Remembering September 11

Remembering September 11

Father Mychal's Prayer

“Lord, take me where you want me to go;

Let me meet who you want me to meet;

Tell me what you want me to say, and

Keep me out of your way. Amen.”

Fr. Mychal Judge, O.F.M.

Chaplain, New York Fire Department killed on 9/11/2001 at the World Trade Center. Death Certificate Number 1.

Remnants of twin towers at Newsum, Washington DC

This now famous prayer of Father Mychal Judge who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 will continually on my mind today as our country observes a moment of silence as we hear the names read of the almost 3000 people who died in four coordinated attacks on this country that early autumn morning. Flags are at half-staff as we travel about Little Rock.

 Mychal Judge was a Franciscan friar and Catholic priest serving as a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department, not afraid to become part of the messiness of life. After the first attack, he prayed over bodies in the streets and then went into the lobby of the North Tower that had become an emergency command post. He was killed by flying debris when the South Tower collapsed. His biographers say his dying prayer was “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!” The iconic photograph of five men carrying his body out of the North Tower has been described as an American Pieta, another Michael’s statue of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus in St. Peter’s in Rome or a lesser known work of Michelangelo, Deposition with Joseph of Arimathea, as Barbara Crafton showed  on her The Almost-Daily Emo from The Geranium Farm.

Father Mychal was also most remembered as a staunch supporter of LGBT rights as well as being a sober member of Alcoholic Anonymous for 23 years.   Another 3000 were reported to have attended his funeral. Father Michael Duffy closed his homily at that service with, “We come to bury Myke Judge’s body but not his spirit. We come to bury his hands, but not his good works. We come to bury his heart, but not his love. Never his love.”

Michael Daly, Daily News (New York) , February 11, 2002.

Shannon Stapleton, September 11, 2001, Photojournalist.

Stephen Todd, Daily Ponderables, September 11, 2017.

“Slain Priest: ‘Bury His Heart, But Not His Love’ September 8, 2011, NPR Morning Edition

Joanna    joannaseibert.com

Buechner: Parents

Buechner: Parents

“’Honor your Father and you mother,’ says the Fifth Commandment (Exodus  20:12). Honor them for having taken care of you before you were old enough to take care of yourself.” Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking  and later in  Beyond Words.

 Buechner reminds us of the fifth commandment to honor our parents. He reminds us to honor them because they loved us and cared for us.

 I sat with a group of friends last  week and we all spontaneously started talking about scars from our parents, particularly our mothers. Some had been abused, neglected by their parents. Some did not receive the love they had hoped for from their parents. Some had parents who never grew up to be the adults that a child needed for mentoring and protection.

Buechner reminds us that our parents also had scars. They were doing the best they could with what they knew. He also reminds us that we should always be grateful to them for the gift of life that they gave to us.

We then wondered what our children would say about us, the scars we have given to them because of our imperfections.

Our prayers became that we  can still  make living amends for the harm we have done and that we can stop some of the behavior that we have inherited and be grateful for the rich heritage that we hope to honor.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com 

Inner Work

Robert Johnson: Inner Work

"All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that nourished our ancestors--dream, vision, ritual, and religious experience--are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious. Thus, in our pride and hubris, our faith in our unassailable reason, we cut ourselves off from our origins in the unconscious and from the deepest parts of ourselves." Robert Johnson Inner Work

 My spiritual director posted this on Facebook today.  It is an affirmation for a new path that a group of us are beginning again. Our book group is rereading the revised version of Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s Natural Spirituality.  We recently were in a clergy group telling them we were studying Natural Spirituality. Two members who had recently finished seminary had no idea what we were talking about. When we mentioned dream work, they were even more in the dark and maybe a little suspicious. Older clergy in the group had been studying dreams for some time and affirmed the study.

I have been  involved in dream groups on and off for over thirty years. Dream work is  one of the many ways to try to discern what God is calling us to do in our lives. My experience is that it is important to be in a group of people studying each other’s dreams together. Most of us find it difficult to discern dreams alone by ourselves. 

There are many factors. Dreams tell us something we don’t already know. Parts of ourselves may block new information. Think of our experience in other discussion groups  when new ideas come up.  There is invariably at least one person being an automatic “no” to a new way of doing things. “That is not the way we have done it in the past.” It always takes time for the whole group to process the information and decide to go in a new direction. Likewise, a dream group of friends looking at a dream outside of our own ego may gently guide us in a new direction in our inner life until the light bulb turns on inside and outside of us.

I like Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s subtitle of her book, A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com