When I wrote up my reflections on military trauma after the JustPeace Conference, I had not yet read Edward Tick’s book, War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (Quest Books, 2005). It further deepens and expands some of the key themes I raised in that earlier piece. It also challenges us with insights that cut across the grain of many of our assumptions.
Tick is a psycho-therapist grounded in the work of Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, and practitioners of “soul work” like Thomas Moore and James Hillman. From this perspective, the traumas we see in soldiers (Tick uses “warrior”) is not a medical malady to be healed with medications or treatments. Neither is it a failure to flip some interior switch to get us back from fighting to civilian normalcy. For Tick, what we now call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is a failure to provide cultural practices and rituals that enable people to integrate their war experiences into an identity that both claims their warrior soul and enables it to contribute to the healing of the society around them. Instead of integrating the experience, they (and we civilians) drown it in drugs, romanticize it in movies (see John Wayne), or deny it altogether by denying its costs .
Tick then ransacks Greek legend, Biblical story, and Native American lore to lift up ways that the warrior “archetype” can be claimed within us, placed in its proper ritual and developmental contexts, and brought to bear on the actual experiences of veterans from the horrendous wars of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. Unless we do so, we fail to guide military action in wartime and integrate its experiences into socially useful lives for the survivors. Tick himself has spent over twenty-five years leading surviving warriors and people of their generation, such as war resistors, through purification rituals in sweat lodges and reconciliation visits in Vietnam. His stories provide compelling grounding for this book.
As a person who came of age in the civil rights movement and the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, I was able to retrieve some of the grief and lost “normalcy” of that period and begin to integrate it more adequately into my later years. That is an ongoing task. Tick’s book was not only helpful on the personal level, but also challenges me with some questions. Here are some of them.
If the Warrior (as distinguished from the “berserk killer”) is an archetype in our lives – both male and female, it seems – then how to we integrate that into the life of one who builds up society and the natural environment? Tick’s later pages give some helpful pointers. What I think is important, is that those of us who tend to begin with an emphasis of peace-building may contribute to the unhealthy failure of reintegrating warriors and their experiences. We deny this dimension of our natural being and therefore fail to creatively integrate it into our other aspects of social cooperation, care for the earth and for life. Peace-building proceeds at its peril (and ours) if we neglect this task. In this regard I thought of Worf, the warrior Klingon in Star Trek: Next Generation, who personified that alien culture’s warrior tradition of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, courage in the face of death and danger, and skill in using force to avert hostility.
Just as there is a point when an emphasis on peace-building can block healing and therefore real restoration, so can a narrow focus on the warrior archetype and its claims on us can lure us into the glorification of war and violence that denies the reality of war and leads generation after generation into its horrors. Tick is aware of this. He is trying to present an adequate culture, religious, and ritual “container” for it so that we can deal with the tragedies of human conflict.
Even as he seeks to retrieve the Warrior archetype in order to reconstruct a healing process for veterans, he also is driven to argue that the conditions of modern warfare have made it impossible to accomplish the personal transformation at the heart of the classic warrior’s quest. Modern technology has separated the soldier from the warrior experience even as it bathes us in blood and destruction. Warfare doesn’t test individuals in a clear public way; it severs the bond (yes, bond) between combatants, drawing non-combatants and the natural world into its destruction. Its destructiveness has escaped the bounds of public policy and personal achievement that once made it “meaningful” in Chris Hedges terms [War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Anchor, 2003)]. This makes it even more urgent that we find ways to enable survivors of war to integrate this experience into a personal identity and social mission that builds up non-violent means for resolving conflicts and caring for the earth.
In Red Clay, Blood River, I was trying to get at some of these healing connections in terms of our experience of slavery, exploitation of the earth, and “removal” of peoples from their ancestral lands. In juxtaposing contemporary searches for meaning and vocation with stories so deep and forgotten that only Earth can remember them, I was struggling with a question similar to Tick’s – how can we honestly integrate our past into a present vocation to care for each other and the earth? His book is a critical addition to my reflections on this question.
A Covenantal Imagination: Selected Essays
This collection of my essays from 1971 to 2003 traces the main contours of the development of my thought. At the core of this development has been the rich concept of covenant, with its many expressions in theories of federalism, the dynamics of reconciliation, and ways of knitting together our “oikos” of work, family, faith, and the land.
The essays begin with my struggle to re-imagine images of church and society as “bodies” through the lens of emerging cybernetic theories. They then turn to relations of ecclesiology to social organization and my early engagement with the thought of Hannah Arendt. Ecological themes begin to emerge with an essay on covenantal approaches to land ethics. The covenantal perspective gains further expression in articles about marriage and family in relation to work and the land. Covenantal perspectives on constitutionalism and the dynamics of reconciliation then emerged in the democratic transitions of the early 1990s. The dynamics of reconciliation and their contexts in wider cultural memory take us into the final essays.
A Covenantal Imagination is available in print and digital formats from Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon, and your independent bookseller.
