Reflections on war.
Nov. 7th, 2005 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaRemarkable service at church yesterday, and I don't say that just because ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel was heavily involved.
The theme was "reflections on war," yesterday being close to both Veterans Day and U.N. Sunday. Michael's written about it at length - you should definitely read down to the end, where he's appended the piece he read as part of the sermon. It's quite a difficult task to preach to a bunch of committed pacifists about the occasional necessity of war, and do it in a way that won't snap their minds shut. Michael did a great job of it.
The person who spoke just before him was an elderly psychiatrist who'd been a medical officer in the Army. Just after World War II, he was stationed in Nuremburg, where he found that he was expected to supply medical care to prisoners of war as well as U.S. troops. Here is the story he told:
A former military governor accused of ordering the deaths of thousands of Jews and Poles tried to commit suicide by overdosing on smuggled-in barbiturates. He survived and was taken to the hospital with pneumonia. The psychiatrist begrudged treating the military governor with his limited stock of penicillin, and wished he would die, but in obedience to his Hippocratic oath and the requirements of the Army he provided the correct medical care. He stationed two guards, Latvian soldiers, to prevent a second suicide attempt. What he didn't do was respond to the military governor's anguish. He wanted to hold someone's hand and pour out his guilt, his feelings, his acute depression, and the appalled psychiatrist turned his head away.
One night the Lativan guards took the military governor to the outhouse and offered him back the cord to his bathrobe, which had been removed for his own safety. They stood aside while he hanged himself. The elderly psychiatrist told us, "the next time I saw my patient was when I cut his body down and pronounced him dead."
At the time, he felt no guilt. He wrote to his father about his vague feelings of guilt for not feeling guilty, but mostly he just wished that the governor had lived long enough to suffer appropriately for the horrors he had caused. It wasn't until years later that he started to wonder: is it ever acceptable for one person to deny the basic humanity of another? Does treating anyone - however much he seems to be the embodiment of evil - as less than human perpetuate his wrongs rather than counterbalancing them?
I can't think of the last time that I heard a story in church that affected me so deeply, and provoked so much reflection on my core moral beliefs. I don't know what I would have done, in his place. I don't even really know what I would want to have done. And I'm just in awe of him, of the strength of him, to get up in front of a hundred and thirty people and tell that story about himself.
curiousangel was heavily involved.The theme was "reflections on war," yesterday being close to both Veterans Day and U.N. Sunday. Michael's written about it at length - you should definitely read down to the end, where he's appended the piece he read as part of the sermon. It's quite a difficult task to preach to a bunch of committed pacifists about the occasional necessity of war, and do it in a way that won't snap their minds shut. Michael did a great job of it.
The person who spoke just before him was an elderly psychiatrist who'd been a medical officer in the Army. Just after World War II, he was stationed in Nuremburg, where he found that he was expected to supply medical care to prisoners of war as well as U.S. troops. Here is the story he told:
A former military governor accused of ordering the deaths of thousands of Jews and Poles tried to commit suicide by overdosing on smuggled-in barbiturates. He survived and was taken to the hospital with pneumonia. The psychiatrist begrudged treating the military governor with his limited stock of penicillin, and wished he would die, but in obedience to his Hippocratic oath and the requirements of the Army he provided the correct medical care. He stationed two guards, Latvian soldiers, to prevent a second suicide attempt. What he didn't do was respond to the military governor's anguish. He wanted to hold someone's hand and pour out his guilt, his feelings, his acute depression, and the appalled psychiatrist turned his head away.
One night the Lativan guards took the military governor to the outhouse and offered him back the cord to his bathrobe, which had been removed for his own safety. They stood aside while he hanged himself. The elderly psychiatrist told us, "the next time I saw my patient was when I cut his body down and pronounced him dead."
At the time, he felt no guilt. He wrote to his father about his vague feelings of guilt for not feeling guilty, but mostly he just wished that the governor had lived long enough to suffer appropriately for the horrors he had caused. It wasn't until years later that he started to wonder: is it ever acceptable for one person to deny the basic humanity of another? Does treating anyone - however much he seems to be the embodiment of evil - as less than human perpetuate his wrongs rather than counterbalancing them?
I can't think of the last time that I heard a story in church that affected me so deeply, and provoked so much reflection on my core moral beliefs. I don't know what I would have done, in his place. I don't even really know what I would want to have done. And I'm just in awe of him, of the strength of him, to get up in front of a hundred and thirty people and tell that story about himself.
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Date: 2005-11-10 06:06 am (UTC)I'm not sure what healing even *means* in that situation, is what it comes down to. I'm glad that he treated the physical problems, at least. At least that's in a realm I can handle and accept.