At the Intersection of Despair and Love
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My connection with the Unitarian Universalist Trauma Response Ministry began September 26, 2001. It was just fifteen days after the perilous events in New York City, Washington, DC, and western Pennsylvania. As a minister at All Souls Church in New York City, I had to do something to help downtown. Our congregants were being tended to, and I was part of that, but I needed to carry my ministry to the epicenter of the devastation.
With some savvy assistance from my colleagues and the bravado of Bob Ossner, a self-described Protestant fundamentalist fire chaplain from Chicago, I spent the night of September 26 at Ground Zero, at what was known as “the pit.” I was the only chaplain in that sector of what was still called the rescue operation. All around were firemen, policemen, crane operators, asbestos technicians, structural engineers, and FBI agents.
What did I do? Mostly, I listened, after leading with, “How ya doin’?” I was identified by a hardhat with the word CHAPLAIN hastily printed on it with magic marker. Bob had said to me, “Anything that’s found that says a life was here…anything…is a blessing. It’s closure for one more family. And we pray around that discovery; in an arms-over-shoulders huddle, we pray.” In the eerie light of dawn, that’s exactly what we did.
As I stood at the edge of the pit, I hoped against hope. Not just that there might be some visible life movement. I prayed and hoped that we might find a way to contain further violence without wreaking international havoc.
A few hours after sunrise, I headed back toward St. Paul’s Chapel, the host site for the recovery operation. Almost there, I spotted a crew of sanitation workers. I walked up to them and thanked them for the work they were doing. “It really feels good to hear that,” they said. One fellow looked at me with a tired smile.
“Clean souls rest easy, Rev., clean souls rest easy.”
In the months that followed I continued my ministry at All Souls and extended it to the Family Assistance Center, set up in the expanses of a hangar-like structure on Pier 94, stretching out into the Hudson River. It housed the array of service providers for surviving family members and New Yorkers numbering in the thousands who had been displaced from job or home or both. The Red Cross was one of many service providers that took up residence there.
One morning in mid-October, I was wandering about the formidable expanse of this site and sat down next to a young man in his mid-20s. Let’s call him Chad. He had worked in the South Tower, the first building hit and the last to collapse. Chad was high enough up so that his narrow escape was the upshot of a heartbeat decision. He had lost friends and co-workers, many of them. While shaken, he wasn’t shattered. While reflective, he didn’t allow himself to freeze into the terror of those unforgettable moments.
In the high-tech high-rise world in which he had worked, this young man had made it a habit of bringing his guitar to play during lunchtime and coffee breaks. His colleagues had loved it. As his story continued to unfurl, so did his smile. He spoke of his drive to write music. Then his voice dropped. “In the last weeks,” he told me, “I just haven’t been able to write anything.” “And now?” I asked. “What about now?”
“Most of the time, I can’t even play,” came the reply. “Hmm,” I murmured. “I’m guessing, Chad, that everything you’ve seen and heard and felt is stirring inside you into songs that will remind us, as only music can, of what happened.” “Really,” he said. “You really think so?” “Yes,” I replied. “I really think so, and I’ll be waiting to hear them.” His smile settled into a mellow glow and an unspoken promise that we all will hear those songs.
I have no idea what Chad is doing now, what kind of job he found, if he’s playing his guitar in his new workplace, or if the notes stumbling around inside him have coalesced into that first song. I just held hope that there were songs in gestation that would carry haunting echoes of that time before easing their way into the rest of his life.
That same month some of my ministerial colleagues and I began to confer about forming a distinctively Unitarian Universalist ministry for trauma response. The mission of the UU Trauma Response Ministry we created out of those conversations is to provide multi-faith and culturally sensitive spiritual care to survivors of mass disasters and other trauma. We offer resources that include education and training on congregational preparedness, liturgy resources, and informed response to the needs of our children and youth. We collaborate with organizations that are similarly focused. By invitation only, we deploy trauma response teams to sites of disaster and crisis.
What prepares and sustains us to do this work? Education, training in the specifics of trauma response, collegial support, and a theology grounded in hope. John Schneider was a seasoned trauma psychologist and one of those who helped us further define and practice the ministry of trauma response. His teachings ring true for me:
Perhaps the most important dimension of witnessing [particular moments that jar and uproot] is our ability to hold hope for another… Sometimes people say, “I can’t imagine ever recovering from this” or “Do you ever think it will be better?” or “Can I make it?” To say at such times that we do believe it can be better, though all evidence seems contrary at the moment, is an offer to “hold hope.” Holding hope can be a spiritual covenant we enter with a person…. It may not be until later that people feel empowered enough to hold their own hope.
In the meantime, we carry, sometimes embodied by a non-anxious presence, “the belief that within each person, no matter how powerful the truth, given the resources and time provided to deal with that truth, we have the strength and potential to handle it.”
