As I’ve moved in and out of military service throughout my adult life, my heart has broken many times. With what’s happening today to our soldiers, Marines, sailors, Airmen, and Space Force Guardians, it’s breaking again. With what’s happening to our democracy, our progress toward an inclusive society, to the values of love, it’s just broke. This morning I want to do a few things: share some of my Air Force journey, talk about something called moral injury, and suggest that misuse of chaplaincy as political theater within our armed forces further imperils a democracy that has always been fragile–and vulnerable to fundamentalisms of all sorts. And because it will often get corrected in UU spaces — the term “Airman” sounds gendered, but it’s the proper, respectful term. Saying “Airperson” to a woman who just earned her Airman’s coin like thousands before her? Just don’t.
My Air Force testimony begins at 18, like Sandi’s, when I ran away to join the Air Force. I say “ran away” because my Dad had been clear: over his dead body would I live away from home my freshman year of college. Boy did I show him — except he was instantly proud, so my single act of teenage rebellion totally backfired. But in the military I found community, purpose, and friendships unlike anything I’d experienced in my sheltered religious upbringing. My job was inspecting airplanes, and I was so enthralled with aviation I went to the base aero club for flying lessons — a bargain even then at $23 an hour. After that I served in the Air National Guard while using the G.I. Bill to attend a Christian Science parochial school, one that made me sign an acknowledgement that I would get kicked out if I was immoral, drank alcohol, or ever used medicine. This last detail matters.
When I left active duty, the Air Force discovered some defects in my lungs — which explained why calisthenics had always seemed harder for me than for others. Then after five years in the Air Guard, a weekend warrior butter bar doctor ordered me to undergo further medical testing. I faced a choice: get kicked out of the Guard or get kicked out of college, in my senior year. This also meant losing my church job, and with a one-year-old at home, Cindy and I needed the income. My heart broke as I accepted a medical separation. I stuffed that hurt in a bottle and got on with life.
Ironically, after graduation Cindy and I — with our son Jevin — left the church on our own. I got the medical care I needed, and my son got his vaccinations. With my military career in the rearview mirror, I spent a decade writing professionally before entering seminary.
As I deepened in ministry, I began thinking about military chaplaincy. It was 2008, I was about to age out of eligibility, and I had a clean bill of health. But when I called the chaplain recruiter I was told the Air Force was in a RIF — a reduction in force — and they needed fewer chaplains, not more. “Well that was that,” and my heart broke again as I let go of any dream of military chaplaincy.
Fast-forward ten years. I’m 50 years old, and I got a call from our UU military endorser. She told me the chief of chaplains was offering age and medical waivers to underrepresented faith groups—up to age 55. I could run two miles without dying; that was good enough. His office was trying to correct a problem dating to the 1980s, when Focus on the Family and allied fundamentalist Bible churches near the Air Force Academy hatched a plan to proselytize young cadets — who went on to become the Pentagon elite. Frankly, in 40 years I thought we’d purged the White Christian Nationalists from our ranks. Who knew.
The current normalizing of Christianity within the chaplain corps isn’t just alarming, it’s Unconstitutional. And dangerous. Handmaid’s Tale dangerous. The Constitution’s Establishment Clause prohibits the government from privileging any religion over another. The presence of military chaplains has rightfully been challenged in court, and in 1985 the Supreme Court determined in Katcoff v. Marsh that chaplains may exist as “an exception” as long as they serve as protectors of religious liberty, not Christian doctrine. In other words, as long as we provide for all people’s spiritual needs equally, especially downrange where there may be no access to spiritual support, we can tread the line between religion and the state. In 2018 — more than thirty years after Katcoff v. Marsh — the Air Force was still trying to break the evangelical stronghold. They still needed more progressives to address the spiritual needs of non-churched, pagan, humanist, and underserved faith traditions. On bases where I served, I was sometimes the only chaplain willing to counsel gay, lesbian, and transgender troops. When people ask why UUs should serve, I say: because we are really good at inclusion.
So at 52, I wound up back on active duty. In military life, where sergeants are often eligible for retirement at 38, and officers around 42, fifty-two is ancient.
I got my first taste of evangelical fear and rage my first day. The major who picked me up at the gate grilled me all the way to the chapel. “How dare you wear that cross on your uniform,” he said. Later, he made his position plain: “UUs are doing the work of the Devil, and God has called me to fight you.” In my first meeting with the base chaplain, I was told — nothing personal —I would never preach in his pulpit. With the Constitution at my side, I fought my way into that pulpit. Another supervisor ordered me to provide disclaimers whenever Airmen asked me about Jesus or the Bible. I was to say I did not represent normative Christian values. I questioned the lawfulness of his order and chose to disobey.
As our UU chaplain cohort has grown over the past decade, my heart breaks every time a new colleague faces this bias. Because we teach that loving who you love is cause for celebration, not condemnation, we’ve been called groomers. When we post online that we’re pagan or humanist, we’ve faced criminal investigation. We are sidelined, ridiculed, and feared. And we endure it in the name of love — fighting for all who needs a voice on their side.
