Felicity Wright

Travels

The Key to God’s Heart: Then and Now

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March 7 is the Feast Day for Sts. Perpetua and Felicity (Felicitas).  Perpetua’s letter to her father is a powerful testimony — then and now.  I’m part of a small writing group in which we have 2 pages each week to write on a top that varies each week.  In this case, the “spark” was “key.”  This fictional dialogue between the two saints is what emerged.

Background:  Perpetua was a noblewoman who lived in Carthage with her husband, infant son, and slave Felicity at the beginning of the third century. After Septimius Severus became Emperor in 193 CE, he proceeded to cripple Christianity on the grounds that it undermined Roman patriotism. Among those arrested were five Christians, including both Perpetua and Felicity.  Perpetua’s father pleaded with her to renounce her faith, but she refused to do so.  Her letters to him were as widely distributed as those of St. Paul to the early church and were instrumental in attracting people to the faith.  Jailed while awaiting execution in the amphitheater, this “conversation” between Perpetua and her slave occurred on 4 March 203.

Perpetua:  Felicity, you don’t have to become a martyr for Christ!  You’re my servant and I herewith absolve you of all wanted or unwanted devotion to me or my faith.  And before you protest too much, consider this: first, unlike me, you’re not yet baptized, and second, you will deliver a child in a month or so.  Thus, Christians won’t condemn you and the Romans won’t execute you.  You have time to reconsider.  So please don’t let my fervor influence you; decide for yourself and your child-to-be.

Felicity:  My lady, I watch you and other Christians and I am in awe.  It was humbling to listen yesterday as you spoke to your father with a blend of kindness and firmness I’ve never witnessed before.  Instead of being subservient – like me – you have a power that is quiet but inviolate.  Christian women are taken as seriously as men; they seem to possess an authority that comes from God.  That is why I want to join you – to experience the fearlessness that comes with faith.  You make choices based on love, not power, and courage, not fear.  I recognize that as liberty.  It is something I have never known, so please allow me to join Christ and you in this path to freedom.

Perpetua:  Those are lovely thoughts, but remember that you cannot follow me into the arena of death and new life: you have an infant growing inside you …

Felicity:   Yes, but I have been praying fervently for the baby to come early.  And just as your husband will care for your son, so also will other Christians foster my child.  All will be well:  I know that Jesus hears me and will do what is best…

Perpetua:  Hmmm… How do you know?  I understand my faith, but yours…?

Felicity:  Dear lady, as you know, during the last years since we first learned about Jesus, I’ve been having wonderful dreams, unlike anything in the past.  You understand this, for you write about your visions in ways that our leaders celebrate. But I haven’t been willing to share, until now.  Usually it’s Jesus or Mary who bring encouragement, but last night, it was a very strange bird-like creature that came and hovered just a foot from my head. I was walking along a mountainous path far above the sea, wondering about life, and death, and whether Jesus was for real, and what heaven is like, or if, in fact, there is anything after death. I was wondering whether God controls everything or not, and whether God is kind or mean or in-between.  Will martyrdom bring believers to Jesus and eternal happiness or is it just a silly notion to keep us docile?  I was muttering some of these things aloud when this bird – it was colorful and huge like the mythical phoenix, but hovered without flapping its wings – rather like an angel over my shoulder.  All of a sudden, it spoke aloud: 

        “Felicity, as you ponder what to do or what not to do – whether to join Perpetua and the other Christians in a brutal death or to take advantage of your pregnancy and slave status to deny your faith, know that God has sent me with one message and one message only.  It is this: God is love and God will love you whatever you choose. Nothing more, nothing less.”

         I interrupted.  “But what does that mean – right here, right now?  What does that mean, practically speaking?”  I paused and then asked, “What is the key to God’s heart?  If I knew what God wanted of me, then I would know what to do.” 

          The creature clucked, flapped its wings, did some kind of happy circle dance, and continued: “God is love, and love comes to those who live with courage, humility, and gratitude.  It’s like a three-legged stool: consider what brings deep but simple joy (the gratitude part) and then examine how to balance that with the other two.  Courage, humility, and gratitude: fused together, they become the key that opens the heart of God.  What you will discover there is the peace that passes all understanding.”

