Page 245 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

214 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

This made so much sense to me, I agreed to become a founding member
and key partner of New York City Recovers, a group of people versed in
mental health, community, and social organizing who were pooling their
time, talent, and treasure to help people recover from posttraumatic stress
disorder. NYC Recovers, a subsidiary of Columbia University Mailmen
School of Public Health, served as the organizing arm for this effort. Dr.
Fullilove and an army of volunteers launched a flurry of civic activities
to encourage citizens to find innovative ways to participate in communal
healing activities, such as telling stories (where were you when the towers
fell, what did you do, how do you feel?). Some other activities included
singing (a citywide choir sang in community centers); family cook-ins;
and a rally was held at Washington Square Park for all to bear witness
and to heal (I was the master of ceremonies). This and other efforts were a
small part of the tremendous outpouring of love in action and participa-
tory healing that popped up over this city and around the world.
I took a storytelling class at New York Theological Seminary; I learned
the power firsthand of people being free to tell their story. It gave new
meaning to standing (or sitting) on sacred ground. A friend talking to
a group I organized told one story I remember. She recounted her story
through her tears and sobs about how a young man of African descent
(she is Latina) found her blocks from Ground Zero, stricken by fear and
unable to move. He grabbed her hand and told her that he would not leave
her. As the great cloud of debris swept upon them, he pounded on a glass
door of an office building wedged closed by people afraid of the cloud and
managed to push her inside. As the cloud of death swept by, she looked
around the lobby and her angel was gone.
NYC Recovers allowed me to do something proactive instead of spend-
ing days looking at the Towers fall carried by a seemingly endless news
loop—all seemed lost or so I thought. The power of involving people in
activities that call for cooperation, teamwork, giving, serving, and dis-
pensing love in large, midsize, and small doses eventually turned sorrow
into joy—the very essence of true transformation.
It should be mentioned that there were faith-led efforts around the city
to help locate lost love ones, feed the workers toiling day and night on the
mountain of rubble, and provide chaplain services to the growing number
of the bereaved gathering in the shadow of World Trade Financial Center.
I met members from 40 Brooklyn churches made up of congregants from
the Caribbean community incorporated to deal with the needs of their
members (many of whom worked in various capacities in the World Trade
Center). A dear friend who is a Christian psychiatrist was contracted to