I apologize in advance for the length of this post. My excuse is in the title...I did say "...Everything" and I don't want to make myself a liar.
I've been going to write a short story about life in the trenches in WWI for a long time now. I've started probably 1/2 a dozen times over the years and each time either gotten myself lost in the tall grass of my imagination or wound up with a hollow, tinny echo of what I'd meant to say. I'm going to do what all writers do when faced with this kind of block. I'm going to talk about it rather than actually do something about it.
So here's the talking:
The story opens with a kid in the front line trenches kind of coming back into himself after a particularly heavy barrage and attack by the enemy. He has an odd thought, "I'm not surprised to be here anymore. None of this shocks me." The idea of that is that he has come to grips with the reality of where he is. This isn't the place the recruiter described. This isn't anything to do with the parades, the parties, the good wishes of family or the farewell kiss. This is what it is. And he is nowhere else but here.
And "here" is a place where good people die suddenly or horribly for no immediately clear reason. Some are horribly maimed; others have broken minds. The only ways out are death or to be relieved by someone and something completely out of his control.
And "here" is a place with a large community trying to kill him. These are people who's only real knowledge of our hero (he gets another name every time I restart writing) is born out of their hatred of everything he stands for, and his part in standing for it. Our hero, being literally blasted into clarity, realizes that it's a sort of hate that, based on his experience, that he really can't ever hope to understand.
Most of the versions of this I've done so far have been 3rd person. So now, we float inside of Hero's head a bit. He latches on to a couple of "beautiful" things, things that are beautiful given the context of "here." Suddenly he's overcome by what that beauty in this place means and he needs to share that revelation with everyone. As he starts running up and down the trench, telling people about the beauty he's found, everyone "realizes" that he's cracked and he's sent to a hospital and eventually back to convalescence in the States.
Okay, so it's a long short story or maybe novella. The next chapter is the clean, white, warm, dry, safe convalescent hospital. In the hospital, he's taught repeatedly what reality "really" is. He learns that most of the professionals he's working with don't get the point of the beauty he's seen and is still experiencing. They confuse the whiteness of the hospital with beauty, the kind of beauty defined by a desperately out of place flower petal or a stale piece of candy that is sweet that seems unending even though the taste fades.
Even so, in the hospital he is finally able to frame fully the truth he's learned. That is, the purposefulness of those elements in the trenches along with him being there to participate with them, to celebrate them, had to have purpose. How much had to be suffered to reveal that purpose?
The last, very short chapter, ends with our hero heading out down a country road on an early summer day. Turns out there was a nurse at the hospital who started to doubt her own reality. At once, she saw both the horror and the redemptive beauty her patient described. As she is standing at his bedside one night, thinking all this through, an old African American janitor (remember the time frame) comes up and said, "That's a special young man. He's seen it." And a conversation ensues.
She buys the hero the clothes to leave and shortly thereafter, leaves herself. At the end, two journeys begin. Note that the old guy remains at the hospital waiting both for and with patients; pun fully intended.
Here's the idea underneath: We live and in fact are born into the trenches. We get confused about this part of reality because we have it better and softer than virtually any generation in history. If tragedy and sadness hasn't found you yet, than you're still waiting...or waiting for healing that will let you see what's already happened. The barrage will come. The agnostic writer Kurt Vonnegut summarized this point well when he responded to the old saw that goes, "The great human tragedy is war." Vonnegut replied, "No it isn't. The great human tragedy is death."
The hospital represents the institutionalized response to the wonder of recognizing salvation right in the middle of horror. The churchianity response is to scrub it, clean it, make it our version of white and then try assign everyone a bed. We have a mission here too, just as at the WWI front. Our response is to reach out to the nurses. "Let me tell you about a rose petal I found in a trench once and what it means."
Because in the end, the revelation is only the beginning of a journey we take with Christ. Salvation and even healing are not the hospital's to supply, even though they try to do so with usually good intentions. These are the province of Christ that we meet on the road and the one he sends to represent him...like the janitor. Through the person and work of Christ and from the fire of the spirit at Pentecost, the one true church of Immanuel, God with us.
Salvation is the beginning of the journey. It will include both early summer promise and the agony of the trenches. But either way, we are not the same and as a result, none of "here" is the same anymore either.
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