I remember where I was on 9/11 – In 2001, I had the opportunity to take a one year sabbatical away from my work with prisoners and my clinical role as a forensic psychotherapist. My superiors expected me to come up with a plan of rest and self-development. But after many years of my own therapy, personal exploration, directed retreats, self-directed retreats and more. The one thing I was certain about was that I did not want to give more time to self -analysis, self-development or anything like it.
Eventually, it was agreed that for a year I would take on the role as Director for Mission Effectiveness at a large Franciscan Hospital serving not the poor but the wealthy and sometimes famous. It was totally out of my comfort zone. Put me on any prison wing in the country, put me in any segregation unit, in any probation office and sit me with the most dangerous of killers, arsonists, rapists, bank robbers or gangsters and I am totally at home, and we all get on just fine. The highly polished, sterile corridors, the perfectly decorated rooms and the state of art operating theatres, filled with wealthy and fee-paying people was something else! Despite illness, the degree of comfort and niceness in this setting was overwhelming, to the extent that it was suffocating and to the extent that it was chronic. I experienced it like drowning in a bath of the sweetest sickliest candy floss you could possibly imagine. But I was there and more, I had asked to be.
Then something happened.
9/11 happened.
Slowly but surely the horror of the twin towers, all those thousands of miles away, seeped into and broke through all that chronic comfort and niceness within that beautiful hospital. Via endless and constant television and radio news reports a different reality started to emerge. The first notice I had of this happening was when the Director of Nursing asked to see me urgently. She was not so interested in my mission effectiveness role but wanted me immediately to act in my clinical pastoral role as psychotherapist and work with her staff. Several were having panic attacks, some were being physically sick, many were crying, some inconsolable. “Whatever you do’, she said, “please stop them being so distressed”.
I responded and for the remainder of that day and the following, I debriefed, I consoled and helped create something of a perspective. Calmness, and unfortunately to my thinking, chronic niceness was also eventually restored.
I have never sought to remove distress be that my own or others. I have always worked to be with others in their distress and have always believed that, although immensely difficult, to sit with one’s own distress is by far the wisest thing to do. I had long learned that trying to push distress away just causes more conflict, more unrest, more pain and especially so when distress is the right reaction to have. The instruction I had received to ‘stop the distress’ disturbed me. I had been required to make everything ‘nice’ again and at a time when for many nothing would never be ‘nice’ again and when the continued suffering of humanity would fill our screens, newspapers and lives again and again. As I walked around the hospital in the days that followed it was like being in a parallel universe; it was as if 9/11 had not, was not, happening – silence.
I knew exactly what had disturbed me about ‘stopping the distress’ and what continued to disturb me about the chronic niceness of that hospital. It was the disavowing, the banishment and the total denial of the need we have as humans to connect with each other and to connect especially at times of suffering. Those rightly distressed nurses had connected with love and compassion, and I had colluded with an effort to get them to return to a state of disconnect and a niceness that was just not real. Those nurses had responded exactly as St Francis would have done. The whole of his ministry most surely based on connection with the world around us and with each other. In one of his hospitals, it appeared that the very heart of his mission and purpose was not being allowed, it was being forbidden.
At the centre of the hospital was an enormous publicity board, it was used to communicate the tenants of mission effectiveness and Franciscan spirituality that had long ago led to the formation of the hospital. This space, rightly or wrongly, it occurred to me was mine. In my room I gathered together the largest sheets of card I could find, I got scissors, glue and every newspaper I could find. With great care I cut out each and every image of the suffering, wounded and dying people from in and around the World Trade Centre. I fitted them together into a montage that when assembled covered every inch of that massive Mission Effectiveness board. At its very centre I pasted the picture attached to this post. The picture is of Father Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest who was chaplain to the fire fighters of NYC. On hearing the news that morning he had quickly removed his habit, put on his uniform and gone directly to be with his men and women. News footage shows him standing in one of the towers. The terror is visible on his face as his lips move silently in prayer and he prepares to minister to the injured, dead and dying. Sometime later another image is transmitted via the world’s media, it is Fr. Mychal who is carried out of the tower, his life given in the midst of unimaginable distress. By the side of this image I then pasted the prayer of St Francis.
Once in place, I stood back and looked at the finished montage, even I, its creator, was struck by its powerfulness. I was nervous, I did not know what reaction to expect. But I was equally aware that standing by the board and in view of the vision it created, I felt at home, I felt the sadness and horror it conveyed, and I felt it’s peace. I decided that’s where I would hang out. Word clearly spread and soon people from all over the hospital started to call by to look. In silence they looked, they wept, some gently touched the images, some thanked me and some went into the chapel and prayed. Some complained. The images, like Fr. Mychal, pulled no punches, it said it as it was. Humanity at its very worse and at its very best.
Humanity is seldom ‘nice’ we are, despite our intellect, primitive and awash with our needs, failings and vulnerabilities. We deny these things at great cost. When we don’t banish ours and others discomfort, when we allow ourselves to connect with our suffering and the pain of others. When we place ourselves in the way of risk, in the way of human tragedy and for the sole purpose of being together in all the shit that we ourselves so often create. Then it allows for something different to happen, for something different to be experienced.
By the time Fr. Mychal died alongside his people, he had seen terror and hell unfold on many occasions. As a gay priest in America at the height of the AIDS crisis he had held and kissed many who in the last days of their lives had been totally rejected by all around them. He had voiced and celebrated the joys of his and their sexuality and invited parents to be proud of their dying sons. No other voice in our world ever did this at that time.
The horror of 9/11 and the horror of the AIDS crisis are of course over but there will new horrors and some of us I guess will need to face such this very day. May we be able to meet whatever horror visits us as Mychal encouraged us to do so by how he was in the world – present, connected, vulnerable, flawed (as he often reminded us) but still willing to love. Father Mychal pray for us …
