The Rev. Benjamin Shambaugh will be back in the pulpit at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church this week after returning from a 10-day stint as chaplain aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Vigorous as it traveled from Panama to Virginia.
The experience, Mr. Shambaugh said in an interview this week, was as enlightening for him as it was for the young Coasties he counseled via a program that is meant to boost the mental and spiritual health of the service men and women returning home after long terms aboard ships at sea. The Coast Guard staffs each ship with a chaplain to help personnel reintegrate smoothly at home; a roster of 50 active-duty chaplains are assigned to ships long in advance, but sometimes substitutes are needed, and Mr. Shambaugh answered that call from Oct. 5 through 15 as one of 102 auxiliary chaplains tapped to help out from time to time.
Chaps, as the Coasties nicknamed him, returned with observations and lessons to impart to his congregation as well.
“I was never in the military myself, but watching young people take on that responsibility is very inspiring,” he said as he waited to catch a plane from Virginia back to New York on Tuesday. “I saw how much they care, how serious they are about it, and how much they care about each other. I wish we would do that more in our regular lives. The beauty of a congregation like St. Luke’s is we have a lot of people with different life experiences and really interesting life experiences. I wonder, how can we mentor each other in the way I saw people mentor each other there? There is so much potential.”
The crew aboard Vigorous had had a busy two months. During the past 60 days, its major mission was an encounter with a seafaring drug runner, from which it seized 1,300 kilograms of cocaine — that’s about $250 million in street value. Mr. Shambaugh found a crew that was ready to hear what he had to say during inspirational talks, daily prayer services, and lectures on topics like reintegration
into civilian life, resilience, spirituality, suicide prevention, and ethics.
When he left for the trip, Mr. Shambaugh took with him materials from his work at St. Luke’s and notes from a recent series of interfaith educational talks he did with Rabbi Josh Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons. “Two of the lessons that the rabbi and I taught I used for evening devotions on the ship. It was a really cool crossover. I had really good conversations with these Coasties — they weren’t necessarily even Jewish or Christian, but they joined in.”
“There is that much respect for people’s faith,” he said. “They see faith as spiritual readiness and as mission readiness. If you’re spiritually fit, it’s like being physically and mentally fit. You don’t see that kind of acceptance [of religion] in normal culture as much.”
Mostly, Mr. Shambaugh said, he was responsible for “deckplate” ministry, which meant talking with crew members as they went about their work each day. He also took the opportunity to train with the Coast Guard servicemen, and “spent enough time on the bridge to become qualified as a helmsman and lookout.”
“They are continually training,” he observed. “I did training because I was there and I was interested. Everybody around me, no matter what their rank was, was learning something new and being coached by someone else.
There’s a really positive attitude of success, helping people achieve and grow and learn. That was really very moving to me.”
By visiting Panama and traversing the canal, the reverend also satisfied a personal curiosity piqued more than 40 years ago when he read the book “The Path Between the Seas” by David McCullough. He visited the Panama Canal Museum, walked through a rain forest in a city park, and worshiped at the Metropolitan Cathedral in the Casco Viejo, the oldest part of the city.
Vigorous sailed through the Panama Canal, then made its way across the Caribbean. It navigated between Cuba and Haiti on the strait known as the Windward Passage; then passed the Bahamas on the Old Bahama Passage, and sailed up the coast of Florida, past Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and back to the Navy base in Norfolk.
Another lesson Mr. Shambaugh learned along the way was that faith is a ubiquitous concept — so much so, he
said, that when religious services are under way, ships are permitted to temporarily fly a church flag above the United States Stars and Stripes.
“It was a reminder that no matter where you are in the world, you’re part of a faith community,” he said. “Somebody is praying somewhere. What we are doing in East Hampton, people are doing in the Caribbean Sea and the rest of the world.”
At St. Luke’s, Mr. Shambaugh will share these experiences with the congregation. “I think it will come out in stories all over the place,” he said. “For me it was a real privilege to be able to serve. I always wanted to be in the military when I was young and I never did. I wanted to go to sea and I never did, but now I had an opportunity to do that as a volunteer. I’ve been ordained for 37 years and I was older than every single person on the boat — I’m like their dad’s or their grandpa’s age — so they talked to me and I could bring that life experience to help them, which was really the whole point.”
