After a quiet start to a warm weekend, we awoke to a huge headline on the landing page of The New York Times: “U.S. Enters War Against Iran.” Well, that places everything in perspective. Suddenly, the problem Jon was having with his iPhone didn’t seem as relevant. In the dozen or so years that we’ve been camping, the U.S. has been involved in a number of military actions. Despite President Trump’s campaign promise to end American “forever wars,” here we go again.

The U.S. bombing of three nuclear sites in Iran has not only thrust us into its war with Israel, it has also left some 40,000 U.S. troops stationed throughout the region vulnerable to retaliatory missile attacks. And so it goes.

The sad reality is that, by our own intelligence accounts, Iran posed no imminent danger to the U.S. and we had been making progress in our diplomatic talks prior to Israel’s surprise attack on June 13. Whether Iran was capable of becoming a nuclear power remains to be seen. We remember all too well Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which provided a pretext for the invasion of Iraq but were never found. While his regime had active programs to develop chemical and biological weapons, those programs were halted or significantly degraded after the Gulf War and subsequent UN inspections.

In an attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. dropped 14 “bunker buster” bombs on its nuclear site at Fordo and at Natanz. These 30,000-pound bombs, called MOPs (massive ordnance penetrators) can drill 200 feet into the ground. The Navy also fired 30 cruise missiles from submarines at Natanz and Isfahan. This morning, Pentagon leaders declared the operation a success, stating Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been destroyed or severely degraded.

Last night, in an address to the nation, President Trump declared the sites had been “obliterated.” This morning, in a press conference with Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Gen. Caine said that while assessing the final battle damage will take time, the initial assessment indicated that all three sites sustained “severe damage and destruction.” Afterward, a senior U.S. official acknowledge that the B-2 attack on the Fordo site did not destroy the heavily fortified facility but severely damaged it.

In response to a question about concerns that the attack on Iran could lead to prolonged conflict, Hegseth said “this is most certainly not open-ended,” adding that the president gave him “a focused, powerful and clear mission” in the strike on Iranian nuclear sites. We’re not confident this will end anytime soon.

Notably, we found Gen. Caine highly credible and appropriately restrained in his reporting on the mission. Hegseth’s remarks followed a familiar script — praising President Trump, disparaging the Biden administration, and offering a religious proclamation: “We give glory to God.”

Please. The insertion of God into the press conference stems from a belief that God is synonymous with victory, triumph and accomplishment, not defeat, loss or suffering.

Yet, in religion and myth, human suffering is a consistent theme in the spiritual story, one that always points into the depths. It is the downward trajectory — not an ascent to the mountaintop — that most represents the transformative spiritual experience. 

We’re not suggesting that Hegseth shouldn’t attribute a successful military mission to the Almighty, but the implication that winners enjoy divine favor while losers endure divine punishment is a spirituality that’s destined to collapse on itself. Such a spirituality reveals the human tendency to divide experience into binaries: good and bad, success and failure, divine presence and divine absence. This dichotomy is spiritually immature. It reflects a conditional theology, one that sees God only in what is pleasing and affirming. 

To grow spiritually is to resist the temptation of this binary thinking. It is to find God not only in the mountaintop moments but also in the valleys of despair. It is to recognize that suffering, while unwelcome, is not devoid of divine presence. In fact, it may be the very crucible through which deeper wisdom, compassion, and resilience are forged.

We suspect that certain segments of the Iranian population are giving glory to Allah that they survived America’s “Midnight Hammer” attack.

“War does not solve problems; on the contrary, it amplifies them and inflicts deep wounds on the history of peoples, which take generations to heal,” Pope Leo wrote in response to today’s events. “No armed victory can compensate for the pain of mothers, the fear of children, or stolen futures. May diplomacy silence the weapons! May nations chart their futures with works of peace, not with violence and bloodstained conflicts!”

Hegseth’s giving glory to God may offer comfort to some, but it risks obscuring a deeper spiritual truth: that God is not contained in victory or defeat, but is present in the entire human experience.