For one thing, there was the incident when I was living with the one brother after I lost my job after my surgery (eventually I was awarded disability insurance). When my mom and other brother came out I had this rather over-done plan - in hindsight I should have toned it down some. But that wasn't the whole issue, either though.
I told my brother that I wanted to host a dessert evening. That's what I called it and that's what it was supposed to be. I think that is very clear and I don't know how it can be misunderstood, but somehow it was, and they came over wanting dinner.
I wanted it to be a kind of magical evening, but it ended out being a mess because they wanted dinner and then I wasn't ready because I'd actually planned too much. Actually, I was ready enough that we could go with what I had done close to when I'd planned it, and just not have everything I planned. And they boys could help decorate, which was part of it, too.
But then I wanted to send a lot home with my one brother and mom and I ended out cooking till the last minute when I should have dropped it and just spent time with mom I guess.
She wanted me to help her with her medications list. She knew I used to help dad with his. But the thing was that all I did for dad was set up his Excel spreadsheet and teach him how to use it and then I think I helped him tweak it a couple times, but he kept it updated.
I couldn't really do that with mom because 1) she was a classic technophobe and wouldn't go anywhere near a computer, let alone an Excel spreadsheet, and 2) even if she had a paper worksheet she wasn't reliable enough to keep it up to date like dad did with the electronic version. I'd tried to get updated information with her over the phone before and it wasn't reliable. So then my brother out there would end out having to be the one having to take charge anyway. Since I wasn't there and I didn't have direct access to her doctors or medical information there wasn't anything I could do. But she didn't understand that. So all she knew was that I used to help dad and I wasn't helping her. That sounds terrible, like I didn't love her or something, but in reality, I didn't know how I could help her. I mean other than calling her and encouraging her and things like that.
This wasn't like in Vienna where I could just easily take down mom's meds as if it was going to make a difference in anything, knowing full well it wasn't it wasn't because how on earth was I ever going to find out if there were changes to the meds or doses. (That is, I couldn't I couldn't live a lie with my mom, as I did in Vienna, although I tried as much as possible to minimize the dissonance there.) My brother out there never told me anything or talked to me about anything, so it's not like I was going to find out from him. So it was going to have to come from mom, and I'm not sure I would have wanted to tell mom directly to her face, but she was not very reliable, and there were a lot of reasons for that, not all of which were really in her control.
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Back to the texts. This next one is:G'Segner, Ford F. (1986, Fall). A chaplain's perspective on the application of values. Military Chaplains' Review, 55-60.
Ah, those pesky little things called values. It seems it's hard to run away from them, hard as we may try. We just saw into my family a bit how ethics has come to play. And if you're a chaplain it seems that it may be even extra hard. Let's take a look.
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The Chief of Staff, Army "Values" White Paper uses these concepts and expands their application.The main part of that that I wanted to discuss is the last paragraph, but it didn't make sense without bringing in some of the preceding text as well, even though understanding what the "familiar language" is might not be that crucial to my discussion.
Our Oath of Commission, Oath of Enlistment, or Oath of Office requires that we live by the tenets of the professional Army ethic and those personal values that strengthen and enable us to execute the missions entrusted to us. Values are what we, as a profession, judge to be right. They are more than words - they are the moral, ethical, and professional attributes of character....
This is familiar language to chaplains. We are charged by our churches and religious groups to represent these values to soldiers. In addition, we are expected to apply the professional Army ethic with its individual values to our lives and to the lives of the soldiers we serve." (p. 55-56)
So, if I understand it correctly, churches charge chaplains to teach Army values. At least that's how I understand the crux of this text. I mean, I realize that churches don't ONLY charge chaplains to do this; that this isn't the only thing that chaplains are charged by their churches to do, but the thing here is that one of the things that churches charge chaplains to do is teach Army values. Right? Isn't that what this says?
And it's written by a chaplain in the rank of Major who, according to the biographical blurb on the first page, "is a Personnel Staff Officer assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Human Resources Directorate, Leader Policy Division, Washington, D.C. That sounds pretty impressive to me, like he probably knows what he is talking about and has some clout behind hime too, so that other chaplains might respect him.
