Turning Around

The following profile is based on a Sojourners interview with John and Ann Sieckhaus, and on a homily given by John Sieckhaus in March 1984 at Trinity Episcopal Church in Trumbull, Connecticut. The Sieckhauses would like to acknowledge the assistance of members of their community in articulating their story.—The Editors

"It's amazing when you can see God's hand so clearly in your life. And that's what happened," John Sieckhaus commented as he reflected on the past 15 years of his life. During those years he and his family experienced both turmoil and peace, fear and bold certainty, brokenness and healing. Along the way the Sieckhaus family learned to take "one step at a time, the step that God gives for today." With that attitude they were able to take risks of faith when the future seemed uncertain and insecure.

John Sieckhaus was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, in a Catholic family. When John was 16, his parents were suddenly killed. The family was split up: John's brother joined the Army, his sister went to live with one aunt and uncle, and he lived with another. The trauma and instability he experienced then led to psychological and spiritual problems that were to emerge much later in his life, but more immediately gave him a desire for security.

"I saw education and a good job as one way to get that security," he says. "I thought if I got a Ph.D. in sciences, I'd have it made and wouldn't have to worry about financial security." He enrolled in St. Louis University and received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1967.

While he was a college student, he met Ann Selle. They married, and though John's faith "wasn't a major part" of his life at the time, Ann became a Roman Catholic when she married him. With his degree John found a job with a major chemical manufacturing company in Connecticut.

For several years John progressed well in his job. He and Ann began a family and settled in a comfortable suburban home. In December 1970 John was offered a double promotion to a technical director's job, "which had a lot of expectations with it, most of which were undefined." From all outward signs, it should have been a time of happiness for the Sieckhaus family.

But John's life "was in a process of disintegration." He felt a sense of aimlessness. With the advantage of hindsight, John traces many of his problems to the trauma of his youth and the image he had formed of God. "During my youth I had begun to picture God as being vengeful and capricious, one who puts us here to deal with life's vicissitudes on our own, one who really doesn't care. This frightful face of God became even more believable with the death of my parents. I increasingly saw life as an impossible situation, and in response, simply chose to withdraw."

The pressure the promotion brought intensified his troubles. "My life really began to fall apart. I began to experience depression and anxiety." During the next two years, he went through a psychological breakdown and was hospitalized three separate times for depression.

At about the time the breakdown began, the Sieckhaus family had stopped attending their church. John begins to explain it as "falling away," but Ann chimes in with an elaboration. "It was more than falling away," she says. "We had made some choices about it. In the process of his breakdown, there was just no help there. I was running into walls instead of support. However, I have to honestly say that during that time I had a belief that God had an answer. I didn't see a specific help, but there was a faith. That was the place where I held on and just really began looking."

One Friday evening in February 1972, some close friends took them to an inner-city church, where a small interdenominational group of people was meeting for prayer and mutual support. John remembers, "There was something in their lives—a spark, the way they shared about their faith, the reality of Jesus Christ in their lives—that touched both of us. It was the beginning of a turning around.

"Jesus was … someone whom they could have a personal relationship with, one whose love could heal their afflictions … I wanted to know this God and be restored to health." The Sieckhauses began to meet regularly with the group.

Some members of the prayer group formed the nucleus of an intentional Christian community that became a "spiritual family" for the Sieckhauses. In this supportive context, the entire Sieckhaus family gained a new emotional and spiritual wholeness. Ann recalls, "There was healing in our marriage; there was healing in our relationships with our children. There was an enormous amount or fear in all of us during the breakdown. I really felt that at the point where we reached the end and couldn't go any further, God really intervened. It was like the door was opened."

"It was the love," explains John. "It's scriptural—it's love that casts out fear. I think that that more than anything else was our experience with this community. It was really experiencing God's love in an incarnational way."

For John healing meant giving up his view of God as "vengeful," "capricious," and uncaring. "The way back involved my choosing to see God as a loving Father and appropriating the good news of my salvation, appropriating my baptism, in all facets of my life."

During John's illness the chemical company "was very supportive," Ann notes. When he was able to resume work again, he continued at the company, although he was no longer in a managerial position.

Almost as soon as he returned, John was assigned to a year-long project involving the chemical systems of the B-l bomber. The assignment enabled him, as a scientist, "to re-establish a certain confidence in who I was, in my abilities. I did probably the best technical job I have ever done in my professional career on that program.

"But when it was all said and done, I was left with a real emptiness because of what the work was. It didn't fulfill something inside me; it left a lot of questions about the real value of having done this technical job and solved this problem, which was a very important one for the military."

The project also entailed a great deal of stress. "The unique forces and pressures which hold sway in today's weapons production industry took a toll on my emotional and spiritual well-being," he reflects. "Despite the 'success' of the program, there was no sense of fulfillment, only relief when I was able to walk away from it. I was not alone in this respect, either, as friends and co-workers had shared similar experiences with me."

Surviving that pressure with the help of the community "was a strengthening thing," John recalls. It was a redeeming experience to be able to do well "in the very environment that had been a contributing factor in the depression in the first place."

Although it strengthened him, the pressure helped John to "see that [military contract work] was something I had to get out of, that it was cutting across the truth of what God was calling me to do." In 1974 he went to the company's management and obtained an assignment in a different section, where he became involved in microbiological research.

In 1977 he was instrumental in establishing a life sciences research section. Eventually he moved into a management position and developed a research group that, at its peak, included "15 or 16 professional scientists working on projects aimed at developing new forms of pest control and ways to produce chemicals through biotechnologies, such as genetic engineering."

John did not continue blithely down the road of company success, however. With the support of his community, he continued "prayerfully looking at issues of where God was leading me." Through his involvement with life sciences, John "began to get a picture of the implications of the advances of new technologies and sciences, and some of the real problems that have resulted from it, in terms of chemicals and the environment.