 

That night, Felicity gave birth to a healthy daughter, who was handed over to other Christians in the community.  Three days later, she and Perpetua were martyred in the amphitheater as part of the military games to celebrate the emperor’s birthday.

On Being ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ (SBNR): Take 1

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Note: this is the first of three explorations into the gifts and challenges of being SBNR.  Wait for the others in the next few weeks.

According to the Pew Research Center, 27% of US adults claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” a jump of 8% in just five years. The term is now so popular that it claims its own abbreviation—SBNR. Compared to the murder and mayhem caused by extremists of many religious, SBNR has to be a positive development in human culture. Yet, some who identify as SBNR may occasionally long for the certitude of more traditional faiths, especially at this time of year. Additionally, some SBTR folks exhibit a self-righteous certitude that can be as dismissive as fundamentalist believers.

To which I say that theological tenets are like building codes, those local regulations that control the design, methods, and materials used in construction. Most local jurisdictions have such laws that are established to protect the health and safety of residents. Anyone building or retrofitting a house (and the contractor or architect) must comply with standards governing the frame, plumbing, electrical, and other features of the structure.

But there are building codes and then there are building codes – specifically prescriptive and performance codes. Prescriptive codes specify what is required – how many inches of what kind of insulation in the ceiling, how many in the walls, etc. They do the same for windows, walls, wiring, and wastewater systems.

Performance codes don’t prescribe requirements; rather, they give minimum benchmarks. They don’t care whether the builder uses fiberglass insulation, plastic bags, old socks, or solar energy – provided that the building meets acceptable standards of safety and efficiency.
So far so good. Unfortunately, some local governments formulate standards the same way many people formulate explanations for God. Builders and smaller jurisdictions usually favor prescriptive standards with detailed checklists. You don’t need a cadre of professional engineers to decide if something will work or not, you just check off each item to ensure compliance.

But architects and innovators typically prefer performance standards that allow greater creativity and flexibility. They can think “outside the box” and devise new solutions to old problems. To require a new state-of-the-art building to conform to prescriptive criteria equivalent to a traditional building could be wasteful, prohibitively expensive, and even impossible.

Isn’t this akin to our understanding of God’s ways? – Some people want the details spelled out and a checklist provided, while others want individual flexibility within a broad framework.

Prescriptive standards – whether they relate to places of the hearth or of the heart – are valued by those who want straightforward, right-and-wrong guidelines. There are times in our lives when we all want straight answers, especially during childhood and trauma. However, as we grow in faith and discernment, many of us find we have outgrown simplistic criteria for faithful living; we want to focus on the big picture of God’s love without falling into the quicksand of other people’s sense of right and wrong. It’s time to move from prescriptive to performance criteria.
But that doesn’t mean that we’re off the hook. Local governments must develop and enforce building codes or houses fall down, neighbors get into shouting matches (or worse) over unsightly monstrosities two feet from their dream house, and the building profession is plagued with corruption and deceit. Doing nothing – living without a code of some kind – is not an acceptable response.

Another way of looking at is to think of prescriptive codes as religion and performance criteria as spirituality. There are times when we need strict prescriptions, but mostly we prefer the flexibility and growing edges of performance benchmarks.

And those of us who use performance standards to explain God must work harder than those who are satisfied with black-and-white criteria. Each of us is required to come up with a statement of faith that, while not being prescriptive, is nonetheless a clear and cogent explanation for how God works in our lives and how we translate that into daily action. Otherwise, SBNR is just a cute way of saying you believe in everything or nothing.

Follow the Freedom Star

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Many Christians just celebrated Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas and the day the three wise visited the baby Jesus. It began the tradition of gift-giving at Christmas and also represents the true message of how God came to earth as a helpless infant. For me, it also suggests the power of the natural world to affirm our majesty and power and to open up new possibilities – if only we but follow the heavenly stars to our own new vision of freedom.

