"To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors," says Judith Markelz, director of the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio.

"Whether we're actually preserving veterans' capacity to have a flourishing life after war, a good life for a human being after war, I don't know. I just don't know," says clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay.

Jewish singer and songwriter Debbie Friedman, who died in California on January 9, once said that "spiritually if you don't have the opportunity to exercise your heart and soul you don't really fully understand all that you are."

The vocation of healing is a central theme in the acclaimed novel "Cutting for Stone" by Abraham Verghese, who writes that doctors "must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound."

"Patients require that one-on-one encounter, the Samaritan function of being a physician," says writer and Stanford Medical School professor Abraham Verghese. "When the physician examines the patient, this is an incredibly important ritual."

What war veterans need, says Rev. Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock of the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, "is for people to let them tell their stories and listen, and most congregations don’t really have a clue how to do that."

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.

If you are a patient who is poor, says this doctor-nun, "sometimes in this society you're taught not to care about yourself…You're denigrated. You're just not an important person."

"I'm doing the best I can to live out my faith as I understand it," says Episcopal priest and Vanderbilt University chaplain Becca Stevens. "Love is the most powerful force for social change."

"Part of what's in a pilgrim's heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey," says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed's Warrior Transition Brigade.