I do not understand war. Even in the present time, for all my deeply felt moral and religious commitments touching on today’s conflicts, the reality of war itself seems to engulf my certainties. I am often at a loss for words and prayers.
In 2018, I attended a church service in a small provincial French town outside Chartres. We were remembering the day when World War II ended. The speaker was an old man from the area who recalled what the last days of the war were like for him as a young boy. The Americans, going after German troops, were bombing Chartres and its surroundings. They very nearly destroyed the famous cathedral, where Nazi snipers were supposedly holed up—warned off only at the last moment by a courageous American soldier on the ground, Welborn Griffith, who personally determined that the spire was empty. Griffith was killed shortly thereafter. Our speaker remembered running through his backyard, bombs falling, huddling in a gardener’s shed all night, night after night, shivering, wondering where his parents were.