You may remember that, during the darkest days in the history of our country when people bought and sold other people whom they could then treat worst than the vilest of farm animals, there were a few courageous souls – God-fearing whites and daring blacks – who developed an elaborate system of secret hiding places to help runaways find their way north to freedom. The Underground Railroad relied on markers in trees, special lights hung out at certain hours, quilts of particular colors hung out to dry, and other such signals to set the path. Many of them had learned the popular folk tune, “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”

Follow the drinking gourd
Follow the drinking gourd
For the old man is a-waitin’
For to carry you to freedom
Follow the drinking gourd.

The verses were elaborate codes devised by an itinerant white carpenter (the “old man”) who went from plantation to plantation, teaching the song to slaves from Alabama and Mississippi. It led them up along the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers to the northern states and, later, Canada. Hounded by dogs and slave owners, the runaways and their accomplices faced torture and certain death if they were caught. The “drinking gourd” is the constellation we know as the Big Dipper. If you look at the two sides of the cup that are opposite the handle and multiply the distance between the two stars by seven, you will see the North Star, also called Polaris.

The black slaves and their supporters were not the first to follow a star to freedom. Two thousand years ago, three kings from the Orient followed a star to Bethlehem. Without knowing much about it, it seems like nice, romantic little tale, but that doesn’t do justice to the story. First, it was a time of terrible oppression. The period of Roman occupation in Palestine was different – but fully as gruesome – as the days of slavery before the Civil War. Taxes were upwards of 60-70%, and people lost their land to pay tribute to the Roman Empire and those Jewish authorities that supported Caesar. Some people sold themselves and their children into slavery, because it was that or starvation. Five percent of the people owned 95% of the wealth, and the rest suffered, cruelly and unmercifully.

Second, “kings” is a misnomer. The three men who came to Bethlehem were probably astrologers from Babylon or further east. Astrologers were the first astronomers, who were, in turn, the scholars and scientists of the ancient world. The term “magi” is the root of magician, and it designated someone of exceptional wisdom and knowledge. Think Gandolf, as in Lord of the Rings, and you get a pretty good idea of the caliber of these three people – men who could envision a world different from what they saw around them, namely a world of goodness, kindness, justice, and freedom. For them, Jesus symbolized a new way of living. In presenting him with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the Magi were acknowledging Jesus’ kingship, his priesthood, and his humanity, that is, honoring the fact that the God who is king is also fully human and fully vulnerable – just like us. In recognizing the love of God embodied in this tiny child, these three wisest of all wise men could see a way out of the oppression and injustice of the Roman Empire. Think stars, think freedom.

Epiphany is a Greek word that means to “shine upon” or to “give light.” It means a dramatic uncovering or sudden awareness that changes one’s sense of reality. Suddenly you see what is happening and what is possible in a whole new light. It’s an “ah ha” moment, in which you blurt out, “Eureka – now I see it. Now I understand.” St. Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus was an epiphany. The runaway slaves vision of freedom was an epiphany. The Magi’s recognition that a tiny infant could and would change the world was an epiphany.

I had a dramatic epiphany about 25 years ago, during the darkest period of my life. My husband had decided, rather suddenly, to end the marriage, leaving me with two kids, an expensive mortgage, and not much else. I felt alone, helpless, trapped – consumed with terror and anger. The rage was a poison within my body, like the cancer that had killed my mother years earlier. I knew that it only hurt the children and me and had little effect on my estranged husband, but I was powerless to rid myself of it. I began praying with fervor unlike any time previously.

One autumn weekend, I went camping in the mountains with friends. Around midnight, leaving my kids sleeping in the tent with our trusty dog, four of us went walking to view the stars. It was an extraordinary sight: never had I seen so many stars in the world. I thought back to all of the isolated places I had ever and I couldn’t remember seeing so many stars. My mind wandered to the ancient Phoenicians and Norsemen and others who traveled by the stars. And I wondered if the sky sparkled like this when the shepherds watched at the time of the Nativity.

