Thirteen years ago I was assigned to the headquarters of the Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C. I spent five years there as director of communications for the 10 Jesuit provinces. In 2001 I was approved to receive final vows and I made plans to do so in my Jesuit community there. Although I announced the event to family and friends, I expected to go through a simple ceremony within my local community. The president of the Jesuit Conference had been my provincial just a few years prior to this and I asked him to receive the vows.
My family and friends were not to be deterred, however. What I expected to be a simple event with myself and my fellow Jesuits turned out to be a social event of large proportions. All my brothers with their wives came into town. So did an aunt and uncle and three cousins and their spouses. In addition, some friends from home in Indiana also traveled to the east coast as did the family of a fellow Jesuit from Ohio. The ceremony occurred on a Saturday afternoon. The entire weekend was a festive family reunion. The ceremony took place in the Holy Trinity Parish chapel in Georgetown, a much smaller edifice than the parish church itself but historical because it was the parish's original building.
The one thing everyone remembered were the shadows of the airplanes flying down the Potomac river toward landing paths at Washington National Airport. Because the Potomac sat just below the university campus, the planes followed a path down the curving river just before landing. The chapel has a large window at its rear and the shadows of planes passed by regularly.
Exactly three days later terrorists struck targets in New York and Washington and the festivity of that weekend was gone. The World Trade Center was no more and the Pentagon was badly damaged. One of my brothers and his wife had stayed on in D.C. for a few days to do some sightseeing. They were able to leave Washington at their own leisure as they had driven in for the event. But a couple I knew well had flown in. They too remained to do some sightseeing and were due to fly out that September 11. They had even checked out of their hotel and were on their way to National. When it became evident there were no flights leaving, they returned to D.C. and tried to check back into their hotel to no avail. It took some doing but they found another hotel where they stayed an extra couple of days before finding a flight that took them through Charlotte getting back to Indianapolis.
Washington was all chaos and it continued for a month. I recall not sleeping well those nights. At that time no one knew what might happen but there was wide speculation as to what could happen. We all began to realize that if we had to evacuate the city, the only way to do so was to start walking the direction opposite central Washington. Later that week I took a walk down to the Mall and walked into a mostly deserted National Gallery of Art to view the section of American art. I remember buying a hot dog from a vendor on the street and the woman selling the food just shook her head when I asked how business was those days.
It is difficult to get very "spiritual" or think pious thoughts recalling my final profession. The weekend seems years away and the vows strike me as unimportant in the face of the disaster of that week. Only the reminder that one is obliged to keep living faithfully to God keeps the vow profession important in my mind and life. Evil can make us forget who we are and can frighten us into forgetting that God remains in control of what a Preston Sturges character once described as a 'cock-eyed caravan.' Only love destroys the hate and there sometimes does not seem to be much of that going around.
No comments:
Post a Comment