pray for our loved ones and friends when they go into hospital or face surgery, and I doubt that any of us here, if we were sick, would not feel comforted knowing that we were being upheld in the prayers of faithful people.

If we are at all honest, we will admit that when we pray for healing, we don't always pray with confidence. We may ask fervently, especially when it is for ourself or for a loved one (and are there any prayers more fervent than prayers for our sick children?), but we ask with the knowledge that not all prayers for healing are answered. For some, the denial of prayers for healing can be a faith-shattering experience.

As a mentor of mine said once, a preacher should avoid theological explanations for the existence of evil and the perceived inadequacies of God. Trying to explain these things is a mug's game. As a priest, I've seen the children of parishioners come back from seemingly fatal injuries, and I've seen others taken away without warning, and I could never say how the hand of God worked in any of these situations.

If our expectations of God are like the expectations of Canadians for their health care system (quality health care available at all times for all people), then God will always prove disatisfactory. In any case, I am not sure that today's readings have any sympathy for those expectations. The story or Elisha and Namaan in 2 Kings is really about the superiority of Israel's God to those of its militarily powerful neighbours, while Jesus does not cure the leper in order to build up his practice as a healer. Rather, in telling the leper to go "and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them" seems intended to establish Jesus' authority as the Messiah who comes to fulfil the law and prophets.

What is most interesting about these two stories, I think, is how God's power is shown to work. In the case of Namaan, a powerful general, the Patton or a Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf of his day, has to submit to the advice of a servant, present himself to the prophet of a God he does not serve, and be healed by that God. Namaan's brand of worldly power is shown as nothing compared to God's power. Yet in the second story, the Son of God, who has power over demons, ends up swapping places with the outcast leper. At the end of the story, the leper is made whole and returned to his community whereas Jesus becomes the outsider because of his fame,to the point where he "could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country".

Luther Seminary professor Sarah Henrich is right, I think, to see a shadow of the cross in the exchange of positions between Jesus and the leper. She writes that "this exchange of realities between Jesus and the man whom he has healed ... points long-range to the role that Jesus is willing to take for humanity itself, giving up his life of freedom for the loneliness of the one isolated on Golgotha, whose "willingness" is a proclamation in its own right. He will use the language of "willing" in 14:36, exchanging his own desires for what the Father "wills."

Henrich's point is that Jesus mission is to go to the cross for humanity's sake to cure us all of sin and death. The healings and miracles done along the way to that goal are signs and indicators of Jesus' power and purpose, not goals in and of themselves. In going to the lonely place of Golgotha and death, Jesus by his cross-stretched arms embraces the whole of humanity's sickness: all of our cruelty, selfishness, all the deaths we inflict and all the deaths we suffer. All of these things are taken on by Christ, and in his unlooked for resurrection we have the first sign that God will make good on his intention to banish these things from his creation.

The widespread loss of faith in the promise and purpose of God by our contemporaries manifests itself in our turning to medicine to save us. Poll after poll in Canada and its provinces shows that health care is the number one concern of Canadians, far eclipsing issues like foreign aid. Our fixation on health care and on related issues such as longevity, a subject that seems much in the media of late, underscores a point that the theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say. According to Hauerwas, we want to live as long as possible, until the point where we entrust ourselves to medicine so that we die painlessly, in our sleep, and not knowing we are dying at all, thus denying the reality of death. At the same time, the inequitable consumption of health care resources, from analgesics to doctors, in the developed world leads to an increase in the realities we try to ignore, death and suffering, in the developing world.

Fortunately, there are many examples around us of those who practice the healing arts in ways that we might call Christ like, meaning that they do so not for gain and often at great cost to themselves. Last week the news from Syria, where Namaan's successors have been unleashed, told of medical students who have left school to work in field hospitals, or of those who risk death to bring medicines into blockaded and shelled cities such as Homs. These examples raise the interesting question of whether the benefit of the healing arts is not only the eradication of disease and suffering but the restoration and reclamation of community. After all, the point of today's gospel is not only that the leper was healed, but that the price paid by Jesus to do so also restored the man to his community.

Returning to Hauerwas, we might ask ourselves, what benefits might we gain if we were willing to see medicine more honestly, not as the means to deny our own death and suffering, but as the means to restore community? If the developed world were to divert some of the health care money we spend on ourselves to others at home and abroad, would the benefits realized in a wider vision of the human community outweigh the sacrifices we might bear? And would not that sacrifice be true to the spirit of today's gospel?

Power Dressing in Church: A Protest Against Clergy in Robes

Thanks to CF chaplain friend, @PadreShaun, for tweeting this piece from The Telegraph about a tempest in the Church of England over priests being "forced" to wear robes. According to the Rev. Andrew Atherstone, a curate and tutor at Oxford's Wycliffe Hall, clergy wearing robes in worship are a hindrance to mission and evangelism because "Robes can be a form of power dressing - they can reinforce the divisions of a stratified society, where deference to rank and authority is key".

Or, as Bishop Broadbent once said, no one wants to see "the clergyman up front in robes, looking a right wally".

