by Timothy Carroll
To participate in the formation of a community project is strange in all kinds of curious ways. It is stranger, still, to write about something that feels so new and wonder about the possibility of my words drowning out myriad other voices and accompanying experiences that have lent their presence to this project, as if mine could carry theirs. The privilege I have been afforded to bear witness to the narrative of a community earnest in understanding the truths of war is a reminder that it would be difficult to be too careful with a writing such as this; thus, I bring my doubts along with my words.
It seems to me that there exists the potential for our work to serve as a revealing of oneself. The monthly Just Listening program has been like this for me. Intimate in the way I have experienced sharing a personal writing; natural in the way I have experienced loving a partner; shaky in the way I have experienced my hands before an interview; and expecting in the way I have experienced the return of a friend; maybe, Just Listening is a microcosm of an universal story being told. Dr. Edward Tick (2005), a psychotherapist and veteran advocate who writes on the power of our stories in the context of war, puts it like this: “Like a hologram, one person’s story extends into others to reveal the larger story of what happened to us all and what meaning we might discover in it. A personal war story is always about everyone who participated in the war, as well as their family members, their friends, and their communities” (p. 218). At each gathering I have seen a glimpse of this universality as, sometimes in subtle omissions, sometimes in confession, sometimes in celebration, both community and warrior grow toward a reconciliation of a dissonance between the two.
George Washington once noted that the service and calling of a nation’s warriors “shall be directly proportional to how they perceive the Veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by their nation.” Perhaps we do not have this figured out. In a report from the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2012 it was found that “an estimated 22 veterans will have died from suicide each day in the calendar year 2010” (p. 15). Our community, like others throughout the country, is in need of spaces where truth and compassion can meet. “Just Listening” is a community gathering focused on healing through deep listening. Our veterans and their families need to tell their stories and the community benefits from listening. With no political agenda and no goals beyond fostering wholeness, this practice allows us to sit in the presence of suffering, our own and others’, and, together, the citizen and the warrior might move toward something like an alleviation of suffering from the wounds of war.
As this chapter of my time at UWG is coming to an end, I am reminded of the teachers here who have taught me to ask questions like, “What help have I to give?” and continuously refine my orientation that it might be founded on a correspondence between my head and my heart. From its first meeting in the summer of 2013, it has been and continues to be a gift to watch the Just Listening program fill an ordinary room with the extraordinary stories of a community.
Timothy Carroll is a psychology graduate student.
