Disability studies have made me consider how acceptance of our bodies and wounds can lead to truer worship and flourishing life. I have sought to convey this idea in a Vimeo presentation called “Wounded Warriors and Holy Acceptance.” (Click on link above) The presentation is a simple pastoral address to American “wounded warriors.” I wish it could have been done at a setting like the C4 Ranch in the Santa Ysabel Mountains of Southern California, at a retreat for veterans and their families where nature and the focus of activities on rest, play and relationships would also lead toward healing. In the presentation I seek to avoid a triumphalist version of healing that focuses on the instantaneous, positive, and optimistic. Instead, drawing on disability studies anthropologist Zoe Wool’s work, I explain that “veteran therapeutics” [i] and the medical model which undergird much of the work of VA and Military Hospitals, reminds me of an ends-based Christian approach to healing which misses the opportunities inherent in acceptance of disability.
In Wool’s essay, “Veteran Therapeutics: The Promise of Military Medicine and the Possibilities of Disability in the Post‐9/11 United States,” she explains that “there is virtually no traffic between the worlds of disabled veterans and the worlds of the critical disability community in the United States.” [ii] This disconnection led me to consider how there are many insights of disability studies that remain, at best, at the periphery of wounded warriors’ minds when they consider healing. These insights need to be heard.
I center the presentation on insights from Wool, and a recent song from Rita Springer, called “Defender.” Please forgive my at times off-kilter falsetto (I’ve been in the books lately and not on the “strings”.) The song fits well with Wool’s message of acceptance of disability, and appreciation of the present, as a life-giving response full of possibility. The song’s theme underscores how God brings shalom as we stay still, without action, reaction, or fixes, awaiting God’s presence and help. The themes of the song draw potency from a fundamental insight of disability studies: that all persons, disabled and “able-bodied” are ultimately dependent. Such dependence leads to the interdependence and mutuality for which we were designed, and reminds us of the limitations of our bodies. We weren’t designed to constantly forward reach for elusive cures. The song speaks of being in spiritual “wilderness,” of losing one’s self, and of our desire to be “put back together.” It is an invitation to mourn, rest, and discover how God holds our identities and goes before us. Such thoughts may find welcome among post-9/11 veterans, of whom 43% have some form of disability[iii], and for whom many have known devastation from the signature weapon of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—improvised explosive devices. Many have lost battle buddies, witnessed dead enemies and civilians, experienced brokenness in their own bodies, and suffer traumatic brain injury, PTSD and moral injury.
Various thinkers have informed the heart of my talk. I sought to stay away from “ableist notions” of wellness of which the disabled writer Maria Palacios warns–of pretending to understand another’s truths, trying to “heal [them], fix [them] and promise [them] that [they] will walk.”[iv] Such ableism, though an unknown factor, can stress wounded warriors more than their injuries. I want to “get the word” out on the beauty inherent in disability of which Patricia Berne and her friends speak, “this is disability justice… a movement towards a world in which everybody and mind is known as beautiful.” [v] I was driven by John Swinton’s wisdom about the healing possibility of the heart, beyond cognition, but in body memory and timefullness, “the past is not truly past but continues to pass through [the] heart in a way that profoundly impacts [our] present experience.” [vi] Swinton urges us to “be in the moment with someone when they are out of time.” This is powerful for those who re-experience the trauma of war daily through visible and invisible wounds. It also means that something like a worship song may move the heart where logic and talk fail.
Please see below the endnotes for an audio transcript of the recording. Thanks for taking time to give this a look friends. Blessings! KC
Bibliography
Bell, N.S., R. Hunt, P., Harford, T.C. and Kay, A. 2011. “Deployment to a combat zone and other risk factors for mental health‐related disability discharge from the U.S. Army: 1994–2007.” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 24: 34-43.
Berne, Patricia. “Ten Principles of Disability Justice 1.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2018): 227-230. Grezzinger, Steffany, Springer, Rita and John-Paul Gentile. 2017. Defender. Dallas, TX: Gateway Publishing.