For comments on A Covenantal Imagination, CLICK HERE.
Making My Way in Ethics, Worship, and Wood
In this book I lay out the main way of thinking that has emerged out of my personal experience and cultural environment over the course of my life. I call it an “expository memoir” because it focuses on a succinct description of my patterns of thinking as they have developed over time. Through it I have tried to become more self-conscious about the way my origins in Washington and at my family’s farm in Virginia, my education, my experiences in marriage and family, and my teaching and research here and abroad have shaped my concerns and thought.
Woven all through this long development were concepts of covenant and federalism, public and reconciliation, and the ensemble of the “oikos” connections of work, family, faith, and land. Themes of ecology steadily shaped my thought in the last thirty years, while a turn to working with wood and constructing worship furniture spoke to the connection of worship and ethics that has flowed through my work.
I hope this memoir not only offers a kind of summary overview of my thought but stimulates readers to reflect on their lives and they ways they have thought about the world around them. I am pleased that the publishers chose to use Sylvia’s stunning tapestry “Terrifying Joy” for the cover. It offers an opening into the light so brilliant we cannot see what it holds. Our journeys always contain elements of both feelings, even as our sometimes frantic hopes urge us on our way. You can find Making My Way in print and digital formats at Wipf and Stock publishers, Amazon, and through your local independent bookstore.
For comments about Making My Way, CLICK HERE.
Mining Memories on Cyprus 1923-1925
Mining Memories on Cyprus 1923-1925: Photographs, Correspondence, and Reflections is available in a Kindle e-book format. Based on my maternal grandparents' involvement with re-opening the ancient copper mine at Skouriotissa, Cyprus, it contains 116 startlingly clear photos of mine life in those years as well as copious quotes from their correspondence.
This memoir not only introduces readers to the people but also to the geography, machinery, and events shaping the early days of re-opening the world’s oldest copper mine. It also reflects on what it is to recover pieces of our past, rub off some of the tarnish of forgetfulness, and try to reconstruct a history that binds us to people and places far from our usual paths.
The book is also an invitation to others, not only to recover forgotten or repressed parts of their memory, but also as a reconstruction of their identity. I am keenly aware, all through writing the book, of how Cyprus’s division between Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking populations has made it very difficult for Cypriots to claim their joint history, appreciate the ecological unity of the island, and find a way toward a workable federalism grounded in a new social covenant among diverse peoples.
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To purchase a copy, just CLICK HERE.
For readers' comments about the book, CLICK HERE.
For previous blog posts leading to the book, CLICK HERE.William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings. For more about my woodworking, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. READ MORE...
SAWDUST AND SOUL: A Conversation on Woodworking and Spirituality
Sawdust and Soul arose from many conversations and joint woodworking projects I have had over the years with John de Gruchy—friend, theologian, and woodworker who lives in South Africa’s Western Cape but who has also spent extensive time in the US. We’ve talked a lot about our wood projects and how this traditional practice of turning trees into useful and artistic pieces shapes as well as expresses our deepest values and approaches to life as well as its transcendent source. These are conversations about woodworking and spirituality. We’ve included a bunch of pictures of our work as well as some line drawings and poetry by John’s wife Isobel. And yes, our children get in some words along with the woodworkers who have been part of our community of inspiration and support. Our topics range from the shaping of a sense of balance in our lives to dealing with loss, memory, and our wonder as creatures in the midst of an amazing abundance of life and artful design. Whether you’re a tree-hugger, an all-thumbs reader, or an honest-to-goodness woodworker, we invite you into the conversation. CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO CLIP!
SAWDUST AND SOUL is now available at your local bookstore as well as
Wipf and Stock Publishers
Barnes and Noble
Amazon (also on Kindle)
and other book sellers.
For an EXCERPT from the book, by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, CLICK HERE.TURNINGS: Poems of Transformation
Like works in wood upon a lathe, these poems are word-turnings that reveal the inner grain of our human experience. They are bowls to catch our turnings of memory, conversion, falling in love, and passing through our seasons and the wrenching turns that mark our lives. Above all these turnings are a shout of praise, a murmur of wonder, a turning away from life as usual, a merciful re-turning to the songs, images and stories that move our lives.
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Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.
You can get Red Clay, Blood River at:
Amazon
Amazon Kindle Version
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READ MORE...OTHER WRITINGS – FREE
I am editing and recasting some of my previous writings into digital format to make them available free to interested persons and study groups. To see a list of these books and articles as well as to save them to your own computer, CLICK HERE.
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Thanks, Elaine!
Yes, Judith Herman is one of the sources for Tick’s reflections. She takes in a whole array of trauma, especially the trauma experiences of women. Very insightful stuff.
One very good book on this subject is Trauma & Recovery by Judith Lewis Herman. She talks about how revolutionary it is for war veterans to be able to talk about their experiences. Not only is it part of the process of recovery for the soldier but for the whole society.