Recalling the Four Chaplains

For unknown reasons, over the past month or two on perhaps three occasions I’ve run across posters, one quite old, commemorating the “four chaplains.” Each time they caught me, made me think for just a moment or two about war and peace and how we meet our deaths…

On this day in 1943 the American troop transport the Dorchester was sunk by the German submarine the U-223. I don’t know how many chaplains were aboard, but I suspect just four. The ones we remember were a rabbi, Alexander Goode, a Catholic priest, John Washington, and two Protestant ministers George Fox and Clark Poling.

I have no idea what their formal assigned jobs would have been or if such precautions were made at that time and place. What they did was help. They focused on the wounded and helped a number to boats and then helped pass out life jackets.

When they ran out of life jackets they gave theirs away.

The waters were very cold and most who didn’t get into boats would die of hypothermia. So, no one knows whether this last gesture was futile…

There are in the circles within which I move some question about whether people of faith should take on the work of chaplains. The concern is complicity in war…

A legitimate concern.

And there is a sense in which those posters and various campaigns in the past about these four men were about propaganda, holding up the rightness of our side. And so there is also a fear of being used in such a way…

But here’s the secret.

We’re all complicit. There is no escape. There is no sitting on the sidelines of life.

I have no idea what these four thought about their war, although it is the conflict our nation thinks of as “the good war.” If such a word as good can ever be applied to war, I think maybe, perhaps this would be that one…

But that’s not the point. Francis of Assisi is by tradition the first chaplain, he joined if briefly one of those nasty little crusades. And none of those crusades should have happened.

But there he was…

If people of faith are not nurturing, giving some sense of hope, just being present in the face of war, then what is their work, what is our work?

When I was on sabbatical a few years ago and was minister in residence at our Chicago seminary, Meadville Lombard, I met two Unitarian Universalists who were preparing for the chaplaincy. One had been a sergeant in the Army the other was an active duty Marine pilot.

We never talked the specifics of the wars raging in the Middle East, but contextually, I think they both thought them at the very least bad policy. Along the way one told me he had become a pacifist.

But what was very clear was how they were both preparing to serve their sisters and brothers, and those are the words they used.

In this context, and in most, the words I think of, when I think of the web of relationship…

There is a Buddhist tradition that in every hell there is a Buddha.

Chaplains may or may not be the Buddha in those wars. But I’d bet money if you were hard pressed the chaplain’s corps might be the right place to start looking…