About fifteen minutes into the walk, I saw the shooting star. It didn’t register much at first, sort of a subconscious thought, “Yup, there’s a shooting star,” as it streaked across an eighth of the night sky. But one of my friends had noticed it too, and asked excitedly whether I had seen it or not. I gave her a smile and probably said something pleasant and noncommittal. I really didn’t want to talk, for I was too enraptured just scanning the sky, and searching for the occasional meteor. I thought some about my current life, but spent more time pondering ancient history, my childhood, and the universe as a whole. I remembered that, in native American spirituality, the stars are our ancestors looked down from the heavens, and I felt wondrously peaceful and complete. I was so happy to be there at that time, at that place. The entire sky was sparkling, radiant, glowing.

And then I glanced at the ground, and it was luminous, as were the shrubs and trees. I looked at my friends, and they sparkled also. And so did I – rather like we had all been gently dabbed with Tinkerbell’s fairy dust. The heavens had opened and the stars had feathered their way down to earth. The delicate energy of God was present inside, outside, all around me… I experienced a unity that I had never known before, in which there were no boundaries of time or place. Past, present, and future were one; here and there were one. I was a child visiting her grandparents in the mountains of Massachusetts, I was an explorer on an ancient canoe, I was a shepherd in Bethlehem, I was a mother whose kids were sleeping contentedly in a modern nylon tent. All the stars were friends and relatives who cared for me. They were sparkling with happiness and cheering me on, saying, “You can do it, girl. We know you can.” I just kept repeating, “Thank you God,” to myself. It was involuntary: I had to thank God.

I later learned that this was a classic religious experience, in which one recognizes God’s grace as a powerful and unmerited gift. In that moment, my cancerous rage disappeared forever, for I had felt God’s love as a warm and comforting hug on a cold and private night. I knew instantly that God loved me and that my children and I would, somehow, survive. I was liberated from the rage and the fear. The stars that came to earth and surrounded my friends and me was the most powerful gift I have ever received. It’s the reason I eventually went into ordained ministry, for it changed my understanding of God, the world, and myself. Think stars, think freedom.

And what about you? What is the sudden revelation that the stars might offer? Consider those attachments that keep you from being fully free. Consider those fears that keep you bound in fetters. Is it anger? Jealousy? Physical decline? Loneliness? Is it an addiction that you would like to liberate yourself from? Is it the sense of inadequacy – physical, psychological, financial, or other? – We are so attached to our emotions and to our material supports that they cloud our vision. We live in darkness, blind to the stars and to the holy in our midst.

So, in your mind’s eye, feel the magi’s gifts coming to you. There is myrrh to acknowledge your humanity, incense to affirm you as an agent of God’s love, and gold to honor your majesty. Feel also the stars that come and dance around you, kissing you with God’s comfort and affection. The gifts of the Magi and of the stars are God’s gift to you. They are gifts of courage, freedom, clear thinking, and clear seeing. They are the gifts of liberation from false attachments and false fears. Think stars, think freedom, follow the Drinking Gourd.

On Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, this is God’s most incredible gift to us.. It is nothing to do with belief; it has nothing to do with some supernatural entity directing what happens in the world. On the contrary, it has everything to do with mystery, connection, peace, and freedom. That is the message of the three kings: the freedom to see the world, others, and ourselves in a new way, in the way of Jesus and the runaway slaves, with liberation and love.

Blessings to you on this New Year and throughout 2018.

Christmas 2017: Unexpected Gifts

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(Please note that I have changed the names of my heroes.)

It definitely wasn’t on my Christmas list! But the holidays this year brought an unexpected and life-changing gift: to witness courage in its many and diverse forms.

My primary reason for travelling to California for Christmas was to spend time with son Galen and his new fiancée Jessica. My second hope was to visit Mary, a dear friend, much-celebrated counselor, spiritual director, and wise woman extraordinaire. Mary and her husband Jonathan were in a terrible car accident over a year ago that left her seriously paralyzed and confined to a care facility in Oakland, where she will live out her last years. My third goal was to visit various clergy friends and members of the church I served before coming to NY. But with only five days, I expected Christmas to be more stressful than celebratory. Little did I know that I would receive a gift to treasure for years to come.

Some key background info: about a year ago an unexpected insight came to me, namely that Love (love of self, love of others, love of life) sits atop the three-legged stool of Courage, Humility, and Gratitude. One can’t experience true love without its being supported by the other three. I understood that intellectually but last week brought it to heart.

