A Secular Saint
March 22, 2025 | By Raleigh Adams YDS ‘26
image description: a parishioner looks upon a religious icon
Captain Kimberly Hampton was a native of Easley, South Carolina. She was the Commanding Officer of the Easley High School NJROTC, captain of the tennis team, former attendee of West Point and Presbyterian College, and beloved by any and all who met her.
The town of Easley is built around her memory. The local library is named and maintained in her honor. Her family scholarship put me through the first year of college. The tennis coach who shaped my teenage years did the same for Captain Hampton decades before me.
In ways I cannot fully describe, I have lived in Captain Hampton’s legacy my whole life. She has been my ideal of accomplishment–of what a worthy life looks like.
Thoughts of Captain Hampton always pick up around Lent, as memory, flesh, and sacrifice blend.
Captain Hampton died January 2, 2004. She was the first female military pilot in United States history to be shot down and killed as a result of hostile fire. She was also the first woman from South Carolina to die in the Iraq War.
She is my secular saint. I have grieved for a woman I never knew but feel irrevocably connected to. I have stared into the horizon and steeled myself, knowing that in some way, I want to continue her legacy of love to the point of self-sacrifice.
I have often wondered if, at the sudden end of her life, she got to smell the magnolias of our home. If she felt the Carolina sun on her cheeks, kissing her goodbye a final time. I have wondered if the same last breath of home will await me one day.
The sweetness of magnolias mingles with the coppery scent of blood, however. All sacrifice mirrors Christ’s passion.
In suffering through His Passion, did Christ lift the cross upon his shoulder and feel the wood beneath his palms and think of Joseph, of a childhood spent in carpentry alongside his earthly father? Did he smell the wood through the blood, sweat, and clamoring crowd and immediately know its type by heart? Did Mary’s sobs of grief mix in Christ’s memory with the sound of her laughter? Did the desert sun hit him in the familiar way it always had while traveling with his apostles - his friends? In the very end, do home and the familiar come back to us?
Captain Hampton did not know what her final moments would be, but she knew the risks of her service. Taking up the cross of active combat came with the risk of death and joining her sacrifice to that of Christ’s passion and resurrection upon the Cross. We do not know our time or place to join Christ's suffering, or our final end, but our souls yearn for this kind of sacrifice, “Athirst is my soul for the living G-d. When shall I go and behold the face of G-d?”[1] We are guided by Christ, and the saints who died before us, into G-d’s illuminating light and our ultimate home, “Send forth thy light and thy truth: they have conducted me, and brought me unto thy holy hill, and into thy tabernacles.”[2] The paths are different, the burdens varied, but the destination is the same: the Lord’s glory and embrace. In Captain Hampton’s willingness to lay down her life, she became a paragon of the good life—not in comfort or acclaim, but in faithful witness, in choosing the narrow road marked by love, suffering, and eternal hope.
Captain Hampton’s life, though marked by the particularities of military service and earthly struggle, points beyond itself. Her sacrifice does not stand alone—it is drawn into the wider tapestry of Christian witness, woven together with the saints and all those who have borne their crosses with love. In her, I glimpse the shape of Christ’s call: to lay down one's life, not always in death, but in daily acts of courage, fidelity, and surrender. Her story is not simply a local memory; it is a signpost, a sacrament of grace hidden in the ordinary and the tragic, leading us toward the eternal.
I look to Captain Hampton as a model of sacrifice, but even her act is but the light of the moon to the sun of Christ’s gift—reflecting back but a fraction of the light. Yet, to look at the sun directly would be blinding; it is a blessing to have the moon’s light to be guided by. Much is the same for those to live a Christ-like life before us. Of course, the goal is to imitate Christ, yet having examples of how such can be done by fallen people is a gift of community and Christian fellowship from G-d. Even when it seems impossible to follow the sun that is so far away, the moon’s light reminds us it is always there. The moon, Christians who embody G-d’s light, act much the same in leading the individual on earth to the divine.
We are each called to be such moons for each other: reflecting Christ’s light, traveling home. Our souls yearn for such, to behold the face of G-d, and though we know not the hour of our journey, to be conducted to Calvary and then down the path to His holy hill and tabernacles. We are mirrors of such grace, following Christ, and reflecting the Gospel to others through our lives.
As Lent progresses, I think of how Captain Hampton’s sacrifice orients me to Christ, and how I can follow in her steps in offering my sacrifice and struggle unto the Lord. I am reminded of home, but assured that the best is yet to come, that even when it seems hard, people have traveled this life before me in beautiful and Christ-like ways.
As He took his last breath, Christ felt the familiar warmth of the sun and knew that His suffering was not in vain, as He was going into “the altar of G-d: to G-d who giveth joy to my youth.”[3] Perhaps, like Captain Hampton, He longed for home, not only the one He left behind, but the one He was creating for all of us. This is not something to mourn, however, but as the Psalms command to “give praise upon the harp.”
We are not to be sad, but instead rejoicing at a return to our Heavenly Home.
So as the Lenten sun lengthens and Holy Week draws near, I return to Captain Hampton’s memory—not to mourn, but to remember rightly. Her story calls me not to despair in suffering, but to trace in it the path homeward. The cross casts its shadow not to darken our path, but to direct it—to stretch toward resurrection. And in the quiet glimmer of those who walked it before me, I see the moonlight of grace, gentle and constant, guiding me through the night toward the joy of the morning: the altar of G-d, the home of the soul, and the face we were made to behold.
Psalm 43:3
Ibid.
Psalm 43:4