Eight-thousand souls are deployed in a single carrier strike group. The multitude is spread across the aircraft carrier as well as its satellite submarines and destroyers. Every night afloat, the 1MC, the announcement system, sounds. These speakers — which would at other times call sailors to war or carry the captain’s instructions to his men when making ready to leave homeport for up to a year — at 2200 sound the voice of God. A prayer, theologically simple and universal but undoubtedly Christian, passes into the diesel enclosures, the reactor departments, and the ammunition storerooms.
While the prayers are rendered, it is expected that all hands halt in their transits and receive the benediction. Sinners, all — some saved, others agnostic, and a few militantly atheistic — still themselves. The only lights allowed in most parts of the ship at night are red in order to reduce the distance that the illumination travels; it is in this scarlet glow that a sailor can feel the smallness of his sleeping rack (which measures 6.5 feet by 2.25 feet by 2.5 feet) and easily imagine himself as either Ebenezer Scrooge in his grave or Jonah in the belly of a mechanical whale. These moments are a comforting, unsettling, and blessed interlude in a day that, in all other aspects, is a simulacrum of the one that preceded it. The ancient maritime tradition of the evening prayer connects those souls with the multitudes who did the same in those very racks.
This article is taken from The American Spectator’s latest print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.
Our mariners need ministering, but men of the cloth are difficult to come by. This must change, for almost nowhere is there a more profound need for the spiritually palliative effects of God’s love. Like the country it protects, the military is spiritually adrift. But while civilian pastors must compete with seemingly endless distractions for their flock, the chaplaincy has the opportunity to reach out to servicemen ...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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