The World Groans

Dear Lord, as I began to write this, I couldn’t help but overhear the women at a table close to mine in this Alaskan café. “They raped her with beer bottles,” one said. I looked for a different table; none was open. “How scary is that,” she was saying as I resettled. “How scary for the baby.” And now, three minutes later, they’re talking and joking about smoked salmon.

Lord, what kind of insane world is this? It’s the question people have been asking you since they acquired the ability to think abstractly. It’s Gilgamesh’s question. It’s Job’s question. It’s Sophocles’ question. It’s the question the precocious nine-year-old poses. “If God is love, why did my cat get run over?”

These things come to mind as I think about the artful and moving book I have with me, Tears in the Darkness. It’s about the appalling “leadership” of General Douglas MacArthur in the early stages of World War II and, in terms of soldiers captured in battle, the greatest military loss in American history. It’s about what the defeated Americans and Filipinos faced as prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines. Particularly, it’s about the experience of Ben Steele, a Montana rancher who volunteered for the army air corps before the U.S. entered the war to avoid the hardships that might come with being drafted.

Over the few weeks I’ve carried the book with me from place to place, I’ve looked for signs of your presence in battle, in the death-ridden march to the prisons, in the prisons themselves, on the ships that transported the vanquished to camps in Japan, in people’s actions.

Ben Steele looked for you, too. He believed in you, though he didn’t consider himself “religious.” Back home in Montana he had listened to tent preachers. Now, on the Bataan Peninsula in the spring of 1942, having experienced surrender, but not without having helped to exact a hard toll on the invading Japanese, he looked for you on the Old National Road—a thoroughfare trodden for some 60 miles by the sick, maimed, and depressed on their way to humiliation, torture, hunger, and mass graves. The authors, professors at New York University, tell us that, so far as Steele could see, the “Holy Spirit … was nowhere in evidence” on the way from surrender to prison. His eyes and ears led him to that conclusion. “How many men begging for a drink had gone to their deaths with the words ‘Please, God!’ still on their lips?”

The soldiers were begging you for food even before their surrender. And then in prison and on work details they pursued cats, dogs, snakes, and rats. They ate insects and plants. Some converted to Catholicism not because they drew close to you but because the priests had connections to food-possessing civilians outside. The prisoners experienced hell, your absence—”suffocating heat and asphyxiating air… . They swallowed, swallowed again, but could get no relief.”As the authors write, perhaps consciously echoing the Psalms, “[I]t seemed that God had forgotten them. He had sent them into a wilderness, into the heart of darkness, and set them down … on a bed of stones.”

When Bill Steele received a package of letters and photos from his family, he focused more on the food he saw in the pictures than on the family members. POWs argued over who would get what from dying men who could still hear them. Exasperated by the antics of a crazy prisoner, fellow prisoners beat him to death.

What had these kids from Arizona and Maine and Montana done to deserve this? What had the Japanese guards, many of whom would die later in the war, done to earn so profound a brutalization of their own souls? According to the Normans, the Japanese commander at Bataan, Masaharu Homma, was tried and convicted in a postwar kangaroo court and wrongly executed. Whether that judgment is fair or not, we know for certain that injustice knits injustice. For how long?

But this book reminds me that philosophers have attempted to do what you never did, at least in the word you’ve given us. They’ve attempted to explain the breathtaking wickedness that surrounds. You give no explicit answer. Job, like the POWs, had to deal with it.

Yet I see you in the story told here—a chapter in a long and complicated tale inaugurated at the beginning and still barely known. You share our sufferings, we share yours. The world groans.

The soldiers, like you, prayed for the removal of what could not at the time be removed. Like you, they watched indifferent guards gambling for their possessions. One of them said, as you in effect said at Golgotha, “We’re all gonna die here. Nobody gives a damn what happens.” The soldiers said “[w]e’ve been sacrificed”—forgotten, abandoned, mistreated because misunderstood; in the eyes of the rigorous Japanese, full of the devil. A mad man, mistaking himself for you, shouted from the Bilibid prison, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Sometimes you speak through the least of us.

A priest, a sort of whisper in the chaos, made his rounds. One day, when Ben Steele seemed almost gone, Father Cummings “opened his Mass kit, took out a prayer book, a rosary, [and] a tin of holy oil.” He anointed Steele with oil and asked you to forgive the nearly dead man’s sins. Cummings always led the men in the prayer you gave your disciples on the Mount; he baptized and anointed: “He played medic as well as priest, crawling over and across men to get to the worst of the wretches.” He argued with men who said that the Japanese were worthless. He said, “no one is hopeless.” He planned to work for you in Japan after the war. He died in the bowels of a Japanese “hellship” en route to Japan.

But, as Father Cummings would tell us, there is resurrection—quiet, noticed by few, but no small thing, apparent in different ways. “Ben Steele’s life as an artist,” the writers say, “began in the dark interstices of his [hunger-induced] disease … . He drew in the morning, he drew in the afternoon, he drew under the yellow lights.” After a while, he was impressed with what he saw. Steele later remembered this moment as a “revelation.” This revelation was the source of what would become his career as an artist and art teacher. He drew what he remembered from the ranch in Montana. He drew comrades starving to death. He drew Japanese murderers. He taught others to draw. The book shows that there’s power in his drawing.

How strange, and yet unsurprising, that Steele’s gift to his many students should have been birthed in circumstances so cruel. Would Steel exchange his gift for those three years of imprisonment and torture? Would Steele say that the evil he experienced had worked together for some good? We’re not told. More silence.

Now I look for a sign-off before “amen.” But, really, all I see—what I continually saw as I read this powerful book—is an image, an eternal moment. I know that there is much to say about the hours when you and man hung together on that cross. But right now it seems that silent recognition is best. So I close the book and stop.

Preston Jones teaches history at John Brown University in Arkansas. He is the author, with Cody Beckman, of God’s Hiddenness in Combat: Toward Christian Reflection on Battle (2009).