Hansen, Christopher, O’ Connor, Kathleen and Nancy Ramsay. “Fostering Expressions of Lament and Bearing Witness with those experiencing Military Moral Injury.” Webinar, Soul Repair Center, Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX. April 19th, 2021.
Herman, Judith Lewis. 2015. Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Kinder, John M. 2015. Paying with their bodies: American war and the problem of the disabled veteran. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Madaus, Joseph W.; Miller, Wayne K., II; Vance, Mary Lee. “Veterans with Disabilities in Postsecondary Education.” Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, v22 n1 p10-17 2009.
Palacios, Maria. “Naming Ableism.” Crip Story. April, 1st, 2017. https://cripstory.wordpress.com/2017/04/01/naming-ableism/
Savitsky, Laura, Illingworth, Maria and DuLaney, Megan. “Civilian Social Work: Serving the Military and Veteran Populations.” Social Work, Volume 54, Issue 4, October 2009, 327–339. Shudofsky, L., Ballan, M.S. Project for Return and Opportunity in Veterans Education (PROVE): An Innovative Clinical Social Work Field Education Model. Clin Soc Work J 46, 121–129. 2018.
Swinton, John, and Bethany McKinney Fox. 2019. Disability and the way of Jesus: holistic healing in the Gospels and the Church. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
Swinton, John. 2016. Becoming friends of time: disability, timefullness, and gentle discipleship. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press.
Vespa, Jonathan E. 2020. “Those Who Served: America’s Veterans From World War II to the War on Terror.” June 2nd, 2020. Report Number: ACS-43. U.S. Census Bureau.https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/acs-43.pdf
Wool, Z.H. 2020, “Veteran Therapeutics: The Promise of Military Medicine and the Possibilities of Disability in the Post‐9/11 United States.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34: 305-323.
[i][i] Wool, Z.H. 2020, “Veteran Therapeutics: The Promise of Military Medicine and the Possibilities of
Disability in the Post‐9/11 United States.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 34: 305-323. Wool is an anthropologist and ethnographer. Her thought, about veteran therapeutics and the medical model, echoes Swinton’s argument that “Science is never neutral; it always contains and produces a social theory.” C.F: Swinton, John. 2016. Becoming friends of time: disability, timefullness, and gentle discipleship. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press. 47.
[ii] Wool, Z.H. “Veteran Therapeutics.” 13-15.
[iii] Vespa, Jonathan E. 2020. “Those Who Served: America’s Veterans From World War II to the War on Terror.” June 2nd, 2020. Report Number: ACS-43. U.S. Census Bureau. Of this number of Veterans 40% had a disability rating of 70% or more. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2020/demo/acs-43.pdf
[iv] Palacios, Maria. “Naming Ableism.” Crip Story. April, 1st, 2017. https://cripstory.wordpress.com/2017/04/01/naming-ableism/
[v] Berne, Patricia. “Ten Principles of Disability Justice 1.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46, no. 1 (Spring, 2018). 4.
[vi] Swinton, John. “Becoming Friends of Time.” 53. “Time [is] a divine gift that is meant for the glory of God and the edification of all God’s creatures…in a world wherein grace is found in weakness—life in all of its fullness is discovered in the broken body of Jesus, and time is found to have a beginning and an end with a journey in between that is both meaningful and determinative of what occurs when time ends.”
Hi, this is Kristian Carlson, I want to thank you warriors for [this opportunity] to speak about the experience of being a wounded warrior and having physical and invisible wounds and seeking to carry those wounds to God.
As I share just a few thoughts with you about that, I want to recognize that I’m not an expert, that I have not walked where each of you have walked, but I do believe that together we have things to learn. (And) having come today with a certain appetite and thirst, perhaps for healing, perhaps for a cure, perhaps for something more that will reflect vitality, flourishing or shalom. I believe that in the mutual desire that the One that is sometimes hard for us to call on—and some of us represented here have faith, or are grasping for that faith or understanding, but in that calling upon God, something I believe can happen. Something special. With that, I’d like to share this song, and use the song as a launching point to discuss this experience of being a wounded warrior.