I arrived late on Wednesday 12/20 and stayed with Galen and Jessica. The next morning, after leaving a message for Jonathan asking about visiting times for Mary, I called Linda, a clergy friend in Vacaville, who told me that her husband William had died the night before after a week in the ICU. Although I knew he hadn’t been well for several months, this came as a total surprise. With Galen’s approval, I opted to stay with Linda for a night. While there, we attended an ecumenical service to honor all the homeless men and women who had died in 2017.

 

Several people spoke, including the brother of a Vietnam vet who lived on the streets for over twenty years. A woman talked about a homeless friend who was the most generous person she had ever met. At the end of the service, a rather scruffy 60-something man pulled out a set of bagpipes and gave a superb rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Everyone was greatly moved, with some wiping away tears. In chatting with him after the service, I learned that he was a Korean War vet who had played the pipes since junior high school. He now alternates between staying in the country with a friend and living on the streets in Vacaville. He offered several anecdotes about how his love for the bagpipes had sustained him through war and other traumas, waxed eloquent about homeless friends who had died, but never complained about his ongoing challenges. Such love, such courage.

Spending time with Linda that evening, I learned that she would lead worship at the two services (Christmas Eve morning and evening) of her own church, and had also agreed to fill in for another priest on Christmas Day so that he could be with his young family. Humbling…

Then on Friday, when visiting Mary in the nursing home, I saw a beauty far greater than anything I could have imagined. Although confined to her bed and wheelchair and sleeping more than half the day, her face shone with spirit. It reminded me of wisdom of a therapist from years past: “Sh*t happens. Sometimes it’s a little bit of sh*t and sometimes it’s an earthquake. Some people go through a hell that they don’t deserve, while others reap benefits they didn’t earn. Life isn’t fair. The issue is not why bad things happen but whether you can live with the challenges thrust upon you in a way that you can feel good about your life choices. Can you live in such a way that you make the best of what you have and don’t make a bad situation worse? Can you be a hero in your own story? If so, you’re a winner.” Mary is as stellar example of being a hero in her own story. Such love, such courage.

 

That evening, I reconnected with Galen and met Jessica’s family including their 11-year old yellow lab “Bosco” with an obscene growth (the size of a fully inflated balloon) on its hip. The abscess has been growing steadily for over a year, but Bosco’s heart isn’t strong enough to survive the requisite surgery. So the family is enjoying his presence for Christmas, knowing that he will be going to the vet in a few days to end his life on this earth. As we sit in a circle in the living room, there is always a family member sitting on the floor next to his mat, calmly stroking his neck and back. It takes two people to support Bosco as he struggles to go outside to attend to his needs. As an outsider witnessing this mutual love and support for the first time, I am in awe of the bond, as both canine and human family members honor and support each other. Such love, such courage.

A semi-homeless bagpiper, Linda, Mary, Bosco. If I hadn’t gotten the Christmas connection between courage and love, a final witness came to make the point: Jonathan. After attending my old church for the Sunday morning service on Christmas Eve, I drove to Mary’s nursing facility to visit her for the last time before returning to New York. Jonathan was also there, and I was not prepared for what I saw.

Jonathan was a much-celebrated off-Broadway producer who won many awards and hobnobbed with numerous celebrities. In five years of knowing him and Mary as close friends and pastor, he was always the center of attention. Enchanting and engaging, he was also egocentric, leaving her to manage the day-to-day needs of the household. When I left the Bay Area in 2010, he also suffered from various mobility impairments and psychological challenges, including post-traumatic stress syndrome resulting from his being one of the first American soldiers to liberate the emaciated Jews from Dachau. Being Jewish himself, he never quite recovered from the horror. During their fifty-plus year marriage, Mary attended to his every need.

