Father Mychal Judge: Ladder to a Bridge

by Kathryn Price on September 11, 2011

Father Mychal Judge is carried from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Father Mychal Judge is carried from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001

“You don’t need to do this,” Father Mychal Judge said. He was standing on a ladder, talking through the window of an apartment building to a man who was holding a gun to his wife’s head. A hundred police officers stood on the ground below. Mychal’s words floated down to them; he told the man with the gun pointed at his wife’s head that he was a good man; that he didn’t need to do this; that Mychal wanted to hear what he had to say. “Come on down and let’s talk about it,” Father Mychal said. “I’ll stick by you.” News photographs of the incident showed Father Mychal carrying the couple’s two children down the ladder, then the gun, and finally there was a photograph of Father Mychal and the man emerging from the apartment building together.

The Franciscan priest showed this same propensity to go the aid of others despite personal risk to himself  during the first years of the AIDS epidemic. He went into hospitals at a time when many people wouldn’t visit AIDS patients for fear of contracting the disease, and he ministered to those dying from it. It was in the hospital that someone asked him to visit a police officer who had been paralyzed in a shooting, and it was through that visit that he met a firefighter and became interested in being a firefighter chaplain. And so it was that he came to be in the lobby on the morning of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He had rushed there in the unfolding horror of that morning, saying, “I have to be with my men.” His was the first officially confirmed death there.

I didn’t know of Father Mychal Judge until several years later. I was researching the role of chaplains, a field I was considering, and his name came up in some of my searches. Intrigued by a trailer for Saint of 9/11, I continued to explore his life by reading two books* that have been published about him. What I found was the story of a man who had developed a gift for connecting with others, despite a lonely childhood.

As a boy, Mychal Judge could only see his father from the window of a hospital. Mychal was three years old when his father entered the hospital for mastoiditis, where he underwent repeated surgeries for  the next few years. The hospital didn’t allow children to visit, so Mychal’s mother took Mychal and his twin sister to a street corner near the hospital, where they could see their father waving from the window. He died when Mychal was six. A certain loneliness entered Mychal’s life.

Mychal knew from a young age that he wanted to be a priest. He left for seminary at the age of 15.  The seminary was in the Catskills, far from the city of New York that Mychal loved. It was 13 years before he became a priest, years during which he received little encouragement in his academic pursuits, and little in the way of any other kind of comfort. Yet he stayed with it, through a rigorous and solitary path. Finally, the day of his ordination came. On this, the occasion of his first homily, everyone recognized that he had a gift, a gift for connecting with people as he spoke. Even his mother, who had begrudged him going to seminary, seemed proud of him at the reception that followed. The boy who had longed for his lost father would become the friend and beloved pastor of many.

I think of Father Mychal Judge often, not only in connection with the events of September 11, but because his life story is personally inspiring to me.  And I am thinking of him especially on this, the tenth anniversary of that day. I think of the number of lives lost beginning with those taken violently and abruptly from us on that bright September morning to include thousands around the world since. And the first confirmed death in all of these was Father Mychal Judge. Sometimes, when I consider his whole life, that seems ironic. But perhaps it is not. I think of him standing on a ladder those many years ago, talking quietly through a window to a man holding a gun to his wife’s head, telling him that his story didn’t have to end this way. There are few individuals who can climb ladders and create bridges to those who are threatening violence and to quietly speak the words we can’t say to ourselves in the heat of the moment, or in the long years of fanning the anger leading up to it: “You don’t need to do this.”

*The books I read, from which I learned some of these details of Father Mychal Judge’s life are: Father Mychal Judge: An Authentic American Hero, by Michael Ford, and The Book of Mychal: The Surprising Life and Heroic Death of Father Mychal Judge, by Michael Daly

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I hear voice(s) on the prairie: Michele Bachmann, an American gothic narrative

by Kathryn Price on August 8, 2011

American Gothic (2)Michele Bachmann was born in Iowa; therefore, she knows everything she needs to know to be the next president of the United States. At least that’s the impression she gives from the meta narrative with which she surrounds herself, with daily dispatches from Iowa where she hopes to win the straw poll in Ames on August 13. No matter that her family moved from Iowa when she was in the sixth grade — she learned everything that she needed to know there. “The voice that I learned growing up in Iowa was a very reasonable common sense voice and that is one that I’ve learned, that I’ve taken to – very successfully to the halls of Congress,” she told George Stephanopoulos in an interview on “Good Morning America.” The interview began with an odd admission; Stephanopoulous had asked the question: “In your announcement you said ‘my voice is part of a movement to take back our country.’ From whom?” Bachmann’s answer: “Well, from the people all across the nation.” Wait a minute. From the people all across the nation? The people all across the nation are those whom she and her voice and the “movement” intend to take the country from, she just said, as if the nation is under occupation by outside forces — or maybe just by a voice that did not learn everything it needed to know in Iowa by the sixth grade.

