We live in a Good Friday world, but we are an Easter People.
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This is our final installment of reflections on David W. Peters’ memoir, Death Letter: God, Sex, and War. Peters served as a battalion chaplain in Fort Hood, Texas from 2004-2007, which included a deployment to Iraq in 2006. After Iraq he also served as a chaplain clinician in the amputee, orthopedic, neuroscience, and psychological wards at Walter Reed Hospital.
Hope and healing came as he found a renewed relationship with the Church. It would not be the fundamentalist church of his youth, however, but the Episcopal Church, where he says, “I found acceptance and welcome in a community that recognized at once the profound harmony and disharmony of the world.” He became ordained and today serves as a priest in that tradition.
He also reports that hope and healing is progressing in his relationship with God. He finds solace for his own sufferings in the suffering Jesus. “On the night He was betrayed He took bread, and every time I take communion, I take a step toward healing.”
Hope and healing came to his relationship with his ex-wife. After having written his feelings about her in this book, he came to terms with their divorce and the fact that she was not the villain. They do their best to “keep the peace and do what is best for” their children. Peters also remarried and found “a new vision for the healing gift of love.”
In learning how to write about his experiences, David Peters found a measure of healing and hope. He credits the Veterans Writing Project and the Walter Reed Writers Workshop for helping him find help in the practice of writing.
Finally, this one who went to war and came home to write about it found hope and healing in the power of a story like his own. In the Appendix to Death Letters, the chaplain recounts the personal story of theologian Paul Tillich, whose experiences in and after World War I gave Peters an account which in many ways mirrored his own. The final line of Death Letters quotes Tillich:
The courage is to be rooted in the God who appears when God disappears in the anxiety of doubt.
Indeed.
The Internet Monk Archives 
As for Christ’s cry on the cross: ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ , perhaps this is best thought of as the cry of One Who is bearing the weight of mankind’s sin’s, past, present, and future.
He endured this so that we would not have to feel forsaken.
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Read it last week when Part 3 came out. It’s not one of those books you’re going to see featured at the checkout display at Mardel’s. It’s a powerful portrait of someone being tossed to and fro by the brokenness of the world and his own. His journey doesn’t include the usual “I read my Bible and prayed more and overcame my adversity” trope so common.
It is a tough read.
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Oh, I don’t disagree at all. I’m just saying that I love when really good quotes like this match up with Jesus’ experience. They become more trustworthy when they do. Or maybe Jesus’ humanity becomes more trustworthy.
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I don’t know how I missed Part 3 of this review, but I just now went back and read it along with the comments. I had been dithering on getting this book, tho it’s on my wish list. I think maybe I felt like I couldn’t stand to pile more burden and negativity on right now, that I’m just starting to regain some solid footing as it is. The image brought out in Part 3 of the freshwater Sea of Galilee sitting on top of the bottom layer of salt water certainly resonates with me, and I believe I need to read this book. Most likely with trepidation. Buckle up!
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But Rick, for some, even the God who appears in the life and words of Jesus, even the words from the cross, disappears in the anxiety of doubt, before the God who is the ground of courage appears, making all that went before more paradoxical, mysterious, and less fixed.
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-> “The courage is to be rooted in the God who appears when God disappears in the anxiety of doubt.”
Now that’s a keeper of a quote! And what I really like about it is how it’s supported by Jesus himself (on the cross, saying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
What I find interesting is that, if I’m reading between the lines correctly, Peters’ hope came while WRITING about the suffering. It doesn’t sound like he began the project from a point of hope, but that the hope came during the examination during the writing process.
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