A Prayer for Boston

We pray today for every person affected by the bombings 
That every person who witnessed the attack find the support they need 
We pray for spiritual healing to activate itself in the body, mind and spirit of all who crave it
We pray for resiliency for the Marathon staff, doctors, nurses, EMTS and police officers who were there to help
We pray for Sweet Martin Richard's family... that the love they have for each other carry them through the days ahead
For every person suffering physically and emotionally, we pray that someone show kindness to them today 
We pray that the families of Newtown, CT are able to process and express all that this event triggers for them

We pray that the concern of people all over the world reach every person who needs it and that the miracle of love heals the unimaginable wounds of yesterday.

Amen

It Could Be Your Prayer

A few days after the shooting in Newtown, I was at the Heartworks House, preparing for a candlelight vigil we were holding that night. My sister Maryanne was hanging up photos of the 26 people whose lives were taken on December 14^th. I watched her cutting out the photos, carefully positioning them on poster board. The world seemed very small as I realized that some of these very same families had probably done a similar act for Maryanne, 11 years ago, without ever knowing her. Years before their first graders were even born, before the principal, school psychiatrist and teachers could have had a glimpse of the children they would inevitably die trying to protect, chances are these same families in Newtown, CT were watching the news and praying for my sister on Tuesday September 11, 2001.

They could not have known that in 2012, one of the widows they were praying for would be on her knees, a week before Christmas, taping a picture of someone they love on a poster board. I was struck by the image of Maryanne doing for them, what was once done for her. It was gestures like this one, the prayers said by strangers starting on September 11, 2001, that encouraged my sister to get out of bed every morning for 11 years to raise her children without the man she had been in love with since she was 16 years old.

As Maryanne worked on the posters, women began to fill our Heartworks office. We started to pray for the Newtown families. I recalled a conversation I had with my BFF on Maryanne’s front steps a week after the September 11^th attacks. It is a conversation I reflect on often, especially on mornings like this one, when I have sat in front of the television watching people’s lives fall apart right before my eyes. Women gather at Heartworks House on mornings like this, asking me “What can we do? What can we possibly do?” Often times I tell them about Amy and I sitting in front of Maryanne’s house when the crisp Autumn air seemed too heavy for my lungs to take in. I remember how challenging it was to breathe and talk at the same time. I remember asking whether I should focus on breathing or talking.

In those first few days after the attacks, all conversations felt thick, slow and muffled.

I kept swallowing, hoping the extra saliva would help make my thoughts become audible to the outside world.

I had something I needed to tell Amy, someone who depended on and loved God in a similar way that I did. I could only share my struggle with someone who had known me most of my life and who I did not have to explain any background or religious beliefs to. Amy knew my faith, she knew that I was someone people looked to when they were in crisis: when a trauma was causing them to doubt their belief in God. She knew that this is why I had become a social worker and grief therapist. Mostly, she knew how I believed in the power of prayer. She knew that when my brother had called the week before and said, “Turn the television on Megan, that’s John’s building on the news,” that the first thing I did was pray.

As we sat on the front steps, Amy asked me how I was. I told her what I had not been able to tell anybody yet:

“I feel terrified. Terror…that is the only word I can think of to describe it. I feel terrified, all the time.”

I was not terrified because there had been a national security incident. I was not terrified that we were a country on the brink of war. Those realities had not yet sunk in. We were still grappling with the unfathomable reality of John not coming home and how to explain what had happened to his 4 young children.

“I am terrified because I know that everyone is praying for my family...Not just a small circle of people who knew John…not just our friends and my parents’ friends and John’s parents’ friends…but people all over the world are praying for “the families of 9/11.”

and this means that every time someone prays, we get a part of it…

Maryanne gets a part, the kids get a part, Johns’siblings, my siblings, his parents and my parents too…we all get a part of the prayer.”

I had seen the news…the images of people in all parts of the country, all parts of the world, standing at vigils, setting up prayer shrines, lighting candles and placing flags across their towns…and even with all this…

“I am terrified because even with the whole world praying, this still feels like the worst… of the worst… of the worst…

Even with the whole world praying, we can barely breathe,

Even with the whole world praying we can barely get dressed,

Even with the whole world praying we can barely eat, drink or sleep,

Even with the whole world praying I watch my sister struggle to move her body from one chair to another.

I’m terrified that this is what it feels like, even with the whole world praying.”