"By the time the nerve gas thing surfaced, there was something beginning to stir within me again about what it was that I was doing professionally with the talents that God had given me. In terms of being an active participant in research to develop 'new products and technologies,' was that the fulfilling thing?"

The "nerve gas thing" began with rumors and an article in the August 23,1982 issue of a trade journal, Chemical and Engineering News. The article discussed the Army's interest in developing binary nerve gas weapons. The company for which John Sieckhaus worked indicated its willingness to be part of a program to develop the weapons.

John knew immediately that he was going to have to take a stand on the issue. "It was very obvious that this was something the Lord had prepared me for," he says.

Ann remembers that "when we first found out about this nerve gas issue, we both knew that we were going to have to do something about it. It was a time for us to do more cost-counting. We began to share with the children," who were 17,15, and 11 years old. "Right from the beginning, we talked about the fact that their Dad would either have to leave or could be fired over this.

"Our oldest daughter very strongly said, 'Well, you should fight it,'" remarks Ann. "Then we said, 'Well, okay, now you're getting ready to go to college. If we seriously follow this, we're jeopardizing the job.'" Ann was not working at the time; John's job provided the entire family income.

After wrestling with the issue for a number of months, John thought the best action he could take was to express his concerns in a letter to the senior management in his company. As Ann put it, "We as a family decided that we had to take one step at a time, and the first step was to write this letter.

"I think all of us had the hope, right up to the reception of the contract, that God would really turn this around. This was one of the things that we believed very deeply—it's part of what we believe as a community—that God places us in given situations in the world to effect change."

John sent a letter to the chairman and chief executive officer of his company in January 1983. In the letter he stated:

I have been troubled since first reading that [the company] is considering the production of the binary nerve gas component QL for the U.S. Army ... I feel morally obliged to share my deep concern about our company's involvement with the production of this chemical warfare agent

Because of the particularly abhorrent nature of the weapons of this age, the victims are not just those upon whom such weapons are used, but include as well the people and companies engaged in their manufacture.

Within two weeks John received a reply in which the chairman stated, "We feel that we must support our nation in providing the military strength in all areas to aid in the disarmament talks and to provide a deterrent against aggressive action by others." The chairman ended the letter by expressing his "sincere wish ... that you, and your colleagues, will understand and support our position."

John says that when he received the letter, "I knew I'd have to write a rebuttal at some time, because he asked for my support, and as far as I knew, I couldn't do it."

Meanwhile the company began researching some of the components of nerve gas systems, a move that would better prepare it to bid on government contracts. A request to analyze one of the chemicals and its production reached John's department in the summer of 1983.

"I had to say no," John remembers. "I went up to my superior and said, 'This is something I can't do.' He respected my position, and they had somebody else do it." After this refusal he began to draft his second letter to the chairman. By September he had the letter ready.

But then a friend informed him that the company had not received the nerve gas contract and had no plans to bid for another one. John decided to wait and see what would happen before sending his letter.

In January 1984 John learned that the company had received a contract from the Army to develop a process for producing a binary nerve gas component. Almost immediately he sent his rebuttal letter, in which he wrote the following:

During World War I the use of chemical weapons resulted in the death and maiming of 1.5 million men. The world was so horrified ... that the civilized nations began in earnest to develop agreements banning chemical warfare ... In 1969, our country took a particularly significant step when it announced the suspension of their manufacture. Let us not play an active role in starting the frightful cycle all over again.

... How can we, American citizens at [this company], knowingly make ourselves culpable of the atrocities which will inevitably result from the use of this inhumane weapon system? How can we ... stand before God offering Him the agonized bodies of men, women, and children—His beloved creation—as the fruit of the talents and gifts He has given us?

Shortly after he sent the letter, John attended a speech his company's chairman gave at a local university. In his talk the chairman reiterated the stance of his earlier letter to John, saying, "The American people are responsible for defense policy ... How wars are to be fought should not be decided by business executives." Therefore, the chairman concluded that it is not fair to condemn companies that manufacture weapons systems.

Seeing that the company was not going to change its position, John resigned in February 1984. He stayed on for a month to ease the leadership transition and received encouragement from many of his colleagues. In fact, Ann says, "We received comments from people who are still working at [the company] to say that his stance has had a major impact on their lives."

John had no particular job in mind when he left the company, and he had no time to look for a job during the last month he was on the job. Ann was offered part-time work—as an assistant to the family pediatrician—fairly soon after John left the company. But John was not able to find a suitable job situation for six months. "He really reached the point of being willing to do just about anything," Ann explains. It was a hard period of adjustment for the family, but underneath it all, they had a sense that things would work out.

"There was a surprising peacefulness in the midst of it," John says. "I wouldn't want to come across as saying to others that when you do this, it's going to be a piece of cake. And yet there was something about it that was very grace-filled."

Eventually John was offered work consulting with a firm that deals with the treatment and recycling of chemical wastes. Teaching positions opened up at two local Connecticut universities. John designed a course on "Chemicals, Human Health, and the Environment." "The things I'm doing now are more meaningful to me than anything I've ever done professionally," he declares.

But the family has had to get by on about half its previous income. For years they had consciously been simplifying their lifestyle, but with one daughter in college and a son who is looking at colleges, they still face uncertainty. "We'll just have to see how God provides," Ann says.

The Sieckhaus family maintains its involvement in church—including a support group that formed soon after the nerve gas issue surfaced—and in their Christian community. John is grateful that their work arrangements have allowed those commitments to deepen. "The wealth of things, the variety of our community interactions, the things that are going on at church—there's such a richness that it's hard for me to take it all in at times," he says. "God is indeed faithful."

Liane Rozzell was an editorial assistant of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.