A Freudian slip, or did she simply misspeak? I can tell you which of the two would be my guess. That is because Bachmann is so very involved in her voice and her story, and where she grew up and how she did life; in her narratives, her voice is your voice is our voice is the nation’s voice. No other voice is. Even before she went to Iowa and tagged every reference to her personal history with the name of the state, Bachmann’s comments ran along a constant, self-referential loop; conclusions built upon a case study of one; not merely n=1, but n=Michele Bachmann. Her comments consistently take the structure of a logical fallacy that proceeds like this: “I did [something] once upon a time; therefore, this is how the nation should do it — will do it, when I’m president.”  She is currently so immersed in the business of creating a mythical self who speaks in an Amer-Iowan voice that one can’t help asking: do you hear other voices, Michele?  Like the voice of someone who grew up in say, New Jersey, or Oregon? Could there be children in these states who learn a very reasonable common sense voice — perhaps even everything they need to know — by the sixth grade?

“I’m a federal tax lawyer, I’ve seen up close and personal how devastating high taxes are on job formation.  I’ve also created a business with my husband so we know how to create jobs,” Bachmann said as she began her campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, place of Michele Bachmann’s birth, in case you hadn’t heard. In a nation that faces unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression and in a world where other nations around the globe are teetering at the edges of various economic brinks, Bachmann tells us that she created a business with her husband; therefore, she knows how to create jobs, or rather “we” know how — she and Marcus, presumably. So — no worries, people.  None whatsoever. Not only that, “it won’t take that long.” One might ask Michele Bachmann if she has ever started a business in this kind of economy, since that kind of case study would more accurately represent the sample population in her story; even so, the number of cases in her story would still be one. And if the reference to her experience as a federal tax lawyer is intended to demonstrate insight gained with experience, an article in The New Yorker indicates that according to former colleagues, in her four years at the office, with Bachmann taking two of the “generous” maternity leaves granted by her employer, the I.R.S., during those four years, her actual time logged at work was closer to two years and amounted to mostly “lightweight” work. The article also cites another one of those what-worked-for-Michele-should-work-for-all-of-us stories, dating to when she was in school; her shop teacher “had a board hung up in the shop class with holes bored in it, and he would use that on the backside if somebody got out of line. Anybody remember those days? That’s when I grew up. And it worked really well.” The board worked for Michele; therefore, we should all be spanked.

Bachmann’s constant self-referential moral of the story tales are concerning because she seems unable to differentiate her personal stories as personal without projecting them as the proper narrative for an entire nation.  When her parents divorced, Bachmann says that the family faced hard times “but didn’t go to public programs to bail us out. That is not condemning anyone who does, but my mother didn’t because that’s just the way our family was. She wasn’t going to do that. … She said we’ll just do without.” It’s a good thing Bachmann is not “condemning” anyone who does go to public programs, since as an adult, she has not exactly followed in her mother’s footsteps. Nevertheless, she portrays government programs as a threat to freedom. And her inability to engage in political debate without making it about herself is dangerous; during the recent standoff on the debt ceiling, she once again invoked her “titanium spine” as if that was what was at stake in the budget deal. She said that there would be no repercussions from a failure to reach a deal by August 2. “I want to state unequivocally for the world, as well as for the markets, as well as for the American people: I have no doubt that we will not lose the full faith and credit of the United States,” she said on July 28 at the National Press Club. Apparently the world wasn’t listening unequivocally to Bachmann’s voice as the “very reasonable common sense voice” she seems to hear in her head; and we didn’t even need to default for the full faith and credit of the United States to be at risk; the standoff itself was enough. But at least Bachmann’s spine didn’t give an inch, and that’s the story she can tell herself and her followers. No matter if everything else goes to hell. As she stood in Waterloo at the start of her campaign, Bachmann said: ““We’ll need to expand our message so people know who I am and what my vision is for the country and the hopes and dreams that I have that I want to share with people.” Again, there’s that voice: who I am, what my vision is, the hopes and dreams that I have. Nothing about listening to any other voices.