Instead of looking at me, Amy’s eyes wandered across the yard and settled on my 10-year-old niece. After watching Kaitlin give a good, hard kick the soccer ball she had been moving around under her foot, Amy responded to me with as profound a truth as I have ever heard.

“Maybe Kaitlin finding that soccer ball to distract her for a few minutes is an answer to a prayer.

Maybe the call Maryanne got yesterday about the widow support group is an answer to a prayer.

Maybe the cartoon that made Molly laugh last night was an answer to a prayer.

Maybe Patrick and Colin being invited to friends’ houses this week is an answer to a prayer.

Maybe the coffee the neighbor brought this morning and the lunch delivered by that deli owner and the dinners being made tonight are all answers to prayers.

Maybe…every small effort that is sustaining your family is an answer to one of those prayers.”

I knew Amy was right, and from that moment on, I began to see everything differently. Any moment of distraction, any glimpse of relief or faint smile I knew was an answer to someone’s prayer. When Maryanne had the energy to make lunches for school or the focus to hold a conversation or the moments when the people I loved weren’t crying. All of these were answers to the world’s prayers.

I tell you this story because I know with a hundred percent certainty that the prayers and the seemingly small acts of kindness done for my family in the weeks, months and years following the events of September 11, 2001, is what got John’s family and my family through the darkest of days. So as we begin 2013, please don’t think of Newtown, CT and just shake your head.

You can do something - you can pray…

It does not matter how you pray, or what your name for God is. Pray as often as you can, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Don’t just THINK about the families in Newtown. PRAY for the families in Newtown. Your prayers carried our families through that first Christmas without John: that first New Year’s Eve, 11 years worth of birthdays, anniversaries, graduations and ordinary weekdays and weekends. The prayers 11 years ago were intangible intentions that played themselves out daily in thousands of much needed and tangible ways. They did not mystically lift the pain, but they surely played a role in Maryanne and her children moving through seemingly impossible days.

Pray for the families of Newtown.

Pray for every person living with unfathomable loss because Newtown is not alone in their suffering. There are other families too – like there were on that September morning – who are struggling with grief, just in a much more private way.

Pray, pray, pray.

Then pray again and again and again.

Don’t ever stop, make these prayers a part of your errands, job and workout routine. These prayers for Newtown and our world are desperately needed, especially when the news cameras have stopped rolling.

Know that it could be your prayer that helps a child find a soccer ball to kick around or a Mom to pick up the phone at just the right time or open the door to a baked lasagna being handed to her by a neighbor.

You never know…It could be your prayer that creates a moment of connection, or helps someone catch their next breath.

You never know when it could be your prayer that keeps someone going, when the darkness of life feels too much to bare. You may not know how the world’s prayers find their way to a grieving household in a small East Coast town, but I do.

So please keep praying.

Please forward this on to your friends who pray and your friend who don’t.

Christmas Morning Prayers 2012

I am brought to my knees, once again on this Christmas morning. My heart and mind expanded beyond my home as I opened my front door this morning to the frigid air and snow covered streets. As I had my traditional Christmas morning chat with my father outside by his memorial tree, I was reminded of Christmas past when in 2001, 3 months after September 11, it seemed impossible to have Christmas Day. We had a similar feeling on Christmas 2004 when my father was lying in a bed in Sloan Kettering Hospital and refused to let any of us come see him far even 5 minutes. "The thought of all of you home with your children, opening presents, will get me through my day." He said. I learned later that the pain was so intense that day, Christmas Day was the last thing on his mind. Then a year later, after he was gone, Christmas morning again, seemed impossible. Last year, my godson Charlie opened his presents with chemotherapy drugs sitting on the kitchen counter. Sometimes it just seems impossible to have Christmas. This year my father-in-law will not e with us. We will include him in the day in other ways. And so as I pray this morning I realize there is not more to pray for that other days, it is perhaps maybe about praying more throughout the day than usual because today, for so many families, seems like an impossible day to get through.

I pray for every family waking up today in Newtown, CT
For every soldier waking up over seas 
For their families waking up here without them
I pray for every family waking up in a new place, displaced from Hurricane Sandy
For every person waking up on a cold street this morning
For every person living through this day filled with grief
For all the people in hospitals and dying at home
For all families living with mental illness at their dinner tables tonight
For every person living with addiction
For every family living with cancer
For every family living with chronic illness
I pray for all families that are disconnected from each other
I pray for all the quiet, unknown sufferings of families while they open their gifts this morning 
I pray for our human brokenness, that we turn to God over and over again for light in the darkness.