This is called Defender, written in 2017 by Rita Springer, Steffany Grezzinger and John-Paul Gentile:
(Kristian begins by singing “Defender” and playing the accompaniment on guitar)
“You go before I know
That You’ve even gone to win my war
You come back with the head of my enemy
You come back and You call it my victory (Ohh ooh oh)
Oh, You go before I know
That You’ve even gone to win my war
Your love becomes my greatest defense
It leads me from the dry wilderness
And All I did was praise
All I did was worship
All I did was bow down
All I did was stay still
Hallelujah, you have saved me
So much better Your way
Hallelujah, great Defender
So much better Your way
You know before I do
Where my heart can seek to find your truth
Your mercy is the shade I’m living in
You restore my faith and hope again
And all I did was praise
All I did was worship
All I did was bow down
All I did was stay still
Hallelujah, you have saved me
So much better this way
Hallelujah, great Defender
So much better this way
Hallelujah, you have saved me
So much better your way
Hallelujah, great Defender
So much better your way
When I thought I lost me
You knew where I left me
You reintroduced me to your love
You picked up all my pieces
Put me back together
You are the defender of my heart
When I thought I lost me
You knew where I left me
You reintroduced me to your love
And You picked up all my pieces
Put me back together
You are the defender of my heart
Hallelujah, you have saved me
So much better this way
Hallelujah, great Defender
So much better your way
All I did was praise
All I did was worship
Lord I will just bow down
I’m just gonna stay still
Well, thank you for listening to that song friends. What I want to do is to key into some aspects of this song and this experience of being a wounded warrior (which) can really inform our experience and yet it is hard to pin down. As some have said ‘when you’ve met one wounded warrior, you’ve met one wounded warrior.’
What I want to do today is push back against something that I feel is too common, a sort of triumphalism (which) happens often within our Christian Faith: that because Christ has won the victory over Golgotha–over Calvary, and over death and sin, and (has) been resurrected, and it’s Sunday and it’s Easter in our minds and metaphorically, everything is gonna be okay.
(So) sometimes when we come to Church, or we talk about the hardest problems with a counselor or a friend, or we sing a song. We want to be okay, and we want to believe we’re gonna be okay to the point that we want to “faith it”, we want to faith it to the point that everything is cool and its good, and then after that summit of a weekend or a service or an outflow of our hearts, we come back to our regular lives and we feel the ache and the gnaw, the wounds again. Either the visible ones that people can see, or the invisible ones.
I think that (this) triumphalism can miss the Saturday of Holy Saturday where Jesus was in the tomb, and it can also miss what one student (describes). (She is) an academic, someone you might think of as an “ivory-tower” type, (but not really, she is a hard worker). Her name is Zoe Wool. I want to refer to her thought because, Zoe has studied disability, and she’s also studied the wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for those of us who are post-9/11 veterans, and what she has found is a concern for what she calls “Veteran Therapeutics”
It flows from the medical model of always seeking to cure, always seeking to heal, always seeking to innovate, always relying on technology to get things better. Where we will make promises to Warriors that have been wounded that, “Just around the corner there may be a better therapy, or there may be a better pill that will help with better pain management or depression and yet that (kind of) promising, and that reliance on the future, and on medicine and technology can overlook the very present we are in.
I guess I want to say that the thing that Zoe Wool is concerned about that [veteran therapeutics either at the VA, or other hospitals] or the way that we approach our fellow veterans is a concern I also have as a Christian minister, pastor and Chaplain.
(A concern) that we can be kind of triumphalistic about the future and about a cure and about “betterness” and healing, and we can miss this present in-between time, which some would consider like a Holy Acceptance,
(As) we look at the words to this song, I want to mention this bridge.