Sometimes our own denomination doesn’t understand us either, as Chaplain, Major Jules Taylor shared with us in fall as our pulpit guest. At General Assembly, military chaplains wear our uniforms at the Service of the Living Tradition. Walking into that hall, we brace for unkind comments — because every year someone seeks to reminds us that UU values are incompatible with military service. One year, an elected UUA official suggested publicly that military uniforms, worn to honor those who came before us, might be banned at the Service of the Living Tradition. Ouch. It took more than a week for the UUA to decide if it wanted to apologize. //Pause
Why are UU chaps in the military? How are UU chaps, UU? It’s not only to nurture souls or minister to those others will not — but to save lives. One of the lines in our performance reports often reads: number of interventions/lives saved. These include people who come to our office saying they want to die, people we talk down off a balcony, people we convince to put down a weapon they’re about to turn on themselves. We meet people in the middle of the night after they’ve been sexually assaulted. We sit with people the next day when they’re facing a court martial for sexual assault. We meet the people who come home from combat and can’t stop the rage. We struggle alongside people who hoped to find purpose in the military but found themselves instead inside a vast inhuman machine honed for destruction. People who just want the pain to end. These some of my recollections.
Military suicide rates are roughly 1.5 times higher than those of non-veteran adults. The risk is especially pronounced among younger veterans and women. Also at heightened risk are those with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, and those who lose purpose returning home. I was part of many Casualty Notification Teams — the people who knock on doors to tell a family their loved one has died. Every single notification I delivered was for suicide. Every unit memorial service I led was for suicide. Not for being shot. Not for an IED on a convoy. Not for being downed over the South China Sea. Every single death over a five-year period: suicide.
Those are the people I remember on Memorial Day. At banquets, we set out a table with an empty chair for our missing comrades. Those are the ones who sit, for me, in those chairs.
The field of moral injury represents one of the most powerful shifts away from pathologizing the stress of military service — toward understanding that every person who participates in warfighting, from the cook on an aircraft carrier to a special operative–carries invisible injuries. These invisible injuries stem from the spiritual rupture between humans as essentially moral beings and the institutions that cultivate violence. People volunteer to serve, despite their own revulsion to violence, for many reasons: loyalty to ideals of freedom, a desire to shape the world differently, hope that service might free them from a difficult life.
The term “moral injury” has been with us since the 1990s when psychologist Jonathan Shay coined it to describe an injury to the soul stemming from a warfighters “betrayal of what’s right.” It captures the experience of veterans who, following orders, find themselves in violation of a previously held value. It can also happen when values themselves are in deep conflict: I believe what I’m fighting for is right. AND I believe that taking life is wrong.
Moral injury can take many forms: acting on authorized but morally repugnant orders; failing to prevent harm to people in your care; bearing witness to violence; surviving when friends did not. Moral injury lets us see those wounds as distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a defined psychiatric diagnosis — you either have it or you don’t. Moral injury, like physical injury to the body, takes many forms: deep wounds, surface wounds, wounds that fester, scab over, heal, or receive care.
That distinction matters. PTSD is often rooted in physical experience — sustained bombardment, watching a buddy die, endless combat rotations. As the saying goes, the body keeps the score. Moral injury, by contrast, is inherently a spiritual wound. It lives in the disconnection between who we believe ourselves to be and what war has asked of us.
My military career ended on a balcony. I was called out to assist an Airman who could no longer reconcile who she understood herself to be with what her life as an Airman demanded of her. She was about to go over her balcony but finally agreed to speak with her chaplain. She was non-religious but the bond between service member and chaplain is sacred. Thank God she waited for me to get there. We looped in the first sergeant. We got her help.
She also had COVID. For the next several weeks, so did I — and it made a mess of those old scars in my lungs, collapsing one of them. I hid my symptoms for a long time trying to stay in, hoping my breathing would improve. Then during a field training exercise, the exertion of getting into my chemical warfare gear made me pass out. My commander pulled off my mask, cradled me to the ground, and cared for me as a chaplain might. But still, game over. My heart broke one final time, and for a time I put it back in the bottle. I drove around the country in a van, trying to coax it back out. I settled near grandchildren, who got me unstuck.
Unlike many veterans, I had tools that helped bring me home. I had family to remind me who I was. I had a church family to welcome me back. I had a ministry into which kind people let me return. Thanks for that! But my heart still aches for every veteran who can’t. We see them on the streets, hungry and forgotten. We sometimes see them in the news, succumbing to unhealed rage. We read their names in the obituaries, far too young.
Why did I want to become a chaplain? Because there are so few clergy who can do this inclusive work like us. Not because we’re special — but because UUs are trained for it. We’re trained to question injustice. We’re trained to notice oppression. Diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t a program for us; it’s our calling. And so needed. For us, DEI is spiritual work. It is soul work.
My mission was to help people coming home from conflict hold onto a sense of themselves — their values, their souls. By listening to this story, I hope you feel included in this sacred work. There is no physical call to action this morning, and this is the challenge of chaplaincy. Welcome to our world. For a chaplain, the response to injustice and pain is often one of non-action and acceptance, or as one of my chaplain mentors coached, “to sit, open your heart, and let someone else write their hurts upon it.”
I know this is a heavy sermon, perhaps my heaviest. But hearts in bottles aren’t light, and you are today more deeply a part of these stories. What you’ve heard, matters. What you now carry, matters. The weight you feel means there is hope, because where there is attention and awareness, there is healing. May this be your call to action this Memorial Day morning: to hear these stories, hold them together, and feel our hearts open in new ways. These are the burdens of conflict we are called to hold, as we bear witness to the costs of war. Until all come home and war is no more. We remember.