And in honor of my brilliant little Mary, I am not putting an Amen on this prayer

Merry Christmas
May God bless us with gratitude, awareness and clarity

The Treads of Suffering and Kindness

On Friday as the events were unfolding in Newtown, CT I was sitting alone at the Heartworks House. I did not know about Sandy Hook Elementary School yet, but had a moment of complete overwhelm with the suffering taking place in the world. Looking around the office space at the mixture of inspiring quotes, pictures of bald mothers, thank you notes, deceased children, our "to do" lists for families, articles describing people's illnesses, posters of families in hospitals, war torn countries and military bases, Then there is the "Thank you" art and plaques hanging on the walls from Veterans and families we have reached out to, it all seemed a bit too much. The picture of Charlie looking back at me almost knocked me off my chair. Perhaps Heartworks was  doing a lot for people. Perhaps we were not doing enough. Perhaps we are doing what I am constantly preaching about: doing what you can, when you can, for another human being. I didn't know. But what I do know is that the amount of suffering we witness on a daily basis through Heartworks can be overwhelming to say the least. 

I sent an email to Maggie Doyne, someone I feel privileged to call a friend. Maggie runs an orphanage in Nepal that she built from the ground up. Her organization "Blink Now" is mind blowing and beautiful. I needed to reach out to someone else who allows herself to be present with suffering. I was having that all too familiar feeling of "What the fuck am I doing??? Why can't I be someone who is at the mall right now? I should be home doing laundry! Why am I constantly surrounding myself with suffering? Why can't I be more light hearted? Why am I so intense?" I was feeling alone. A loser like Katie Myler in grammar school. A weirdo.At the very same time, I was feeling a bit paralyzed by Christmas shopping, holiday meal planning and finding clothes to fit me for a fundraiser we had that night. How can I be thinking that I need a new mascara while sitting in Heartworks House? How do I exist in Bernardsville with so many comforts and yet so much suffering going on in beautiful homes  and hot pink J Crew sweaters. 

I think I wrote to Maggie because I needed to connect with someone who wakes up everyday and feels the suffering without the comforts (and illusions) I have everyday. She literally sleeps, eats and lives each day with some of the "poorest" children on the face of the Earth. I missed her. I wished that her sweet face was sitting at the table with me having a Diet Coke. As I looked through my contact list for her email I needed to scroll through a lot of names. ALOT of names. I felt ashamed. How could I feel lonely with all these names in my phone? Names of women who run brilliant foundations, others who come to Heartworks House on a daily basis to heal their own lives as well as give to other people. Names of people who love me and tolerate me and have allowed me to have this comfortable, uncomfortable, blessed and full life. I started to feel connected to the world again seeing all these names in my phone. I wrote to Maggie about how much I missed her and that I was blown away by her ability to stay present with the suffering without the comforts of New Jersey. I felt like I must have done something "right" with my life if 2 people I call friends live among the poorest of the world. Without fully realizing it, I was reaching out to her for inspiration. For some clarity on how to live in both the daily, comfortable life of Bernardsville and be present with the suffering of the world at the same time.

When you are present in the suffering of the world. It can be a sense of feeling connected and isolated at the exact same time.

A few minutes after I wrote to Maggie, the texts, calls and emails began to come in about Newtown, CT. At that point the reports were about 18 children being shot at a school. I went into the meditation room and cried and prayed and begged for the presence of God to work through the illusions of the human experience and make itself known at Sandy Elementary School. I prayed for the parents gathering at the school- that they somehow succeed in the almost impossible task of seeing Christ right there before them, in the worst of horror. This is nearly impossible to do in the moments of trauma because the physical and mental cellular reaction is so intense and altering. But I prayed for it anyway. At the same time I pray that the shock they were experiencing, numb their bodies and minds enough to allow things to register at a manageable rate. Even though I know this is all but impossible as well, I prayed for it anyway. All of a sudden all the suffering that I was feeling so "alone" about - felt like the it was being experienced by the world. I knew that if I was crying, so were others. If I was praying, so were others. If I was feeling like the world had flown of its axis, others were feeling the same way. I no longer felt alone at the Heartworks House. I was no longer alone in my questions and contradictions and awe inspiring awareness of the human experience. The world was once again connected by tragedy. The treads of suffering had simply become more public, more apparent and the story on the television was more potent than the Christmas advertisements for a new Lexus with a bow on top of it that seems to be so alluring to people. 