Hope is a spiritual posture. It is the spiritual underpinning of our trauma response ministry and the bottom-line reason that I’m engaged in this ministry.
One day, en route to a UU Trauma Response retreat and looking for some respite during the long flight, I reached for one of those airline magazines and gravitated to a sidebar story about a unique spiral staircase in a Sisters of Loretto chapel in downtown Santa Fe, NM. I had seen photographs of it before and was intrigued. The stairway, connecting the ground floor with the choir loft, is marked by two 360-degree turns and no visible means of support. Aesthetically compelling and architecturally bewildering, it has become a hub of legend.
It turns out that on the same plane was Dr. Rosemary Chinnici, who was then Professor of Pastoral Theology at Starr King School for the Ministry. In addition, Rosemary is also Sister Chinnici, a member of the Sisters of Loretto, a women’s religious order within Roman Catholicism. She is witty, brilliant, and full of P and V (petulance and vigor). Our plane landed and I hailed Rosemary. “You’re a member of the Sisters of Loretto, right?” I queried. “Yes,” she affirmed. “Well what can you tell me in the next five minutes about that spiral staircase at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe?” “Oh that,” she quipped. “I’ll tell you what happened, the myth and the reality.”
According to Rosemary, in 1820, just eight years after the founding of the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky, the order was asked to send a delegation to found schools in New Mexico. Six sisters set out by wagon train on the arduous journey. Only four of them made it to Santa Fe, but those four stalwarts founded the first school there. In the process, they oversaw construction of a chapel. There was a chancel, a seating area, and a choir loft that was created by leaning ladders against the rear walls. All seemed complete until the reality dawned that there was no way to reach the choir loft once the ladders came down.
The sisters prayed to St. Joseph, the patron saint of carpentry. An itinerant carpenter appeared and built the staircase, that spiral miracle with two 360-degree turns and no central source of support. The wood that he used was not native to the area around Santa Fe. In the middle of the night he disappeared, before they could pay him for the work.
Myth takes over. It was surely St. Joseph himself who erected the staircase. How else to explain the extraordinary coil with no visible means of support, let alone the vanishing workman?
Well, a decade or so ago a family was moving from Canyon City, Colorado. In the process of cleaning out their attic, they discovered the original plans for that staircase, along with other records documenting what had happened. Evidently, one of their relatives had been the itinerant carpenter. He had gone to Santa Fe with his own supply of Colorado pine-wood and, at the sisters’ request, had constructed the spiral staircase.
Just after its completion, a letter came from home. His wife was ill. In the middle of the night he headed north, before he could receive any compensation for his remarkable feat. Subsequent research has revealed his likely familiarity with the construction of similar staircases in France.
When Rosemary Chinnici was a child, she ventured to this chapel with her father, a structural engineer. Invited by a guide to ascend to the choir loft, her readiness to do so was dampened by her father’s voice: “Don’t put a step on that staircase. There is no reason why it should even be standing.”
Nonetheless it stands and it holds. Hope is like that. It’s not a miracle, but how it evolves is commonly inexplicable until much later, sometimes generations later.
Hope is the recognition of promise imparted by a sanitation worker at Ground Zero. Hope is a song that resides nascent in a young man who once played a guitar in a building that stood there.
Hope is a spring that waters a ministry called trauma response. Hope is a spiral that ascends to a choir loft in a chapel visited by an itinerant carpenter. Hope lies at the improbable intersection of despair and love.
Hope arises in the promise of the possible and the presence of each of us for the other. We are holders of hope. As holders of hope, we are healers in a fractured world. Ours is the ministry of hope.
While at All Souls/NYC, Jan held district positions on anti-racism; was active in interfaith housing justice; and was Program Coordinator and then President of the Metro/NY UUMA.In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, she served as a Red Cross chaplain at Ground Zero and the city's Family Assistance Centers and was a charter member of the UU Trauma Response Ministry Board.Since arriving in Connecticut, she has become active in her congregation’s commitment to immigrant justice; racial justice; LGBTQ rights; and interfaith activity.Additionally she serves on the Board of the UU Small Group Ministry Network; as co-president of the Clara Barton UUMA chapter; and on the Regional Advisory Council of Middlesex Community College (MxCC).In the larger UU World, Jan has served on our UUA’s Commission on Social Witness, two years as chair. Currently Jan is a Lead Mentor for UUMA colleagues, was a chaplain at GA 2015, and is active in the Moral Monday CT/Black Lives Matter movement.
Family matters mightily. Hers is blended, “like most congregations and communities," and includes her husband, Dr. Daniel Bull, their adult daughters Shana, Sarah, and Lisa and their partners; and their "completely adorable grandchildren."Downtime joys are swimming; culinary play; cinema; and connecting with friends across the years and newly met.
- At the Intersection ofDespair and Love - December 1, 2015
