“When veterans return to our communities after war, we owe it to them and to ourselves to do our best to support their recovery. To do so, however, we must be willing to engage the same intense moral questions that veterans undertake about our own responsibility as a society for having sent them to war.”

—Soul Repair:  Recovering From Moral Injury After War, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini

Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly 2016 in Columbus, Ohio.

This past week has been quite the journey, with taking the week off of doing research in order to attend the UUA’s General Assembly 2016 (GA) in Columbus, Ohio, from June 22nd to June 26th. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Unitarian Universalism and how the denomination conducts its business, GA is the one time out of the year where thousands of Unitarian Universalists (UUs) convene in order to vote on policies and make decisions as one denominational body. I served for the second time as a delegate, a voting representative, on behalf of my home congregation, Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation (MPUUC), in Fremont, CA. GA is not only a time to make decisions as a national religious organization:  it is also an opportunity to spiritually renew and refresh yourself as well as to forge new connections with people from all across the country, from a wide variety of backgrounds. This GA, I put together a workshop with a couple of other young adults talking about young adult interfaith work and our stories with it. To put it lightly, I was stoked (!!!) about this upcoming GA.

Getting to GA this year started out normally. As this was my third GA, I felt pretty confident with being able to make it on my own traveling across the country. Flying out of SFO and arriving in Washington-Dulles (IAD) was where the trouble began. Upon arriving at my terminal in Washington DC with plenty of time before my next flight, I noticed the navy United Airlines message board at my terminal giving me bad news:  my flight from IAD to Columbus had been canceled due to weather conditions.

This is where my panic began! Being caught in an airport far away from home (let alone California) without a flight was both troubling and unnerving. To make matters worse, I was not going to arrive in time to GA to help lead my workshop. I frantically made my way to the nearest customer service desk to see if there was any possible way to be rerouted to Columbus. To my astonishment, I was met with a line of about fifty individuals, all from flights that had been canceled due to the rainstorm coming in over Washington DC. I felt my own anxiety build as I wondered if I would be making it out of this airport in time for another flight.

After speaking with a customer service agent, I was placed fourth on a standby list for the last flight out of Washington DC to Columbus for the day. I was told bleakly that this flight should be good for me to make, but that it would be overbooked and that there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t cancel this flight should the weather not clear up (meaning I would end up back in a long line of passengers attempting to escape IAD!). Making my way towards the terminal for my later flight, I ran into another passenger who was stuck in a similar situation. Her flight to Cancún, leaving from the same terminal area, had been delayed due to weather as well, meaning we were both in the same boat with navigating across this vast airport.

To my surprise, this passenger was one of the most friendly people I’ve ever met at an airport. Making our way to the terminal, she told me she was originally from Pennsylvania, traveling to Cancún to celebrate her recent certification as a nurse. I explained that I was a stranded Californian trying to make it to my church’s national conference. We became fast friends, perhaps due to the pressure of being at the mercy of the airlines and the weather to make it out of DC. To my delight, we began discussing some very deep subjects around religion.

Having this discussion made me realize the joy in not being in control sometimes. Sometimes we can be so wound up in our own illusions of control, especially when it comes to time sensitive traveling. Without warrant, we are quick to start playing the blame game:  if the airline would’ve just let the plane fly, I wouldn’t be in this situation; if I had just paid for an earlier flight, I might’ve been able to make it out before the rain; if United hadn’t canceled all of these flights, I wouldn’t be waiting in an hour-long line to get a new ticket.

To be honest, aside from having these negative thoughts (or their positive alternatives), there isn’t much we can do in these moments that might make a better impact on our situation. I had already made attempts to get on another flight. I was already missing the workshop I had spent so long helping to plan. There was nothing more to be done. In my moment of desperation, I had to mourn the fact that I wasn’t in control, as scary as that sounds.

UUA Public Witness event titled “State of Emergence: Faith Filled People Rally for Racial Justice.”

The passenger from Pennsylvania gave me a pearl of wisdom with our discussion. Speaking as a Christian, she explained to me that God had reasons for everything that was happening, including making me miss some of my church’s conference. She explained that part of this missing my earlier flight meant we had the opportunity to have this discussion and become friends. In her eyes, we are always right where we need to be in every situation and one shouldn’t worry about things not going as planned. While I do not share this theological view of God (I don’t believe in God in a traditional sense of the word, let alone a Trinitarian-Christian sense), I appreciated the sentiment behind her words:  this journey was out of my control. And it was going to be okay. I was going to be okay.

After saying our goodbyes, and her taking of the first of many selfies with me on her trip, I patiently waited at my terminal for my flight to arrive and for boarding to begin. After all of the groups had been boarded, the agent began reading names on the standby list. I was lucky and was the fourth and final passenger to be allowed on this overbooked flight. Sometimes we get lucky, even when we are not directly in control. I thankfully took my seat on the plane and landed an hour later in Columbus.

To give you all an update on my research, I had a breakthrough with the focus of my topic on moral injury. I want to focus my readings and research on how Monterey County can help both veterans and civilians cross what has become known as the “veteran-civilian divide,” or the lack of dialogue between veterans and civilians around experiences from war. As I mentioned in my previous post, veterans and returning service members sometimes feel a deep sense of shame around their experiences from war, especially those surrounding incidents of moral injury. One possible approach to helping alleviate this sense of shame is to foster open communication in a nonjudgmental environment between veterans and civilians, in order to allow civilians to get a better understanding of what members of our military go through and to allow veterans a chance at healing and self-reflection, understanding that their actions have not come to define them as people and that the public has made a space for them and is sharing in their sense of grief and regret.

Unlike my flight situation, one thing we do have control over is how we, as a public, respond to our returning veterans and service members. We are left with two central choices:  we can either allow veterans to continue to sit with these painful experiences and choose the privilege of not sharing in or ignoring their sense of shame, or we can open ourselves to be privileged to hear their experiences by making a space at the table for them to share and for us to share in that pain. This, of course, is not an easy thing to do. It’s easy to talk about sharing in our soldiers’ anguish, yet to do so takes far more emotional and mental effort. This is by no means the miracle cure to moral injury either; it is but one proposed option for being more inclusive and welcoming to our returning ex-combatants.

I will continue to explore this approach to helping our veterans heal from their moral wounds and how Monterey County can best support them. More updates on my research soon to follow. Please respond to this post with an answer to the following question:

Was there a time where you didn’t feel in control of your present situation? What was your experience? What did that feel like? What pearl of wisdom would you offer your past self around not being in control?

Until my next post, be well. 🙂