Familiar ground to many in churchland, I am sure. I seem to recall that the Reformation included many debates about the wearing of robes, or vestments to use the correct term, by worship leaders. I recall attending one evangelical bible church where the preacher rallied against his childhood upbringing in church, being told what to believe by guys in robes on thrones. And I get the fact that some of my low church Anglican colleagues are sceptical of liturgical traditions, including vestments. I also get the fact that when you see a bunch of us clergy in full costume as above, heavy drapery covering our pear shaped bodies, we can look a bunch of right wallies.

However, the argument of the Rev. Atherton to me carries more than a slight whiff of trahison des clercs about it. The silly reference to power dressing and stratified societies, other than showing how thoroughly post-structuralist theory has permeated the academy, reminds me of a recent interview with the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, who said that an emphasis on correct spelling and grammar was simply the upper classes buttressing their dominance by claiming correct language as a buttress of class dominance. And I thought the point of the OED was so I could speak and write real good.

I have no objection to messy church, street church, family services with puppets, whatever might allow the gospel to reach people where they live. That's all fine. As an army chaplain, I've pulled my stole out of my pocket and thrown it over my fatigues to worship. No problem. But there is an Anglican tradition which Father Roland Palmer once summed up as "readiness and decency" which assumes that dignity, beauty, mystery and decorum have their place in worship. The reason I occasionally go out of my way to attend an Anglican parish where this tradition is upheld is because the right wally in robes points me to something greater than him or her and me, namely, to God. I worry that if the Rev. Atherton's thinking catches on, people whose souls yearn for theses things will stop coming to Anglican worship, and go elsewhere to be fed.

So tomorrow, gentle reader, I'll be the right wally in the front with the robe. And maybe even a chasuble if the spirit moves me.

"Words That Shape The Soul": Eugene Peterson on Scripture

Christian educatior and writer Christopher Benson maintains a blog that I sometimes disagree with (especially on politics) but which I always find thoughtful and nourishing.

Today's notable quotable comes via his blog, an excerpt from spiritual theologian Eugene Peterson on the authority of scripture and its misuses. Here's an excerpt:

" ... words of Scripture are not primarily words, however impressive, that label or define or prove, but words that mean, that reveal, that shape the soul, that generate saved lives, that form believing and obedient lives. Impersonal, opinionated, propagandizing, manipulating words, no matter how ardent and accurate, inflate upward. They loose rootage in hearts. They lose grounding in human dailiness. They are no longer at the service of listening and responding to the word, those words that reveal God’s will and presence, the language in which we are invited to likewise reveal ourselves in prayer and praise, in obedience and love. Having and defending and celebrating the Bible instead of receiving, submitting to, and praying the Bible, masks an enormous amount of nonreading."

Read the whole piece here.



http://bensonian.org/2012/02/09/how-the-bible-was-read-versus-how-the-bible-is-now-read/

Military Picture of the Week

US Army Sgt. 1st Class Russell Minta, senior noncommissioned officer for the Defense Department's Military Working Dog Breeding Program on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, holds a puppy in his hand. The program provides working dogs to every service branch and numbers among the largest military breeding programs in the world. DOD photo by Linda Hosek

More adorable Army Puppy photos here.

We Are Not the Dead: Soldiers' Faces Before, During and After Afghanistan

The UK's The Telegraph has published a series of pictures and interviews of members of the 1st Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, before, during, and after their deployment to Afghanistan. In these powerful photos you can see the physical and psychological toll that the war has taken on these young men. Especially moving is this comment from one young private, who survived an IED explosion, of how he coped after going home: "I walked for miles and miles not caring where I stepped.”

A Few Good Neurons: Military Implications for Neuroscience Research

The UK's The Guardian reported yesterday on a paper by the British scientific body The Royal Society notes that current research in neuroscience has many implications for military technology and ethics that haven't been fully considered yet.

One of the technologies discussed is the Brain Machine Interface (BMI), a technoligy currently allowing users to control prosthetic limbs through brain signals, which could be applied to controlling weapon systems, either on the battlefield or remotely. As one of the paper's authors writes, "If you are controlling a drone and you shoot the wrong target or bomb a wedding party, who is responsible for that action? Is it you or the BMI? There's a blurring of the line between individual responsibility and the functioning of the machine. Where do you stop and the machine begin?"

This is an interesting question, though I'm not sure that there would be any distinction between a drone operator using a joystick and using a BMI to engage a target. Presumably in either case, responsibility stops with the human operator, whether it's a finger or a neural impulse that pulls the trigger.

An interesting field of development to watch in the next decade, to be sure.

:Remarkable Psychological Resilience": Surprising New Data on Prevalence of PTSD

From today's NYT, a short piece by Anthony D. Mancini, an assistant professor of psychology at Pace University, on a survey suggesting that the prevalence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among serving military may be lower than it is commonly thought to be.

Mancini's research focuses on the strength of what he calls "resilience", or "the human capacity to cope" for most people. His conclusion is that "we should remember that PTSD is a treatable condition and that a realistic and informed understanding of our inherent coping abilities can only assist treatment and, perhaps one day, even prevention of this debilitating disorder".

This message, that PTSD is treatable, is precisely what soldiers need to hear, and this date is encouraging.