Mychal's Prayer

The other day, when my wife came home from the hairdresser, she showed me a card. On one side was a color photograph of a Franciscan priest, dressed in a dark brown habit, a white rope around his waist, standing on a beach looking out to sea. The priest was Mychal Judge, the chaplain for the New York City Fire Department at the time of the 9/11 attack.

When he heard that the twin towers had been hit, he rushed to the scene and administered last rites to those lying on the street. He then entered the lobby of the North Tower, where he helped the injured and offered prayers. When the South Tower collapsed, debris flew through the North Tower lobby and killed him along with others. He was not the first to die that morning, but he was the first victim brought to the coroner and thus became the first certified victim of the attack, victim 0001.

“Even before his death, “ reports the Wikipedia article about him, “many considered Father Mychal Judge to be a living saint for his extraordinary works of charity and his deep spirituality.” The article quoted Father John McNeil, his former spiritual director, who said “We knew we were dealing with someone directly in line with God." The breakaway Orthodox Catholic Church of America has declared him a saint.

My wife found a pile of cards with Judge’s photograph next to her hairdresser’s cash register. On the back of the card she found a poem. Titled “Mychal’s Prayer,” it reads as follows: “Lord, take me where you want me to go. Let me meet who you want me to meet. Tell me what you want me to say and keep me out of your way.”

With no belief in a divinity that presides over the universe or pays the slightest attention to any of us, I was surprised by how much the prayer moved me. It packs a maximum punch with a minimum of means, employing only one-syllable words and a repeated grammatical structure. With this poetic prayer, the believer asks to be an instrument of the Divine will.

As for me, I interpret the prayer as a call to follow the dictates of what in Hebrew is called yetzer hatov, the impulse for good, and to resist yetzer hara, the impulse for evil. The prayer calls on me to follow a set of ideals that are embodied by the Jewish spiritual tradition of mussar, such as humility, compassion, honor, simplicity, and generosity. “Keep me out of your way” represents the need to resist my own laziness, timidity, and selfishness, traits that encourage me to ignore these ideals or rationalize them away. If these ideals are not universal, they ought to be. Just as you don't have to be Jewish to like Levy's rye bread, in the words of the old advertising campaign, you don't have to be Jewish to aspire to these ideals. Mychal Judge’s life represented them to the highest degree.

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