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Heaven Knows, This is a Heartland

by Kathryn Price on July 22, 2011

HeartlandWith wild, sultry heat and humidity making Moorhead, Minnesota the most humid reporting station on earth Tuesday evening, with our  government reopening after the longest state government shutdown in U.S. history, with two Minnesotans vying for the 2012 Republican nomination, and with U2 setting up for an outdoor concert on Saturday evening, a day with a forecast for strong and severe thunderstorms and a fireworks display scheduled a half mile down river from the concert, heaven knows, this is some kind of heartland.

I waited in an auto repair shop this morning expecting the worst and hoping for the best, as one does when waiting for the diagnosis of a grinding on-again off-again sound emanating from an indeterminate location just south of the left front wheel, or maybe the left rear wheel—it’s hard to say—one that kicks in only when you make a left turn under 15 mph—except sometimes it happens with a right turn, too, you think you remember now. As I waited, I thumbed through a June 2010 issue of National Geographic pulled from the middle of a stack of magazines piled on a rack in the waiting area.  In the issue was an article called Counting Cranes, about the number of wild whooping cranes left in the world (not enough, the article said), which made me think of my high school English teacher, Mrs. Vincent. Mrs. Vincent had a passion for whooping cranes. In addition to English, Mrs. Vincent taught whooping cranes, informally. It was a love that called forth to her even in the midst of a lecture on one of the modern classics, and Mrs. Vincent knew that love is always at the heart of the great stories. The whooping cranes came alive in her narratives about them, or rather, her rhapsodies, and anyone knew from listening to her that they were something too good to lose.  My high school was in Omaha, a hop, skip, and a longish—over 45 minute car ride along many intersecting dusty, gravel roads—jump from the Platte River, a way station for the cranes and other migratory birds, part of the Central Flyway.  The Platte is a river you could say I grew up on; my great aunt and uncle had a cabin on it, as did one of our neighbors. It is a river as wide as the horizon and shallow, filled with sand bars, and with strategic planning and some luck, you could walk and leap from one side of the shore to another, practically without getting into water at all.  You could stand in the middle of the river on a sand bar. You could dance in the middle of the river on a sand bar. From the Platte, I came to know rivers as places to walk in, and walk across, as places where you could leap, run and dance. I’m sure I whooped in that river, too, not unlike the dancing and whooping of the whooping cranes.  But I’m in Minnesota now, and the rivers are running high, and the heartland is sweltering with a kind of  heat that seems to shoehorn into emotional spaces that we didn’t know we had.

In the waiting area, the owner of the auto repair shop comes to tell me that they looked at the car, saw what appeared to be a bent rear brake plate, bent it back, and it seems good for now, and I’m good to go. “Don’t I owe you something?” I ask, slightly anxious, feeling that the conversation has ended prematurely and disproportionately, and that it is my call to do something about it. “No charge,” he says, “We were having a free front end inspection this week anyway.”  No charge? I had heard about this place which bears a once popular Christian acronym as part of its name, an acronym such as one you might find on a defunct televangelist brand brought down by the scandal of its founder. The name makes me nervous, but I’ve heard the shop does good work, honest work. The person who referred me is not a Christian, but said that the shop is run the way Christians should act—with integrity. I am a seminarian, and I’m not keen on the brand of Christianity that the shop’s acronym brings to my mind. In fact, it’s a brand I once fled from, and stayed fled from, for all these many, many years, but somehow I got Jesus again, in popular parlance, and that often puts me in an uncomfortable place.  A Christian is, quite honestly, the last thing I’d want to be considered when I hear the versions put forth by candidates whom God has allegedly called to run for the highest office in the nation. And here in this heartland, there is supposed to be some special values added stamp, as if merely being born here and living here gives one a primeval virtue blessed by God. But virtue isn’t regional, and the heartland, while dear to me, oozes with its own primordial tangle in its virtue talk. A lot of it seems to me to be mere blood lust, not virtue; a swift and sharp judgment for those who have not imprinted the model of family or relationships that the talkers have carefully defined in, oh, say, 14 point bulletins.

