The following is an article I found in the Joint Task Force newsletter called The Wire:I assemble the chalice like I used to assemble my M-16 when I was enlisted. Piece by piece clicks into place and I extract an altar’s worth of furnishings from a couple of green weatherproof cases. My vestments are lightweight, small enough to be folded into a tight package. I’ve got my censer, and I’ve tucked incense and charcoal away in medicine bottles and metal cases. My gospel book is smaller than my appointment book. You could say that I haul all the altars of ancient Christendom on my back.
That’s what it’s like being an Orthodox Christian chaplain. You carry your religion with you, all 2,000 years of it. In a religion where an element of tradition that’s only 800 or 900 years old is still considered “new,” the events that played out in history books are as vital to you as things that happened to you yesterday. There are a lot of labels that we attach to our names – Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc. – but they all boil down to the same traditional approach to Christianity.
Coming to GTMO, even on a short-term basis, has been a wonderful experience so far. One of the challenges for any smaller religious community is that you may only get your services a few times a year. That’s why priests like me, who are currently assigned to other installations, make a point of visiting the more isolated American service members, flung out into the world at bases and posts that cling to the edges of countries everywhere on the globe. It may be someone else’s country, but we carry our nation in our heart. For small religious communities, worship is a part of your identity that links you to God, your family and your past. It is my honor and privilege to be able to feed that hunger for God through the ministry and the military allows me to do this for the sake of religious freedom.
I get surprised, too. Somebody I’d never met before hugged me yesterday. That’s what ministry boils down to – that bit of human contact that reminds us that we love each other. We’re often tired and miss family and can begin to view the day as a list of things to “get over” or “get through” but a community of strength and love surrounds us that we often forget about. I bring that care and concern in a chalice, in sermons or in counseling sessions. Other people bring it in a hug. How do you bring it?
As an Orthodox priest, I’ve served communities of countless ethnicities. The thing that binds us all is our common faith, a thing that cuts through time and circumstance to unite us. Through it all, our common dedication to justice, freedom and, most of all, love for one another, unite us as a nation.
The author of the article, Fr Matthew Streett, is the former assistant priest at Annunciation Cathedral in Baltimore. He is now an Air Force chaplain and will be visiting our base here in Baghdad and serving the Divine Liturgy on the feast of Theophany (new calendar) on Wednesday.
