One year ago this afternoon, while driving back to our suburban Boston home after attending an in-town concert, my wife and I decided to give my brother in the Midwest a call. He too was in his car and said he couldn’t talk long because the clouds were looking ominous, sirens were sounding, and he needed to hurry home. In that region, where warm air from the Gulf of Mexico meets colder air flowing south from Canada, springtime alarms happen frequently and such precautions are a matter of course. Phone service was down later that evening so it was clear there was weather-related damage, but it wasn’t until the next day that I learned this storm was something out of the ordinary, an epic freak of nature touching ground at the worst possible location.

Besides being my birthplace, Joplin, Missouri is the commercial, entertainment, and medical center for what is called “the 4-state region,” an area where Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are in close proximity. Though my brother and I grew up on the Kansas side of the state line, Joplin played a major role in our development. It was there that I first heard many concert artists of distinction; my piano teacher, a former student of the legendary Leopold Godowsky, lived in Joplin; it was to a Joplin movie theatre that I took my first date; it was in Joplin that I first saw someone hit a home run over a fence (believe it or not it was Mickey Mantle, shortstop for the Joplin Miners); it was at a political rally at Joplin’s small airport that I saw presidential candidate John F. Kennedy don a miner’s hat and promise to protect the failing local lead and zinc mining industry from cheap foreign imports; it was also in Joplin that I got my first job, a summer position on St. John’s Hospital maintenance crew. At St. John’s I formed a work break routine of standing outside the chapel doors and listening to the Sisters of Mercy chant the liturgy of the hours. I had never been so enchanted. Though only one factor leading to my conversion to Catholicism, listening to those chants sealed the deal and thereby changed my life.

Once phone service was restored, I was able to get descriptive reports. One third of the city was destroyed. Rescue workers were disoriented because all location markers were gone. Eight thousand homes and apartment buildings had been severely damaged or leveled as well as five hundred commercial buildings. Thirty-nine churches, including St. Mary’s Catholic, were no longer standing. St. John’s Regional Hospital, the largest employer in the community, took a direct hit and patients were among the fatalities. The tally of dead throughout the community would increase with each passing day until it reached 161. What was once a heavily populated area now seemed like open prairie. The devastation and heartrending tales of survivors relayed by the news networks left me feeling numb and I am still haunted by memories of the pleas from an anguished couple who couldn’t find their child.

Two days later I received an e-mail from an old friend saying one of our high school classmates had been badly injured. Her home destroyed, she was found over a block away under some fallen trees and debris. Bruised, lacerated and with a cracked pelvis and broken femur, she was placed on a table top by rescuers and carried in driving rain to a pickup truck that transported her to a makeshift triage center hastily established in a still standing section of a church. Because the only surviving medical facility in Joplin was inundated, she was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Tulsa. Considering that many of my relatives and acquaintances live in Joplin, I felt relief only one had been physically harmed.
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Because of this personal connection, the May 22nd tornado triggered intense critical self-reflection. It was not a Job-like arguing with God as to why such terrible things happen to decent people, but rather a discernment of the way I live my faith. The process began when viewing the widely-circulated and almost completely dark Youtube video from a Joplin convenience store. Amid horrific sounds of destruction, a terrified woman pleads with Jesus to spare her life while a second voice calmly instructs people to lie flat on the floor and cover themselves. Memories flooded back of a lunchtime discussion about prayer versus action I had decades ago with a university classmate. Which was more likely to bring results in a time of crisis? As understandable as the plea for divine help was during this moment of terror, it was the person giving instructions who saved lives. True prayer, the kind that molds behavior, is not a bargaining, emergency-only tool but a gradual process of centering in God’s presence. The person disciplined in that kind of meditative routine is more likely to take action and this video made me realize the degree to which my private prayer is not only sporadic but self-centered.

I also recognized a personal, though commonly shared, form of passivity. With so many recent natural disasters - hurricane Katrina, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and tornadoes in other parts of the US - it is easy to push pleas for help out of mind. Parishes have special collections but most of us tend to respond in a limited way. Church musicians in particular, because so often underpaid, can easily rationalize that sacrificial giving of monetary resources does not and should not apply to them. I tried to remember a time when I had so given to a cause that it created personal inconvenience, but could not. I also began to look in a different light those parishioners who volunteer weekly in parish soup kitchens, food pantries, or the St. Vincent de Paul Society and began to question why involvement in liturgical music should exempt me from such responsibility.

A final insight came the week after the tornado when a national televised news program aired a clip of a Joplin church service. It was Sunday morning and folding chairs had been set up in a parking lot next to where a church once stood. The congregation was singing a hymn, unaccompanied. I thought immediately of the phrase that expresses what liturgy is supposed to exhibit: noble simplicity. Though it felt intrusive to watch the worship of those who had experienced such loss, it did serve to remind what actually is essential, especially for those fussy about liturgical practices. Free from ideological posturing and need for control, and deprived of any material resources, these worshippers expressed in the most direct manner their thankfulness to be alive and their hope for strength and wisdom to endure the trials awaiting. Noble simplicity indeed.