Yes, it is hot here in the heartland, and until my car ended up in the shop, I went out in the mornings and evenings to photograph water birds, Great White Heronespecially cranes, not whooping cranes, but their relatives: great white herons or if you prefer, egrets; it’s hard to get bird identification sites to agree on that one. They are closely related. We are all closely related, if you think about it, and I stand with the herons on this:  it doesn’t make a bird’s feather of a difference in what we decide to call them. Meanwhile, the whooping cranes are counting down, and I wonder if Mrs. Vincent herself is still around to know this. If they go, a particular kind of joy will leave the Platte River. We can issue bulletins about what family values mean, but in the end, what matters is what we do and are doing on this earth. There are all kinds of families here; too many to count.

I thanked the auto shop owner profusely for his service. Integrity matters, no matter what  your brand, and that small slice of auto shop heartened me in this heartland, acronym aside. Maybe U2 will sing “Heartland” Saturday night, one of their finest and most underplayed songs, in my opinion. “In the towers of steel, belief goes on and on,” the song says. And who wants to live in towers of steel? And what does belief count for, after all, if cranes count down while people stand there with their signed pledges of belief, before they, too, count down. The most fortunate people are those who love, with wild, indiscriminate passion, this world they find themselves in, the way Mrs. Vincent loved the whooping cranes. Who knows why she loved them? She just did. Bless her.

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The Legacy of Grandpa John, or the Buddha in a Rocking Chair

April 19, 2011

If there is some universal standard or karmic principle that calls out what is good, I’d have to say that letting giggling kids sit behind your rocking chair and mess with your hair when all you wanted was peace and quiet is one of the highest definitions of it. For all I know Grandpa John was having an internal dialogue that went like this: “For the love of God, why am I being tormented by grandchildren that I didn’t even spawn when all I wanted was peace and quiet?” But outwardly he remained as composed as the Buddha, if the Buddha ever sat in a rocker.

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Patrick the Pit Bull–Sometimes it Takes a Dog’s Spirit

April 8, 2011

Those caring for Patrick have said that in spite of all that he has suffered, he is gentle and trusting. Sometimes it takes a dog’s spirit.

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Patrick the Pit Bull: The Story in His Eyes

March 27, 2011

Never try to tell me that animals don’t have a spirit, for I will not believe you. It is there in his eyes, an awareness, a world-weariness, a sadness, but also a growing steadiness, a flicker, a spark. How he survived in the condition he did is beyond understanding, like so many other things in his story. But he did survive. Your days of suffering are over, Patrick, although it will take time to heal. Welcome to life. I wish that the same could be said for all who suffer.

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The Wild, Strange Heart of El Salvador

March 18, 2011

The mountains were cool, and in a couple of hours we’d be back in the heat and traffic of San Salvador, the humidity and the smoke and the coiled barbed wire and the craziness; the voices of the guards drifting through the window at dawn. But even before the sound of their voices, when the curtain that blew all night in the breeze finally came to rest in the first faint light, I heard, earlier and wilder than any other voices, the calls of birds, or some kind of animal–I never found out what they were. The calls seemed distant, as if they came from a mile or more away, but also loud, amplified. They were not chirpy calls. They were like peals. Maybe they were laughter. I heard them in the silence before the city awoke, and wondered at the wild, strange heart of El Salvador.

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Kolaches and Transcendence in New Prague

March 7, 2011

The bright sunlight outside illuminated the windows as we stood in the silence, and the centuries seemed to pour through them along with the light. We studied their inscriptions in Czech as we walked slowly along the length of the sanctuary. The detail was incredible and the symbolism, intriguing. The windows were telling stories.

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The Strangely Disempowering Universe of The Power

February 27, 2011

I discovered The Secret more than three years after everyone else.  I’d heard of it in passing, but I was busy during those years, and it was, well…secret.  When I finally got around to exploring it, I learned that a sequel, The Secret: The Power, was just days from publication.  I decided to wait for [...]

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The Reasonable Thing

December 3, 2010

I searched for each of their names as I stood before the Wall of Memory and Truth in San Salvador on a bright day in March earlier this year:  Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke.  Thirty years ago yesterday, on December 2, 1980, the four North American churchwomen were killed by a [...]

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