For the past few days I have been listening to an audiobook about the experience of Union soldiers after the end of the Civil War, which makes for some very grim listening. The historian, using an approach based on anecdotal evidence, gives story after story of the difficulties that Union soldiers faced in seeking to re-integrate with civilian society, talking about problems of alcoholism, of nightmares, of wounds both physical and mental that refused to heal, of the mutual mistrust and suspicion between civilians and soldiers, of hiring discrimination, and the like. This morning, as I drove to work in terrible traffic, the audiobook discussed the obsessive desire for truth about the Civil War that led many veterans to write personal memoirs and send them in to Civil War magazines, only to face a great deal of rejection because their accounts contradicted the rose-colored sentimentality that was desired, and that led some to become regimental historians and to catalogue the grim arithmetic of battle losses.

About a month ago, when I was visiting a neighboring congregation for a sports weekend they hold for teens and young adults, I had an experience that is fairly common, and that is swapping war stories with other people. Indeed, this happens frequently when brethren are together, as they talk about their experiences throughout the decades, in dealing with church splits, and in discussing the various difficulties and trials, most often with other people, that they have overcome. As I struggled to go back to sleep in the middle of the night last night, I saw an invitation from a friend of mine to a place where he wished to talk about the forgotten role of reconciliation for members in “taking it to the church,” and though I did not know the specifics, nor did I want to know the specifics, I knew enough to realize that what was being discussed was one of many skirmishes in a great and terrible spiritual war, in which people forget that we are all, hopefully, on the same side, and that any hostility or enmity between us ought to be as temporary as possible, lest we forget who the real enemy is.

Some months ago, I had an awkward experience in visiting the home of some fellow brethren for a rehearsal for a variety show our congregation holds every year. The awkward experience consisted of listening to the matron of the house discussing a matter where her own experience was much like that of my mother and like that of other people present and like that of still other people I was thinking about. It was a surprise that I had not considered the way in which people view certain matters as evidence of disrespect in the war between estranged husbands and wives. Given the painful memories I have of my own being stuck as an unwilling hostage in the long conflict between my parents after their divorce, I find it particularly unpleasant to see the absence of communication and the nursing of long grievances in the conflicts that other people have with their estranged spouses, and the way in which the children, the most innocent of the human parties involved, suffer as a result of the absence of a common front between those who should be allies and partners presenting a common godly front, instead of seeking allies among other peoples with similar grievances to turn individual civil conflicts within families into larger wars.

In my library, there are a great many books written by survivors of trauma [1], and from the libraries of the Portland area I have read many more along the way. There are many similarities between these books and the historian’s account of the memoirs of Civil War soldiers. For one, many of the memoirs I read are written by people who, like myself, are somewhat obscure, who have a strong compulsion to record their stories, to point out the successes that they have known despite the horrors they have experienced, and who catalog the grim arithmetic of the struggle for dignity in a life where that is often in peril or under assault. I collect these books in alarming amounts in large part because I can relate to their stories, because of my own, and this means that we are all part of the target audience for the books and accounts of anyone else who shares that experience, because we know something that many other people do not know, and cannot understand, and the compulsion to write and to understand something of these matters and to make sense of these experiences is incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it. And so we talk to ourselves, to people who understand the campaigns we have endured, the war wounds we suffer, the horrors that stalk us day and night.

Regardless of the wars that we have experienced, whether we are veterans of physical combat from our time in the armed forces, whether we are veterans of friendly fire in our spiritual war against the Adversary, whether we are veterans of civil conflict within the home, or whether we have witnessed the horrors of being impressed into warfare against the darkness of great evil without having chosen it for ourselves, we are veterans of a great and terrible war. We share the divide that warfare, of either a spiritual or emotional or physical kind, has between those who have seen the elephant and those who have not spent the time to walk through the valley of the shadow of death with those who have fought against death and despair. We share the wounds, the campfire stories, and the spirit of fellowship with those who have fought in the same battles and the same campaigns that we have. We share the longing for peace, and the desire that it has been a long time coming, and that the war will never end so long as the horrors are ever before us in our anxious days and in our tormented nights. Yet the longing for peace, and the experience of war and its lingering repercussions still remains.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/book-review-when-a-man-you-love-was-abused/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/book-review-overcoming-abuse-gods-way/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/book-review-why-are-you-so-scared/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/10/book-review-how-to-live-in-fear/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/book-review-this-is-awkward/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/book-review-many-faces-of-ptsd/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/book-review-identity-thief/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/book-review-black-earth-the-holocaust-as-history-and-warning/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/book-review-struggle-for-intimacy/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/book-review-kill-the-silence/