Are we talking here about faith in God, in fellow human beings, or in one's self? Perhaps it's unavoidable that we think about all three in times of war.
Despite the old adage about a supposed lack of atheists in foxholes, I do think personal claims to religion can suffer terribly in wartime. How could they not?
Some years back, an Anglican bishop told me that he believed a part of the Church of England's decline was directly related to British soldiers' experience of World War I--living months, even years, in trenches while continually subjected to random sniper shots, raking machine gun fire and high-intensity artillery bombardments.
You get a flavor of this in (if I remember right) Sebastian Faulks' novel, "Birdsong," which paints a vivid scene of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, when British troops were ordered to make a direct assault on heavily fortified German positions. Twenty thousand men in this assault--60 percent of all officers and 40 percent of those in the ranks--died on a single day. Faulks has a chaplain witness the opening minutes of this madness; overcome, the character tears a cross from his uniform. (And, think about it, if humans are made in God's image, as Christians and Jews are taught, then such murder runs perilously close to blasphemy.)
Far more powerful is the scene Elie Wiesel describes in "Night," about an incident in Auschwitz, where he was interned as a boy. The narrator, an adolescent, is forced with other inmates to watch the hanging of a young Jewish boy who slowly strangles to death on the rope. "Where is God? Where is He?" someone in the crowd asks. And, as Wiesel writes, from within the narrator comes the answer, "Here He is--He is hanging on this gallows."
I always feel like this question of God's presence or absence or wounding can't be addressed without the parallel question, "Well, where are the humans?" The British offensive on the Somme lasted for months--in other words, the commanders persisted--eventually gaining something less than 10 miles of territory and creating more than one million casualties on both sides. As for Auschwitz... well, only humans attended the Wannsee Conference and humans carried out its orders.
There's a face in the mirror aspect of this week's question, too... It did occur to me, as this most recent Memorial Day drew close, that I could take a piece of paper and write the number 3,454 on it in stark black ink and hold it up as a spectator during our local parade. That would have signified the number of young men and women killed in Iraq to that day--before we lost an additional 10 on the very day itself. But I didn't do that.
Finally, if one were to link some of these questions, I suppose one could quote from one of the Somme's survivors, Harold MacMillan, in which he was wounded and spent a day lying in a foxhole. He lived to become Prime Minister four decades later and at some point is recorded as having said: "If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent." For what it's worth MacMillan said he didn't believe decency was quite enough.
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