“When I thought I lost me, you knew where I left me”
There’s a sense of being lost in this song
“You reintroduced me to your love, you picked up all my pieces, put me back together, you are the defender of my heart”
Friends, it is a real thing that more than two million Veterans have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, and the numbers are likely even higher now, it’s a real thing that the median age of those who have served is 37. A lot of us are moving past what we might have thought of as our youthful bloom. It’s a real thing that signature injuries from Afghanistan and Iraq are often thought as coming from IEDs and leading to things like TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, and also variations of Post-Traumatic Stress. And here this song is saying,
“When I thought I’d lost me, you knew where I’d left me” It’s keying in on identity. And it also says “You picked up all of my pieces”
Shrapnel, the kinds of wounds that have happened when people are in armored vehicles and they have body armor, and (therefore) so many more have been saved from these conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq -in terms of alive-, but who bear different wounds that could be called impairments or disabilities.
This is something that Zoe Wool brought up, one well known veteran spent over 9 years going back and forth to surgeries to (gain improved) health. I believe he was a quadruple amputee, a person with quadruple amputations, and (she mentions) others that have been burn victims that she has talked with in Texas, and in Walter Reed, or amputees, one of them mentioned the constant surgeries, the pain from the prosthetics that would go over the stump,
One of the insightful things that Zoe mentioned (explains the challenge of amputation and recovery for post 9/11 Veterans),
it used to be that they (Doctors) would amputate high, but after technology and improvement they started to amputate lower and lower and try to save the limb, sometimes not (amputate) at all, where people could be life-flighted from Germany or even to the United States, only stabilized with pinchers or forceps holding parts together, because Doctors hoped that the more tissue that they would have, the better health outcomes they could have with reconstruction with the parts that they had saved, but some of that even extended the painfulness of the process of healing and (extended) the hope that those pieces could lead to health and wholeness.
What I want to get at here with the main point is (to ask) What if the healing and wholeness that we seek as wounded warriors may not be in the process of medical intervention or a miraculous healing from God of our body and mind, but might come from a sort of Holy Acceptance of the challenge, the pain, and the gift of right now in the present?
Wool referred to one woman whose husband had PTSD and (who) struggles with self-medicating and alcoholism, but from her perspective, kind of the waves, the cycle, the vacillation, has led her to instead of thinking of a cure for him, (to) a hope that he’ll keep getting better (incrementally), even when he has steps back, and (that) they will find the ability to enjoy each other in what they have. I think there’s about 47% of folks who get treated for PTSD that don’t experience healing,
Of course the clinicians (at) the VA might want to point to the hopeful statistic of 53% that do experience healing from cognitive behavorial therapy, CPT, exposure therapy, EMDR, different aspects that treat PTSD and the fear related (aspects of it)…but what (about) the other 50% that don’t have an appreciable, improved outcome? What can they say to themselves and to God?
When I think about this song saying
“When I thought I lost me,” when in that identity of striving for what I thought of as a cure, or for healing, when I thought (about) all that happened,
“you reintroduced me to myself.”
What if God in the very stillness of a moment, when we have no action, we have no conviction of what the healing looks like, but rather a certain acceptance, what if there is just a beauty in that?
I love the line that said, “all I did was praise, all I did was worship”,
the Hebrew word for worship is to bow down, “all I did was bow down” “All I did was stay still”
Now some of you might say, oh Chaps, this is pretty hard core. You are telling me that I feel depressed, or I feel so discouraged in my wounds, or in my disabled aspects of my body, that now I need to bow down and worship and surrender, (and) worship God? Well actually, let’s talk about that.
I heard a moral injury speaker, a well-known pastoral theologian, Nancy Ramsay, talk about how sometimes in the sense of moral injury,
which is when we see an act, or we perpetrate an act, or we see an immoral act perpetrated against someone else (or ourselves), we feel injured about the way things are supposed to be,
or maybe we feel like our connection with God is severed because we’ve changed, or how we’ve perceived God has changed.
Nancy calls that a certain kind of loss of innocence, she says that “innocence lost is not the same as innocence regained” after therapy or health. She says it is innocence mourned. There are a lot of folks talking about the aspect of lament.
