Bombs Over Baghdad

After the wedding, Mimi and I went on a brief honeymoon—enjoying California’s diverse landscape by staying at bed-and-breakfasts on the coast and in the mountains. Upon returning to Golden Gate, I went back to work at the environmental company and prepared for another semester of seminary, while Mimi began working full-time for a greeting card company across the Bay in Richmond.

One January afternoon, a co-worker poked his head into my office and made a chilling announcement: “We’re bombing Baghdad.” This news raced through the building, as everyone tried to absorb the fact that our country was at war. In the coming weeks, traffic around the Bay area was snarled by sporadic gatherings of protestors with “No blood for oil” signs and conversations around the company break room were dominated by the latest word from Iraq. Among my work colleagues, the general attitude toward American justifications for the conflict was questioning, if not outright hostile.

It would not be entirely accurate to say that I witnessed a different reaction to the war among my Christian friends, since there really wasn’t much of a reaction to witness. Around church and the seminary, the war was discussed to a point, but it did not seem to be a central concern. As far as I could tell, everyone more or less accepted that our government was basically trustworthy, and its attack on Baghdad was viewed as a regrettable necessity. At the end of the day, no temporary crisis was going to detract us from the ongoing business of spreading the Gospel to a world that would always be racked by violence in one place or another.

In my journal from those days, the cultural divide I shuttled across daily was plain to see from one entry to the next. On one page, I recorded brief musings on local responses to the Iraq war—which included a protest designed to shut down the Bay Bridge—while the very next page contains notes from one of Pastor John’s sermons that addressed an entirely different war. Drawing on the Old Testament story of David and Goliath while speaking to the church’s leadership team, John compared us to a plucky, outmanned, young David who was battling not Goliath, but the twin giants of spiritual apathy and New Age deception in Marin.

Looking back, I’m not sure how well a military analogy works in reference to an apathetic foe, and, too, we Christians had New Agers outnumbered exponentially if you counted the whole world and not just Marin. So, really, it made more sense to cast us as Goliath when you stopped to think about it. But the bottom line is that this supposed spiritual war got top billing, even as a real, physical war was raging in Iraq. I would like to believe that this disconnect between the Christian circle I inhabited and the world outside it led to a growing dissatisfaction with my own insular thinking. But for the moment, these were still seeds that had yet to sprout.