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Responses
I was on the bus when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. When I arrived at MIT’s Religious Activities Center, where I and the other MIT chaplains work, I noticed that there were police stationed at both entrances. Bob Randolph, senior associate dean for students, was just leaving the building. As we met, he said to me, “Well, are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” I said. This article is a belated answer to that question I asked of Dean Randolph on September 11th. It is a reflection offered on behalf of the MIT Board of Chaplains on our own experiences and, more importantly, on what was revealed to us about the soul of the student body by the tragic events of that historic day and the days that followed. What was it we had to be ready for?
The first thing we had to do was respond to the needs of others, and, honestly, that was a feat in and of itself. Like everyone else, we were in shock; we were in grief; we were speechless. And yet we were immediately called upon by the Institute to be available for students and others who needed care and attention, to organize vigils and prayer services, and to speak out – as the MIT administration did so well, in support of the innocence and rights of the Muslim and Arabic students in our midst.
The most important and helpful factor allowing us to survive those first few days and find the strength to serve the spiritual needs of the MIT community was architecture, specifically, the Religious Activities Center itself, where all the chaplaincies are based. Because the chaplains work side by side, meet together twice a month to plan, and share drinking fountains and copiers, we have relationships with one another as individuals, and a level of trust in one another as leaders. Many of the students in our chaplaincies know another, too, as they share facilities on a daily basis.
So in the midst of crisis, we were able to divide up tasks, stand side by side in front of crowds of people witnessing to our respect for one another’s faith and culture, and quickly organize interfaith worship services four days in a row. While on many, if not most, college campuses, chaplains are isolated from one another in offices squirreled away on the edges of the community, W11 allows us to strengthen and support one another. And the events of September 11th demonstrated in a powerful way how much that empowers us to serve the community.
The word “chaplain” means “one who is attached to a chapel,” and during that second week of September, we certainly lived into that definition, taking turns sitting in the chapel, being available to anyone who wanted to talk, from dawn to dusk. From the beginning, as we began planning events and arranging space, our goal was to find symbols and rituals that would help any person – not just actively religious people – process their feelings and find hope. As hundreds of people came through the chapel that week, most of whom people we did not know, quite a few of whom identified themselves to us as “atheists,” we offered universal symbols such as candlelight, silence, and readings affirming the value of peace.
With tremendous support and assistance from Campus Activities and the Dean of Students’ Office, we organized, advertised, and led interfaith events daily for the next five days, from a vigil on the steps of the Student Center on September 11th, to a noontime observance of the national Day of Prayer called for by President Bush, to a prayer vigil in which students from Harvard, BU, and MIT walked through Cambridge, stopping along the way to pray, reflect, and sing. What was most poignant about these events was not the words spoken by those up front, but the clear value for the participants of simply being together, and the way in which people who were complete strangers opened their hearts to one another. One chaplain, for example, was deeply moved at the September 11th vigil by a conversation with two MIT students of different nationalities, who stood together trembling with anger and fear, then listening to one another’s concerns about the difficulty of forgiveness, and finally embracing one another.
In our individual denominational gatherings in the days following September 11th, students asked to mourn using the traditions and rites with which they were most familiar and comfortable. In the Lutheran Episcopal Ministry, we turned to the Litany, an exhaustive penitential prayer used in liturgical churches in times of great sorrow or national crisis. At a special Hillel service, Jewish students sang songs of peace in Hebrew and English, recited the Kaddish prayer, and lit traditional yarzheit candles for those who had died. Students united across usually-observed divisions to pray together, with Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform Jewish students praying together in the immediate aftermath of the tragedies, and the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, and Episcopal student groups gathering together to pray for peace throughout the Advent season.
Several chaplaincy groups formally communicated to the Muslim Student Association their desire to be of any help they could to MIT’s Muslim community in the days ahead.
The Executive Council of the MSA says that, “the number of supporting e-mails and phone calls we received showed the closeness, compassion and mutual openness to and from other religions. We really came to understand who our friends were in the bleakest moments.”
