Page 9 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

viii Preface

In 1972, I got a job going to fires at night for the American Red Cross.
New York City was burning in those years. Four fires per 8-hour shift, 12
per day, over 4,000 incidents a year, each of which left at least one family
homeless. I drove mostly impoverished families to Red Cross hotels and
explained how and where to get more help the next day. Those who emerged
from fires with nothing to wear benefited from the 24-hour clothing-and-
spiritual care of Adventist Community Services’ “retired” Pastor Adam
Layman and his disaster boutique on wheels.
For me, the disasters just got bigger and farther away: a major air-
plane crash near JFK airport; a social club fire that killed 87 immigrants;
floods in southern states; refugee camps at the Thai–Cambodian border;
earthquakes in Italy, India, El Salvador, and Colombia; famines in Sudan,
Ethiopia, and Somalia; war in Angola; genocide in Rwanda; and then back
to tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, and terrorism in the United States.
For all their superficial diversity, what made each event a disaster was
extreme disruption of body, mind, spirit, family, home, livelihood, and
community. Those of us privileged to be the ones who personally bring the
comforting resources of the larger community to disaster victims must
and do struggle to find ways to be as effective as possible. We are obliged
to be as good as we can be.
Our challenge is to know how to comfort the sufferer and to bring him to
someone who can provide for his needs. Bishop Stephen P. Bouman, in his
book Grace All Around Us: Embracing God’s Promise in Tragedy and Loss,
lists first steps in his outline of disaster response. Show up. Attend first to
the ripples on the surface. Accompany the pain on the road. Respond, res-
cue, reach out, call, pray, touch, embrace, feed, shelter, touch, cry, reassure.
He relates the tender guidance of a South African bishop in New York
after 9/11:

In our culture when tragedy happens, we don’t all visit at once. We come a few
at a time, so that each time the person in sorrow has to answer the door and tell
the story again of what happened and shed the tears. As the story is told again
and again, healing can begin.
Bouman tells of Kathleen O’Connor’s reflection on Lamentations:

To honor pain means to see it, acknowledge its power, and to enter it as fully
and squarely as we can, perhaps in a long spiritual process. To do so is ulti-
mately empowering and enables genuine love, action for others, and true
worshipfulness.

This is hard and necessary, but we have to do this and much more.