The thread of suffering that I was feeling for all of these private families, my own included, as we move into our first Christmas without my father-in-law, as my long time friend Patti starts chemotherapy, as my sister sits bedside as her father-in-law's breath slows down and last rights are read to him. In that moment on Friday, when word of Sandy Hook Elementary school got out, all suffering was the same, just showing up in different forms. Later that night, Eddie and I sat at tables with families living with Autism. The next day I followed a friend down the stairs carrying her 14 year old son on her back because the building is not handicapped accessible and she can't get him downstairs in his wheelchair. I got news that sweet Allie's mother put up a Christmas tree and took it down the next day because she could not handle seeing the ornaments that Allie had made throughout her short life. I began to remember the importance of me staying present with the suffering, and Its not that creative of a reason. It is simply that suffering is a part of the human experience and greatly brought on by our own free will. And if I choose to be distracted from the suffering of the human condition, I will not be affective in any sort of change, or comfort or ease for another human being. As a culture it seems we tend to believe or buy into the idea that the Lexus in the commercial can help us heal something, help us feel less alone, that it can snap us out of our sleep walking, to center and ground us. But it doesn't....Columbine did. September 11th did. Hurricane Katrina did. Hurricane Sandy did. Cancer does. Images of soldiers at war does. Hanging out with Veterans does. Orphans in Nepal and Liberia do too. I wish a new Lexus did. It would be more comfortable. Leather heated seats and that new car smell. But thats not the way it works. 

On Friday after the shooting in Newtown I got a call from Darlene. Darlene is a story of bravery for another day. I met Darlene in the Convention Center after Hurricane Katrina. I was volunteering and she had been picked up from her home in a row boat and was at the Convention Center in Houston, TX with nothing but the clothes on her back. She called me during Hurricane Sandy to check on my family. She called me Friday to talk about the suffering she knew the parents in Newtown were experiencing. She talked about her own suffering all those years ago and how we sat there together in Houston, two strangers on a cot, holding hands and praying. Brought together by forces way bigger than ourselves. Darlene understands her own loss and suffering which is why she is dedicating the life she has rebuilt, to serving other people in similar situations. 

Thank you for listening to me. It is cathartic to write in the middle of the night.  Below is my favorite poem. We read it all the time at Heartworks meetings. We will read it Wednesday night at a candle light vigil for Newtown. I feel like it describes all the things I am trying to say about how being present with our own suffering is an avenue to God and each other and the healing of the world.

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
 like a shadow or a friend.

by Naomi Shihab Nye from “Words Under the Words”

                        

Prayer for Sandy Hook Elementary School

In this moment we pray for everyone in Newtown, CT

We pray that every person at Sandy Hook Elementary feels the hand of God on them

That every family experience a sense of the intangible, ever present love

We pray that within the shock, people's hearts, minds and bodies are able to absorb God's presence

We pray for a miracle of faith to be activated in their hearts, on this, the darkest of days. 

We pray, we pray we pray

Happy Birthday Amy 12-12-12

I am leaving in a few minutes to go see Amy in Rhode Island for her 44th birthday...how can this be? Yesterday we were 12 years old walking the hallways in "the Dungeon" of BHS, in love with Jamie Boyd (and Dave Lanzetti and Brett Kiersted and Joey Russo and Bill McCollough and David Caffery and a few others). Now we are grown adults with children the same age as we were when we met. On this day last year me, Mo and Coleen got in the car and drove to surprise her for her 43rd. We walked in the door , Amy fell to the floor and we did what good friends do when they are visiting the home of a friend on her birthday while her son is in chemotherapy treatments. You drink wine. It didn't matter that it was 3:00 on a Sunday. Time, days and social protocols don't factor in during such a winter. We laughed, we drank, we cried. We met up with Amy's friends and made fools of ourselves. I fell asleep on the couch listening the the voices and laughter of 3 of my life long friends. It was a powerful birthday fueled by love, anguish, fear, trust and vulnerability.

