A Spirituality That Finds Us Where We Are:

A Soldier’s Story

I do not know whether Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran who wrote What It Is Like to Go to War, had mystic revelations as he reflected on his experiences of war. To me, his reflections read as a clear account of how combat moves from trauma to moral injury, from what war does to the body to what violence done for the sake of some vaguely justified “larger cause” does to the soul.

He was writing about war, but what he describes reaches far beyond the battlefield. It applies wherever people are asked to subordinate their conscience to an institution, a nation, or a God without examination.

It begins where Marlantes begins: with the excruciating pain of war seen firsthand. It asks us to examine how we behave, particularly how we act in accordance with our faith (or value system) when we are frightened, hungry, and full of unexamined pain.

The mystic soul is no rare inheritance. It lives in any ordinary, flawed human willing to follow the current beneath religious rules — inward first, then outward, into prophetic awareness: naming injustice, naming idolatry, naming empty ritual, and calling for a return to raw, heartfelt integrity.

The mystics were not naive people; they had lion-like courage. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton was sharp-eyed about the capacity of institutions — including his own Roman Catholicism — to domesticate, control, and ultimately betray the very thing they claimed to protect, the relationship of God to humanity.  The Protestant minister HowardThurman had witnessed what Christianity looked like when wielded against Black Americans, and he chose to go deeper than the wielders could follow. These are but two examples of many traditionally religious leaders who have examined the limits of their own faith.

The people I work with — those who are grieving, those who have seen the worst of what the world does to human beings — often arrive with a complicated relationship to faith. Some have been hurt by it. Some have lost it. Some never had it in any conventional sense and aren't sure they want it. What they nearly always have, though, is an instinct for what is real: they know the difference between someone performing comfort and someone who has actually been somewhere hard.

They — we — are ordinary people who have suffered extraordinary loss. And so we become, almost without choosing it, a kind of balm for one another's wounds: arriving not with answers, but at the level of what we already know. Because underneath the doctrine, underneath the personal damage, underneath the cultural wreckage, there is something that keeps running. Something that suffering, strangely, can teach us to hear — to see in one another's eyes, though we come from vastly different temperaments, backgrounds, and habits of heart.

I believe that suffering teaches us to see and to hear what many cannot, and that this is the core of the mystic experience, or way of life.

Sources: Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like to Go to War (2011). Howard Thurman, Mysticism and the Experience of Love (1961). Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal (1973).