Part of that worship or worship or bowing down, could be lament. I imagine some of you who have friends, or even may have amputations yourself, have a whole different form of bowing down now
if there aren’t aspects of your legs below your knees or arms on which to support yourself in the same way,
and that bowing down can be a message all its own of the condition of an impairment,
and yet it could be a lament, “Oh God, find me in this moment, find me in this pain”
Would you reintroduce me to myself?
Which leads me (right back) to Psalm 23 which says, “the Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want, he leads me beside quiet waters (or still waters) he restores my soul.” “Nephesh” which is another way of saying that my soul comes back to me, that center of myself–God brings (it) back to me.
I want to close with a few thoughts, I know that I’m sharing some broad things with you my friends. With the number of warriors that we see with various disabilities.
They say that some 43% that get out have some form of disability,
and issues of suicide, where the despair just hits the wall, and we don’t feel its worth it,
what if we can learn something from someone like Zoe Wool, and from God’s word, about a certain kind of acceptance, a different understanding even of healing, that’s kind of a process?
It might have lament, (and) as many have said, it’s like a Community thing,
Judith Herman a main thinker about trauma and loss. (Says) It starts with an alliance, it starts with trusted people, and then it leads to safety and stabilization, like “all I did was stay still” I couldn’t do anything else I felt so lost, and then we go into a time of mourning, says Herman, and then we get led from that mourning and remembrance –all the intrusive thoughts, the nightmares, the reactions, the desire to flee, whatever kind of things that are going on, we start to process that, and we bring it, and then we come to this whole trying to reintegrate into our life, what if this whole stages and back and forth of stabilization and mourning and reintegration– What if part of that process is just an acceptance that as a warrior, that has wounds, we have a disability that may not be going away, for many of us, it won’t be, but we have a God who is here, a God who is present, a God who says its okay to stay still.
I don’t know if that’s hopeful for you.
But for those of you who have felt lost, or that your faith wasn’t enough, or guilty that maybe you’ve had a lack of trust for God that you had before, what if we just said, you know, I’m just gonna sing Rita Springer’s song, not knowing the outcome, but knowing that somehow as Kristian has felt God reach down, or as my family has felt God reach down,
I (believe) I’m not so tainted, I’m not so stained, I’m not so, as some would say, “disfigured”, and God would say no, I see beauty, I see my hand, I see my suffering Son, I see this person and I walk with them.
Is that a triumphalism? I don’t think so, I think it’s a holy, reverent, worshipful acceptance, and embedded in it is an expectation. And it’s a pretty simple action, (though requiring) Supernatural help of the Spirit. I want to remind us of this chorus.
When I thought I lost me
You knew where I left me
You reintroduced me to your love
You picked up all my pieces
Put me back together
You are the defender of my heart
All I did was praise
All I did was worship
Lord I will just bow down
I’m just gonna stay still
Let me say a prayer.
“Lord I want to thank you for my friends that have joined me today. Ahh there’s nothing wrong with seeking your healing. In fact, so many times, Jesus, as we see in accounts in Scripture, you say, “what would you like for me to do for you?” And so, God, with differing responses, we might say, thank you for the wounds, thank you what you have done through them, I have seen such grace, or maybe we would say. “Take the wound away. Do a Supernatural work”, and we believe you all powerful God to have your way and to do mighty work. In this moment we lean upon you.
Be with my struggling sister, my struggling brother that might feel without hope, that might feel damaged, afraid, (as) angry as they could imagine,
oh God I pray that this little thing I’ve shared with them, that maybe we’ve overpromised a healing or a cure, maybe we’ve overlooked what the gift of this moment is right now,
in all of our wounds or suffering, that we (still) have life, that we have each other,
that You even give us our identity back, maybe it’s changed, maybe our personality feels changed but
You always knew where we were,
as the Shepherd you also, even in the presence of our Enemies, carry us, and you give us more than we could imagine,
so I pray rest, I pray for stillness beside the quiet waters, for my dear friends, in Christ’s name, Amen.”
*THIS POST IS A PERSONAL REFLECTION AND DOES NOT REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Kristian Carlson 
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