We also witnessed what we would consider profound spiritual healing happening in places traditionally labeled “secular” at the Institute: in the Reflection Wall conceived of and carried out by members of the Architecture Department, which gave students a place for meditation on the suffering others had experienced and a means for communicating their hopes and fears; in the massive community gathering at Killian Court, where by simply showing up and listening to one another, personal vulnerability was sanctified; and in the running conversation on the walls of Lobby 10, which became like a cathedral to the human spirit, in all its passionate and messy dimensions; in the classrooms where students were allowed to talk through their pain and fear, which, as student after student reported to us, when it happened, was the greatest gift the faculty could give them.
Although we certainly saw many new faces in the crowds at our worship services in the weeks immediately following the attacks, as the semester wore on, it seems that most students gradually moved back into whatever routines they had been in before September 11th. At least in part, this probably reflects the realities of the rigor of the curriculum – the objective fact that to keep on track, students simply could not make much time for addressing spiritual or psychic dissonance. The exception to this “return to normalcy” was the campus-wide upsurge in a desire to know more about Islam, which continues unabated. During Islamic Awareness Week, the MSA handed out 500 Qurans, which is twice as many as last year.
For the students who continued or stuck around this fall as active participants in our chaplaincy programs, however, new questions came to the surface: Should we pray for our enemies? Can we forgive those who perpetrated or supported these attacks? Shall we pray for peace, even as the U.S. government calls for war? What kind of peace does our scriptures or our tradition point to – the absence of violence? or a lasting and just settlement between people?
We also heard from our students and felt within ourselves a new desire to deepen our understanding of the other religious communities at MIT. Although we share a building and have worked together on projects through the years, the events of September 11th and the reaction to them by the media and the world revealed to us the limitations of our own knowledge of one another. Chaplains began reading up on one another’s basic doctrines. Students felt challenged to push back the boundaries they had placed on relationships with one another as people of different faiths, if only by saying “hello” to one another in the hallways of the Religious Activities Center.
Although we have a long way to go in deepening our knowledge of one another, the process has already borne fruit. It began with generous invitations from Hillel to all the chaplaincies to join them for refreshments in their sukkah during the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles, invitations from Christian groups on campus to Muslim students to teach about Islamic prayer and faith, and a beautiful Ramadan dinner held by the Muslim Students Association, where students of all faiths broke bread together and asked questions of the Muslim students about gender, faithfulness, and jihad. We began to wonder together about the phenomenon of the growth of fundamentalism within all major world religions during the twentieth century, an issue addressed by scholar and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, whom the Board of Chaplains brought to campus at the end of October.
Although I have focused most of this article on the events and mood on the campus in the semester that has just past, as a chaplain at this Institute, I believe that the most important spiritual impact of the events of September 11th and following on MIT students are only just beginning to emerge. And the extent to which they are allowed to emerge is really in your hands as faculty. The most important spiritual impact of these recent events on our students will have to do with vocation.
Vocation means “to call out.” It’s a word tossed around a lot in religious circles, but its meaning is much more universal than the confines of any or all religions. Vocation refers to the ultimate purpose one strives for in the utilization of the skills one develops or discovers. One person I know refers to vocation as “the place where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.” The students you teach are developing the most powerful and well-honed technical and intellectual skills ever developed. What values or visions will they be used to serve?
Especially, but not exclusively for our students from the United States, this fall was a time when their understanding of “the world’s greatest need” was shaken up and their comprehension of “the world” itself challenged to expand. As she planned her second semester classes, one of my freshman advisees told me she wants to learn more about world politics. A graduate student I know is anxious for discussion with his peers about what this fall means in terms of research priorities, skill development, and communication between scientists around the globe. A few weeks before the term ended, the Bush Room was packed with students at a “Soiree for Social Responsibility,” – students who are hoping to find ways to serve those in need through their research and other endeavors.
Spending a few minutes every week talking about how what is happening in the lab relates to the events of the world does not detract from the integrity of the science being taught, nor does it threaten the mission of the Institute. Rather, it helps students who will be leading all of us in the post-September 11th world, to address the yearning heightened by recent events to discern their vocation. And that is a service to all people everywhere.
So while I began this article answering the question , “Well, are you ready?” which was posed to me on September 11th, I conclude by asking the same of you: “Well, are you ready?”
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