But no more. Gone were the sometimes crutches and occasional walker. Gone were the forty extra pounds. Gone was any expectation that he was the center of Mary’s (or anyone else’s) attention. In its stead, here was Jonathan with flowers, with favorite foods, and with tenderness. Here was the husband doting on the wife with adoration much as the shepherds and wise men attended the Christ child two millennia earlier. Here was Saint Jonathan paying homage to Saint Mary. Now in the final days of packing before moving into a small apartment in another part of the rehab facility, Jonathan is saying adieu to a gorgeous home filled with unique artwork, thousands of books, and enormous and beautiful gardens. He is letting all that glamour and glory go, so that he can be closer and thus more attentive to Mary. Such courage, such love.

I returned to the East Coast humbled and grateful for these, the true gifts of Christmas.

The After-Effects of 9/11: When Hell Meets Heaven

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After spending the spring and summer of 2001 teaching a new computer system to Port Authority employees in New York City, I was briefly assigned to another client in nearby Newark for a three-day class in early September. This meant that I was 25 miles from my classroom at the World Trade Center and 200 miles from my home in Washington, D.C., when the world witnessed the event that would forever change our lives.
One of the greatest honors in my life was being asked to return to help the Port Authority folks deal with the aftermath of 9/11.  Of an original team of forty of more, the Port Authority specifically asked for me and two others (and I was the only non-local, which meant that they had to cover hotel and per diem).  So I return in early October to spend a month helping the staff learn the basics of the new system.  Most hadn’t taken the previous classes in the summer, and those who had couldn’t remember diddlysquat. The documentation that my team developed has, literally, been vaporized. But bills are piling up, vendors are demanding payment, and equipment must be purchased.
I spend two days with Jane, who was in my classroom on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. She and five others escaped, but two classmates went to a different stairwell and were never seen again. Three weeks after the bombing, I see that Jane is still too traumatized to take an elevator or enter a building of more than two stories.
Her husband had been on the 74th floor. He, three colleagues, and a janitor with a lunch box and cleaning bucket, were bunched in the express elevator speeding upwards from the 44th floor, when it suddenly plunged downward about a hundred feet and just as abruptly stopped. Picking themselves off the floor in the pitch-black cage, they had no idea where they were. Prying the elevator doors open, they found only a dark wall.
Smoke was seeping in through the elevator cracks. Covering their noses with handkerchiefs soaked in milk, they took turns with the metal edge of the squeegee to laboriously cut through the sheetrock. They eventually broke into a bathroom, but then had to cut through ceramic tiles. Emerging on the 50th floor, they walked downstairs single-file leaving room for firemen who were running up. They saw the light of day just four minutes before the building crashed. If the janitor had not had a flashlight, a squeegee, a pint of milk, and the cool to mastermind the rescue, no one would have survived to share their adventures of the morning. Was he a guardian angel in disguise?
Several days later, I was at the agency’s temporary headquarters in Hoboken sharing an office with Diane, the training manager, a delightful middle-aged woman with whom I had spent many happy hours over lunch and in meetings. But now, she’s a different person. Once attentive to her subordinates, she has morphed into a protective mother bear; determination and deep weariness have replaced the twinkle in her eyes.
I don’t know what war is like, but I have an idea of what it’s like to “go through the wars”: it is the process by which we are forced to acknowledge our vulnerability. For most of us, war is external; its “over there,” or “back then,” and it involves others. But after 9-11, war is here and now and within. The reality of who we are is struggling with our preconceptions about ourselves. Suddenly we are fearful, and we don’t like the people that we have become.
Another reason Diane has lost her sparkle is because her commute is now 2 ½ – 3 hours each way, instead of an hour previously. This means that she leaves home just before 6:00 am and doesn’t usually get back until 9:00 pm. Twice in the last week, she was an hour late because Penn Central had been evacuated for “something” (never explained); this required her to walk almost a mile to the subway and a then several blocks to the PATH station, extending her one-way commute to nearly four hours. And some of her weariness is because the computer system is often down; what once was a simple, two-minute transaction is now a cause for major celebration.
