Changes of Heart: An Iraq War Veteran’s Faith Story
Among its best-read stories of 2018, America Magazine lists “Deployment to Iraq Changed my View of God, Country and Humankind. So Did Coming Home” by Phil Klay.
Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2018 he received the George W. Hunt, S. J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters.
I read his story with the readers of this blog in mind. Though few of us have experienced the trauma of war, Klay appears to have struggled with faith problems shared by many who are searching for God. He started from the position of a practicing, but doubt-filled, Catholic.
“Faith, for me, has always been a place to register a sense of doubt, of powerlessness, of inadequacy and uncertainty about my place in the world and how I am supposed to live,” Klay writes.
Facing Human Frailty
“You kneel before a crucifix. Before a broken, tortured and humiliated human body. You face human frailty, and human cruelty. You call to mind your sins. All that you have done, and all that you have failed to do, in a place where nevertheless you know you are accepted and forgiven.”
The author, an obviously thoughtful person, writes from the viewpoint of a man caught up in a conflict not of his making or choosing, trying to extract from his faith a way to cope.
“Those early days in Iraq were so busy it was easy to get lost in the constant flow of work. But my time at Mass, and particularly my time in confession, were when time stopped for me; and I tried to imagine ways of reordering myself in relation to this very disordered, broken world. Then I poured out my doubts, received reconciliation and went back to my confusing day job.”
But on his return home, things changed. Battlefields sometimes make faith stronger, forcing its participants to look more closely at the meaning of life and making the leap of faith.
No Longer Believed
“But this was not my situation,” writes Klay. “…I stopped going to Mass. It was not a conscious decision. It would be a year before I would admit to a woman I was dating that I no longer believed in God. It was more that I simply stopped feeling the need to trouble myself about my spiritual life.
“My understanding not simply of the war but of myself shifted. I was not a fallen creature in a broken world reliant on grace, but a Marine in a successful army that had all the answers. I was justified not by a cross, but by an interpretation of public policy, not by the cruel and barbaric torture and murder of an innocent man, but by politics.
“It increasingly seems to me that the certainty of earlier life was based on fantasies of an orderly future in a rational, controllable world, fantasies that were no more than the wish that the Leviathan might one day be tied down by force.”
Eventually, Klay learned to accept uncertainty in his faith as he was obliged to do in every other aspect of life. He accepted that faith doesn’t pretend to provide all the answers but allows us to live a meaningful, God-filled life that rejects the cold irrationality of an indifferent universe.
The Image of Our Tortured God
“And so,” he writes, “though I struggle with faith, faith not only in God but in my country, my church and my fellow men, I go to Mass. I return to doubt, and confusion and uncertainty. I return to a social gathering. To a meal. To the experience of music, to the image of our tortured God, to the recitation of words. To that moment when everybody in the church trips over the phrase ‘consubstantial with the Father.’ To the hands of my fellow congregants offering me peace. To the inscription of the sign of the cross on the forehead, lips and heart.
“I return to the physical expression of a broader social body that proclaims itself a mystical body, each one of us branches emanating from the vine that is Christ. I return to a place designed to pull me out of my individualistic American brain and situate me back inside my skin, and inside a community, with all the raucous contradictions and odd harmonies that implies.”