A year later I am driving up to Rhode Island again. Charlie continues to have clear brain scans. He turned 11 years old on Monday and I get to see him tear through the door after school today. I get to see Amy and have a 12-12-12 birthday party with her and all of her friends. I am leaving the ridiculous, fabricated "stresses" of Christmas in New Jersey. I will drive in gratitude for 4 hours to see my friend and her boys. And I will miss my girls and Eddie. The Heartworks Advisory Board will meet this morning to continue our work. Katie and More Than Me won a million dollars. Poppy visited Madison in her dream last night. A dear friend had a much needed walk to a lighthouse yesterday, and I knew about it. Thank you God for your light through the darkness life brings. As I am writing this blog, the two songs that have played "randomly" on my iPod are "Here Comes the Sun"  and "After the Storm" My two theme songs of 2012. (Way before Hurricane) Thank you God for the sun after the storms. Thank you that I have such solid family and friends. Thank you for the chance to go to Rhode Island and laugh my ass off all day and night. It has been a long year, a long last few months, filled with love.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMER! You are one of my great loves XOXO
As I sign off, "All I Need" by Mat Kearny is playing...another good one. Powerful.

Katie Meyler, Standing in the Egg Aisle and 1 Million Dollars

A few years ago I was in the grocery store standing in front of the eggs. A beautiful light, a girl with wavy long hair was walking towards me. I could feel her energy before her hug almost knocked me over. We had met once....a few weeks before at an Indian restaurant where Heartworks was doing a fundraiser for two brothers, Zach and Kyle Ostrander who would die within 2 weeks of each other before 3 months of age of a rare skin disease called EB. (A story for another day) We had only spoken for a few minutes at the restaurant where she told me about the children in Liberia that she was helping, and yet when I stood listening to her in Shop Rite tell me about the child soldier she had waiting for her in the car, I felt I had known her all my life. Maybe this connection came from the fact that we had walked the same halls in grammar school, though many years a part. Maybe it was the restlessness that I saw in her...that something MORE has to be done...what the bleep was everyone in our well off  town doing??? We have roofs over our head...we have more than enough food on our tables....there was so much work to be done...what was everyone doing with themselves? But what I really think it was, and I found this out after numerous conversations in the years to come- is that we have both always felt like misfits until we found our causes and were given the chance to focus on something more than ourselves. I invited Katie to a Heartworks meeting..."come be with like minded women" I heard myself saying. She walked away, or should I say danced away, as she often does, past the containers of chocolate milk and I knew my life was expanding. I knew I was on the right track, that if my path would cross with someone so ambitious and so real, I must be doing something right. I was grateful that I was in a place that I could relate to her. That I understood her passion. I felt less alone in the world that night, standing there in front of the eggs with the young and beautiful Katie Meyler.

Katie came to the next Heartworks meeting...Where Katie met Katie Borghese and Kelly Kettersen...Both of which encouraged her to start an official non-profit. Both of which became members of her Advisory Board and both of which stood on stage with her last night when her organization More Than Me WON A MILLION DOLLARS from Chase Bank on the American Giving Awards.

Those of us who know her, and Im sure those who don't,  feel healed just by watching her tonight. I have a friend who wiped out on her deck the other night and smashed up her face. I know tonight healed her. A woman called me 2 minutes after the announcement was read, she knew a teenager who attempted suicide last week. I could hear in her shouting that she saw good in the world again. My girls watched Katie and understood that they sit in the same classrooms where Katie sat- where she struggled as a "looser" as she would put it- with her bowl haircut and hand me down clothes...I said - "Look at her girls, thats what a loser looks like"
I pray to have the courage to be a loser- to just be who I am without ego or concern for fitting in with the mainstream. If Katie Meyler sees herself as a looser...I want to be a looser too.

Things have been feeling very whacked out lately. Lately It feels like most everyone has lost their minds.  My friend Holly stated with great clarity that purhaps the reason for this is a combination of Hurricane Sandy, the recent election, the unemployment situation and people just feeling off balance in general. The energy was starting to whack me out a bit in the beginning of the week. Heartworks knows of  sooooo many families we could be reaching out to and it seems like there is crisis and suffering all around us. And the truth is that there is a tremendous amount of suffering going on in the world. But what we seem to miss at times is that it is the suffering that connects us.  Its what we all have in common, the collective struggle to find God, be at peace with our own brokeness and to love each other even though we are all going to have to say goodbye one day. And that day may be tomorrow. The uncertainty of things can paralyze us if we think to much about it. This is where the choice comes to allow the suffering to give us life or cause us to walk around in a fog of disconnection. Katie Meyler chooses LIFE. She chooses to be real and alive and authentic. I love her and love that she is at home on stage on national television and at home sleeping on the side of the road in Liberia. She is at home because she knows who she is. Thank you Katie for letting us know you too.
MORE THAN ME ROCKS! And so do the other 24 organizations Chase Bank honored tonight!