Chaplain (Maj.) George Wallace doesn't always reach Soldiers through traditional sermons, prayers or group discussions.
Sometimes, a simple little nudge will do.
A chaplain at Madigan Army Medical Center, Wallace shared how sometimes these one-on-one discussions are the most impactful. He spoke of how he reached out to a Soldier he discovered had left for war a very religious man, but later felt despair that he had abandoned his morals downrange.
"I simply nudged him and I said, 'Is there room in your theology for grace, for forgiveness?' And that's all I said," said Wallace, who is the senior chaplain clinician and the deputy chief for the Department of Ministry and Pastoral Care here. About a week or so later the Soldier told Wallace that he had taken that question to heart, and that he started to make room for forgiveness from God and from himself.
Wallace understands the darker emotions that the Soldiers he speaks to might experience -- those of despair, of losing trust in oneself and of questioning faith. He had been there himself.
"I bring the experience of post-traumatic stress, which I had suffered with … for almost 15 years," he said.
Although now he is a man who is quick to laugh, and even quicker to smile, Wallace lived with PTS for years. The symptoms would show up, and then go away, and then he would recover.
But after his second tour in Iraq, they didn't go away again.
"It took two trips to the emergency room for me to acknowledge that this was something that I was not going to be able to solve … so I had to get help," he said. So he went to a therapist for grief work, for anxiety, and for antidepressants. When Wallace served with the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division?during the surge in Iraq, 12 of his Soldiers didn't come home.
"I carried a lot of grief from that tour, a lot of things that I didn't want to believe about the world. When you see them in movies and stuff, it just isn't real but when you're face to face with it, it has a way of really shaking you to the core and making you re-envision your world view," he said.
During his deployment, though, while Wallace battled questioning his faith, he experienced what he called a genuine religious experience "that took me from a religion that was of the head to a religion that's of the heart, and it transformed me into a person who could care for people with my heart and not just my head. They need human compassion and care, and I couldn't do that with my head."
"It was a profound gift in many ways, even though it was terrifying, it was awful, and I was desperate for it to be over," Wallace said.
After he came home, that grief work did more than just abate his sorrow.
"I found that … opening my heart to grieving is paradoxically related to opening my heart to love and joy," he said.
He calls that experience of grief and PTS, of religious despair and resurgence of faith, of fear of addressing his grief and finding the courage to delve in, a gift that he brings to the Soldiers at Madigan's inpatient psychiatric unit and the Pinnacle Intensive Outpatient Program, a behavioral health program where Wallace works with Soldiers to explore their spiritual sides.
"I know what it's like to have panic attacks; I know what it's like to not be able to sleep. I can empathize, I can understand, and I can be a source of nonjudgmental presence in welcome. I can also witness to recovery from that, and that there's life after this crisis," Wallace said.
He brings that message and a humble spirit to Soldiers who are the most fragile and vulnerable. He says that the ones he meets at the inpatient psychiatric unit are almost always in crisis, with suicide being "on the table" about 90 percent of the time. Wallace tells them that he's not there to judge them. He hopes instead to "intrigue them with the possibility of finding a spiritual practice" while simply embodying kindness and compassion and understanding.
He sprinkles poetry into his talks with Soldiers, at services, and during one-on-one discussions, for it helped bring him back to his own faith.
Wallace talks about how during Stalin's Russia, poets were considered dangerous because they reminded people of their value, and so he brings poetry with him to his weekly sessions with the IOP patients, whether they work with a piece of poetry, a song lyric or a film clip. He uses those as gateways into discussions that have to deal with areas such as self-blame, self-identity, and self-worth.
He sees spirituality and mental health as being connected, since he sees "spirituality as the electricity that runs through everything."
"Whether it's something you find in a church on a Sunday morning, or it's something you find by walking in the woods, connection with something that's transcendent, that we sometimes call God -- not everybody does -- it's the sense that we are more than these bodies," Wallace said.
He beams as he talks about spirituality at its essence, dipping back into his poetry to describe it almost lyrically.
"That's what spirituality is," he says, "it's this wild hope that's inside of us."
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