So this was written in 1986, the year before I arrived in Vienna. So I was doing deputation at the time this was published. That means I was speaking at churches raising faith support so I could go to the mission field. Interdenominational missions are generally faith missions, which means their missionaries aren't sent out from money from the denomination, but instead each missionary has to raise his own pledged support from churches and individuals. So that's what I was doing when this article was published.
I don't know if either of the H.R. staff at the Vienna mission read this article, but they certainly could have. Or maybe they were familiar with the concept before it even went to print, so that this concept is only news to me.
However that may be, I find it very strange that churches should church chaplains to Army values. The church would know that the chaplain has to fulfill certain Army tasks, but Army values could be oppositional to the church's and I don't think that churches should charge chaplains to teach Army values. The church's job is spiritual and it needs to charge the chaplain to do the spiritual work.
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I'm going to discuss this section. It's unusual, because I didn't have it marked up from when I first read the text in the mid 1990s in Minneapolis. But this section is just a horrible throwback on the way the H.R. director and maybe some other leaders even too used Scripture to mold people's thinking, for counseling, if you will. In my opinion, it was a great misuse of Scripture. I actually saw it among certain Protestants in Russia that had had a lot of Western contact too.The section is titled "The Challenge"
Chaplains must understand the role expected by our individual supervisors and commanders. Are we good luck charms who ride in helicopters to keep them from crashing? Are we the conveyors of good and bad weather wishers? Are we staff officers who advise on religion, morals, and morale? Once we perceive our role, we can determine whether or not it promotes the ideals of the professional Army ethic. We like to say ours is a sacred trust from God to promote the principles, commandments, and truths revealed in the Scriptures. I believe we act naively and with benign ignorance when we do not heed such Scripture passages as: "The man who can be trusted in little things can be trusted also in great; and the man who is dishonest in little things is dishonest also in great things. If, then, you have not proved trustworthy with the wealth of this world, who will trust you with the wealth what is real? And if you have proved untrustworthy with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?" (p. 57)The part here that I'm going to take issue with is when the author starts trying to apply Scripture. For one thing I've had to read and reread it to make sure I understand what he's trying to say with this passage of Scripture. At first reading it's easy to think it's a non sequitor as to why on earth he would be putting it there and what it might have to do with what he just said. But I think he's trying to get chaplains to just sort of getting real and making sure they have their feet on the ground and can do the basic things that are given them and then after that they can think about other and maybe bigger or harder things.
But the thing is that it's almost a syndrome or something to just throw these verses out like that as if that was the magic answer, with no thought about context of Scripture. And incidently the context of this passage happens to be very interesting, by the way: (Luke 16)
10 “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. 11 So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? 12 And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?
13 “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
And while we're expanding applications, some people expand the "no man can serve two masters" to go beyond just the God / mammon problem. So there you come back to the being unequally yoked issue again. And so we see why that author maybe didn't want to discuss the context of verse he was citing. Serving in the military comes up as an unequally yoked issue.
But getting back to the verses in the text... It's these particular verses that they pull out of the hat (so to speak, I mean) that show the qualities they want, the single verses are just thrown at you, like here, where it seems out of place, like it was just pasted there last minute or something. There's no lead-up to it to speak of and no discussion of it or break down of it. It's just there. And it describes what you're supposed to be like in that sphere of existence, just like at the mission. This verse is the kind of thing the H.R. chaplain would say in Vienna.
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[This is a very brief little Canadian interlude. I got a huge container of Bird's custard on Amazon.com some time ago and I just made some and I'm enjoying it. I'm not feeling well, so that's the extent of my gourmet cooking of late. It was very nice though.]"Martin Luther's words are relevantI had the good fortune to be studying German in West Berling in the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth. My friends at the Paulinum Seminar in E. Berlin took me to a history museum where there was a special Martin Luther exhibit. Of course, they interpreted him as being an early radical, but the thing was that Luther didn't want to be associated with political upheavals. I also bought a historical atlas of the world in East Germany, and there is a page where Luther is prominent on it too.
