Faith in the Army, Part 3: Bigger World, Smaller Christian World

"To define is to limit," said Oscar Wilde.  In this self-examination of faith I started a few days ago I realized that another vast difference between Sgt. Gussman the new believer in 1974 and Sgt. Gussman in 2007 when I re-enlisted is three college degrees and much personal experience of many facets of the Church in this world.

In one of his best books on the faith, C.S. Lewis wrote about the "Mere Christianity" we all share if we are Christian believers.  Thirty-five years of reading and re-reading C.S. Lewis' 39 books and many hundreds more have left me much more aware, sad to say, of everything that is not mere Christianity.  The stuff we don't share looms large in my mind.

As a new believer, I wondered about different denominations of the Protestant Church, different faiths, different versions of the Bible, different ways of communicating the faith, and spiritual disciplines.  I tried lots of them.  I listened to James Robinson preach in stadiums in Texas and Oklahoma on cassette tapes.  I listened Bob Mumford and Derek Prince teach about the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  I read Sword of Lord newspaper out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  I went to the Gospel Service in the base chapel where the training NCO in our Armor Battalion was the lay preacher.

I fasted for up to three days.  I prayed.  I meditated.  I tried everything.  

Then I left active duty, went to college, and started to learn about literature, science, languages, the whole vast world of the mind that I had very little inkling of in high school.  

I learned Greek, I read the Russian greats: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekov.  I fell in love with Dante's Divine Comedy.  Politics went from opaque to entertaining after I read Machiavelli.  

I learned relatively little science.  I wanted to be a writer and took mostly literature courses.  But I learned what may be the most important word when science and religion are discussed together: Contingency.  Science was not sent down Mount Sinai on stone tablets.  Science changes.  Often.

In fact, the best path to fame in science is to take on the biggest theory in science and change, improve, modify, or overturn it.  Einstein corrected Newton.  Someday someone may do the same to Einstein.  In any case, the current theories of science are the best description of reality in their respective fields:  Evolution, Quantum Electrodynamics, Universal Gravitation and others are the best description of reality that millions of working scientists can come up with.

All this exciting new knowledge had the effect of limiting my Christian world.  I knew Christian Television was a non-sequitor even before Neil Postman explained why in "Amusing Ourselves to Death."  Because I knew and loved the ministry of Kanaan in Germany where Cliff lived, the Prosperity Gospel looked both ridiculous and heretical.  

End Times obsession combined with Creation Science in my mind as the playground where you can take the Bible literally at no personal cost.  Taking the words of Jesus literally could lead to giving away all your money to the poor, preaching without pay, going on a mission trip with nothing but a bowl and a staff and other things no literalist takes literally.

So there I am, trimming away fellowship with vast swaths of the Church in this world.  In my current Church, my family is one of the three token Democrat families among 300 Conservatives. So even where I belong, I don't completely.  

And there is more.

Faith in the Army, Part 2

I got several responses on Facebook about this post, and two in person.  Two sergeants in my class seemed worried about me this morning after they read yesterday's post.

After reading the responses on Facebook and talking to Brian and Lealan (not a misspelling) I was thinking about something else vastly different abut my current experience of the military.  In the 70s when I was on active duty, I shared long stretches of time with the men who became my best friends.

For several months, I was Cliff's roommate.  For almost three years, Abel and I were in the same tank platoon.  For a while we commanded tanks next to each other in the motor pool and in road march order.

Shared time, better yet, shared hardship, is the best soil for friendships to grow in.  The time is the soil, the hardship is the fertilizer.  So Abel and I had time for endless conversations about faith, the Bible, the second coming, whether Pentacostal believers were crazy or more faithful than us, and a thousand other topics only discussed by people with lots of time and curiosity.

Soldiers don't really have much time together in the National Guard.  One weekend a month and two weeks in the summer is usually jammed with training.  In 1977, our battalion went to Grafenwohr, Germany for annual gunnery.  Fog blanketed the base for two weeks.  During those two weeks we sat in our tanks and waited for the fog to clear for days on end.  That was the first time I read the entire Bible cover to cover.

Even in Iraq, it was clear from day one that we had missions, requirements, and would be working a lot.  My roommate and I worked in different places, on different shifts and had very few interests in common.  Being roommates with Cliff was different than any roomie I have ever had in the military.

Cliff was getting ready to get discharged.  After he went home for a few months, he planned to come back to Germany and be a Franciscan Brother at a monastery in Darmstadt, Germany.  To this day he is Bruder Timotheus.  I had the chance to visit him many times during the last few months I was in Germany while he was a Novice at the monastery.

Anyway, I really like some of my current classmates, but as Brian has pointed out several times, I go off and do my own thing when people are eating together during the week and have gone home on the weekends so I seldom go on the class trips around the Baltimore-Washington area.

But the point of yesterday's post was the folly of looking for faith in the Army.  I met faithful men in the military, but the military was not the source of their faith.  Since returning to the Army, I have met some of the best people I know.  But they came to the Army with virtue they got from parents, family, their own faith and the grace of God.

The Franciscan monastic community where Cliff lives requires a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience.  Although many of my fellow soldiers believe themselves to be poor, and we are more obedient than most Americans, no one I know is taking the middle vow.