Revelations from the Sanctuary Floor

by Casey Thompson

My church has been talking about war. Led by a group of pastors discontent with the vitriol of our public discourse, my church hosted those in Memphis that wanted to speak about the war using theological frameworks, primarily Pacifism and Just War. We expected twenty-five to show up. A hundred and fifty came.

I must admit this is a hard conversation for me. It summons a memory in me that's hard to move beyond.

When I was fourteen, my father and I drove from Texas to North Carolina . The trip was significant for two reasons. First, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, entering the lives of Scout and the whole Finch clan, magnificent stewards of life that they are, and second, I saw my father cry for the first time.

He took me to Fort Bragg, his old training grounds from a sojourn in the army. I knew he had been a green beret, like a creationist knows about fossils. I was aware of the evidence but couldn't process what it signified. His uniform hung in his closet, hidden in a dark corner behind his suit jackets. His beret was in his top drawer with a hundred other artifacts of a life tucked away. And if you looked on his roll- top desk, a metal figurine stood atop it, in fatigues with rifle, which witnessed to his achievement of top something or other.

The notion of him, however, as a real-life soldier always seemed remote, like a story he made up. Like the yarn he passed off on my sister and me that his white, middle-aged friend Mr. Jackson, who lived in the apartments across the ditch (and whom my grandmother would certainly describe as 'deep in his cups') was part of the Jackson Five. My father is adamant we fell for this. As I was only three at the time, I can't say for sure.

This history, though, the one of a medic in the special forces, the one where he learned rudimentary Vietnamese, the one where he won weekend leave by running fifteen miles back to the barrack but was too tired to do anything other than sleep all weekend, this history suddenly had flesh. My father wasn't simply my father anymore. He was a man stitched together by experience, with an intrigue and a pain all his own.

"I haven't been back here in twenty years," he tells me as we get out of the van. "I never felt like coming back" — splinters of a remote history. My father is more Gary Cooper than Atticus Finch. He's wonderful but silent.

The night before this pilgrimage to his old barracks, we stayed with my uncle, a man who delights in unleashing my father's past. My father, I learned, was known as Fearless Fred Thompson, a young man who flipped his car seven times into a snowy field, an irresponsible hoodlum responsible for twenty-one runs in a game of mailbox baseball, an adventurer who led his friends in a hunt for the famous glowing man of central Pennsylvania, a real life Boo Radley hunter if I’ve ever heard of one. In retrospect, I wonder if my father's deep silence was a prayer that his children would be less wild than he was.

"I want to show you something," he says, interrupting that silence and leading me toward a cluster of plaques that encircle a statue. I follow like a pilgrim.

He looks down, slowly scanning the plaques, attending them with sacred hush. "Here he is," he says, "this is my friend, Bob. He was part of my training class. He introduced your mom and me — out on the jumpfield." This story I had heard. My mother happened upon my father at his most daring, most virile, having just jumped out of an airplane. What's small talk after that?

"Bob died in Vietnam. All of these men died there. There were eleven in my class and eight of them were killed. I was the only one who wasn't sent over. I was selected to train the new recruits."

Even as a fourteen-year-old, I remember trying to take in the enormity of that statement. His friends dying — nearly every one.

Knocked off-center, it was a full moment before I noticed my father crying.

This is the memory I take into Christian dialogues about war, a memory of my father faltering into brokenness before me. In this memory, there resides a powerful, visceral reaction to war. I cannot abide the notion of it.

This memory, however, is not enough for theological conversation — as much as I might wish it to be. Theology is a process of taking an experience like this and submitting it to careful, ordered thought. Moreover, it's an exercise in Atticus' old saw of walking a mile in someone else's shoes, of hearing their story of loss from a dread day in September that compels them to support war, and then tendering that experience to a careful, scriptural scrutiny, too. This is what Christians do. We lay down our prejudices before God and scripture and listen for an answer.

And that's hard, isn't it? Especially when the Spirit has a galling habit of calling us beyond our prejudices toward visions of justice we don't like. But I trust in God, that like Scout's encounter with Boo, I might find grace in a spot that once disturbed me.

Casey Thompson is an Associate Pastor at Idlewild Presbyterian Church in Memphis, TN.