A man who would venture to govern an entire country of the world with Gospel would be like a shepherd who should place in one fold wolves, lions, eagles, and sheep together and let them freely mingle with one another and say, "help yourselves, and be good and peaceful among yourselves; the fold is open, there is plenty of good; have no fear of dogs and clubs." The sheep, forsooth, would keep the peace and would allow themselves to be fed and governed in peace, but they would no live long; nor would any beast keep from molesting another... For this reason these two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other." (p. 57)
But the thing is that, and I agree, that church and state should be separate. Luther has a different logic here than I've used, but I think there is something to it too. The thing is that how things are now is that we rely on law to make sure that everyone can mingle together without eating each other up, but then your trust, I guess has to be in the laws to work, and then, is that the way it is supposed to be anyway? Is this the optimum way the church can work? Is this the way the light can shine the brighest and the salt is saltiest? I'm skeptical, because you have to make so many comprimises.
So if the two kingdoms are together, then where is the church? How can we distinguish the church? Where is it?
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This section is "The Piety Perspective"In a recent newspaper interview Chaplain Patrick J. Hessian, former Army Chief of Chaplains, put the piety and ethic relationship in this perspective.This sounds pretty formulaic, and I think it is in actuality, because I think they research these things to find out what really works and psychological probability and things like that. I mean the Army is interested in soldiers that come out well-adjusted, etc.
... It's important to understand that we don't start with values. We start with beliefs, and we build values on top of that. It begins with primary beliefs, those you learned at your mother's knee. Then you acquire beliefs just in the process of living. It's on this belief structure that your values rest. Once values are entrenched in your being, your attitudes and motivations in life flow from them, and from those attitutdes and motivations come behavior changes...
Contrary to a popular view, values can be changed -- if Chaplain Hessian is correct about values stemming from beliefs. (p. 58)
If you go into the military, and here it's the Army in particular, you've got to know you're going to be in for this kind of thing, especially starting in boot camp where you know they'll put you through the wringer until you don't know which end's up. Right? I mean, they won't torture you, but it's going to be rough.
But when I went to Vienna, and I've said this before, so it's not new, I did not expect this kind of thing. I had never gotten a hint from anyone in the ministry that this kind of thing ought to be expected. I had short term experience with missions and had never experienced anything like it before. And I had had some experience on my own in Eastern Europe.
Nevertheless, it did appear that the mission in Vienna had a similar desire as the Army did. So basically, if they were like the Army here, they wanted to change my values, attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. According to this quote, I don't think that the Army wanted to change beliefs; however, I'm not sure whether or not I would say the same about the Vienna mission.
The thing is that the Vienna mission never found out about the areas in which I disagreed with them. If they had discovered them, besides probably trying to arranged to confuse me and do damage control, they would have given me the boot post haste and sent me back home - really home, for good.
They did get me to change some behaviors, such as at the end when I gave in and started attending the English speaking church. I never had an attitude problem, that I remember. That was the thing, that I was always gracious no matter what they threw my way, and I never complained or anything. So that wasn't an issue, except I really did have attitude issues; I was just hiding them, so they didn't know.
As to motivations... I'm not sure. They might have wanted to change my motivations because I didn't fit in the position they had for me if they were going to insist I hobnob with the secretaries. I had nothing against the secretaries, as I've said before, but I wanted more people ministries, so I was going to be involved in the Austrian church. I really couldn't relate to the secretaries that much. So they would have had to really work on my motivation to get me to fit in well, and I don't know how they'd do it without doing like they did, just crushing my spirit to bits.
I'm not even sure where they would best have begun if there was a chance to make it work. The thing was that, with their parameters, as I found it, there really wasn't a way. If they felt that I absolutely had to meld with the secretaries to the exclusion of everything else, then it wouldn't work and they should have told me that from the very beginning. I wouldn't have accepted it, I know I wouldn't have, because I spefically said then that I'd want to be doing external ministry with Austrians and I was given the go ahead with that. And so I went ahead with my deputation based on that. Otherwise I would not have, I'm positive of that. And the whole time I was there my going to the Austrian church was a point of contention until I finally gave in and started going to the English speaking church the last 6 months.
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That's all. I've got to get dinner and do my evening stimulator session.