One morning, as I was reflecting on the difference between heroes (all of the people in or anywhere near that building on September 11th) and saints (those who have devoted their lives to God and God’s people), a woman entered to drop off files. Hearing her mutter “Jesus Christ” under her breath and assuming that she has just broken a fingernail, I looked up to see what was wrong. Instead of a scowl, I was greeted by a warm smile and a cheerful “Good morning, sister” from a woman I had never before seen in my life.
After brief courtesies, Victoria shared her impressions of that day. She was sitting at her desk on the 63rd floor when the plane hit. Rather than run or scream, she dropped to her knees in prayer. She had a clear vision of God “sitting on His throne” looking down on her and saying, “Look at my baby girl calling on me in the midst of this terror.” Directing some unseen angels, God told them, “Go and see about my daughter.”
When the image of God’s radiance faded, she went with waiting colleagues to the nearest stairwell. Walking down, she began reciting the 23rd psalm and singing praise songs. Others joined in, and many came up later thanking her for the calm faith she radiated in that dark, smoke-filled stairwell. Is not Victoria an angel and a saint?
The next day, Don and Raoul shared memories of walking down from the 70th floor. People were orderly at first, mostly because so many had survived the 1993 bombing and trusted the structural integrity of the towers. Don and Raoul were nonplussed by burn victims and others who were actively bleeding, but they never feared for their own lives until the 20th floor, when the smoke intensified, making it hard to both breathe and see. An incredible, inexplicable, rolling, deafening roar (which they later learned was the crash of the other building) made the north tower shake intensely, cutting off the emergency lights and causing people to stumble over each other. After this, it was a superhuman effort to maintain control, and some began weeping. But still, the group kept talking to each other to stay calm, groping their way down, most of them holding hands, some sobbing, but with little screaming and no pushing – just cold, stark determination.
In the middle of this horrific retelling, Raoul blurted out, “And, you know, we were the lucky ones. We had no idea of what was going on. When the south tower fell, we knew something dreadful had happened, but our stairwell was fine and our tower still stood…. Actually, people like Diane had it worse. She was walking in from the plaza and froze, not knowing whether to rush up and help people or run away as fast as she could. A policeman ordered her to leave – which was good because this was just when debris – huge blocks of concrete and metal, enough to kill you if they landed – started falling from the sky.”
Raoul felt sorrier for Diane than he did for himself…
When employees arrive for a meeting and see someone they haven’t seen since 9/11, work abruptly ends and co-workers pour out from cubicles to chat. It is like the excitement that accompanies a woman returning from maternity leave with a new baby in tow. But unlike the gushes over the beautiful child, this is a chastening calm with unspoken but clear affection. It is both endearing and terrifying.
The following week, as anthrax poisoning replaced hijacked planes as the terror of the day, the agency conducted daily safety drills and distributed safety glasses, nose masks, rubber gloves, and flashlights to all employees. Diane was away when a flashlight was placed on her desk; within two hours, five coworkers stopped in to ensure that that the batteries were installed and her flashlight was working properly.
People looked around at their ordinary colleagues with their ordinary foibles and realized that their ordinary assumptions were all wrong. They discovered that they had been working amidst heroes, including the two procurement officials who returned from the stairwell to retrieve their blind colleague from the 71st floor, the ten co-workers who carried a 250-pound, wheelchair-bound man down 69 flights of stairs, and the two marketing managers who got Tina and her motorized wheelchair down from the 68th floor. Of the Port Authority employees, only 74 of the 2,000 in the building were killed (half of them the police and firemen who – according to the people I spoke with – seemed to know that they were going to their deaths). In both towers, only 2,753 people were killed in the collapse. Everyone credited the low number of casualties to the fact that mutual care trumped panic and pushiness.
Returning just before Thanksgiving to my company’s home office in Columbia, Maryland, I found myself suddenly depressed. In the midst of the hell that surrounds us, I had been graced to witness the best of the human condition. For some, self-sacrifice for others was absolute and cost them their lives; for most, it was timid and tenuous – but nonetheless transforming – if only for a time.
And I know that I too am forever changed, for good as well as ill. The trivialities of life gnaw at me. After spending six weeks in the company of saints and heroes, ordinary mortals seem frivolous and self-absorbed. With the exception of faith-filled Victoria who sang and prayed her coworkers to safety, I do not know the religious beliefs of the employees at the Port Authority. But watching people show genuine care for each other, I realize that I have just witnessed the kingdom of God on earth.