new feature: fouralarm’s NPR CMOTW

I take the news very personally. Some people find this strange, but I think it is a relatively common trait of nerdy people like myself whose childhood best friends were in books and who throw themselves into history and other sorts of stories.

So, I bring you my National Public Radio Crying Moment of the Week (CMOTW).

Yesterday evening, I was listening to Fresh Air as I was making dinner. Dave Davies (uh, what kind of cruel parent names their kid David Davies?) was interviewing Father John Barkemeyer, a Catholic priest from the south side of Chicago who became an Army Chaplain in 2003 and is currently on a 15-month tour of duty in Anbar province, Iraq. The interview goes deep and pulls a lot of chewy stuff out of Father John’s experience serving the soldiers in the most dangerous parts of Iraq. Quite meaningful to me was FJ’s openness about the fact that he had given a homily to his church just before the war began insisting that the evidence for going to war was flimsy. But he chose to follow the young people from his parish who were volunteering for service to Iraq because he felt that being there for the soldiers is not supporting the war. His solution wasn’t just to pray for rain the soldiers; it was to stand beside them, to pastor to them, despite the risk.

A couple of images stick in my brain today. One, of FJ describing the makeshift altars he throws together to give Mass to the soldiers. Most often, he reports, he ended up giving the Mass over a litter, a stretcher that had probably carried soldiers who were wounded, dying, maybe even dead. The poignant symbolism of this wasn’t lost on my non-Christian heart. While I agree that this war is a terrible thing, the young people who volunteer are not fighting for oil, they’re fighting for the most idealistic concept of what America stands for, and they’re fighting for their futures and their families. They are kids who have found something that, for them, is worth dying for whether they went into it with the invincibility of youth or not.

The second image that stands out for me is not FJ’s description of the Chaplain’s “privilege” of holding the only position in the military that is sworn to complete confidentiality, no matter what. It wasn’t even the emotion in his voice when he talked about administering the Last Rites to 19-year-olds who would never see their families again. It was the quiet devotion I sensed when he described the way in which he both respected the faith of the dying Iraqis he comes into contact with, not administering Last Rites, but holding their hands and speaking comforting words to them, through a translator, to calm their fear and ease their pain as their lives slipped away.

So, there it is, the inaugural installment of my CMOTW: a true man of god.