We know what you're thinking - on the one-year anniversary of the 9-11 tragedy, this is going to be one of those Pax TV-sponsored sugar sweet tributes every other magazine is dishing up around this time.

To avoid that, we asked to Door Contributing Editor and transplanted New Yorker Becky Garrison to find a religious soul who could talk with sincerity about their experiences working at The Pit without coming off as being too slurpy. Becky was the logical choice because she volunteered with a myriad of WTC relief operations-Church Seamen's Institute, Bouley Bakery, Red Cross, Nino's, Salvation Army, WTC Ground Zero Relief and Comfort Zone Camp-and her story about her volunteer experiences will be featured in the 110 Stories Project (www.towerstories.org).

She found Fr. James Martin, S.J., a Jesuit priest who left the corporate world of General Electric to enter the Society of Jesus in 1988. He even wrote a book In Good Company: The Fast Track from the Corporate World to Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience (Sheed and Ward, 2000) that illuminates how his transformation to a Jesuit priest brought all good things to life. (Editor's note: Sorry: Unauthorized bad GE joke.)

This editor of America magazine has a diverse background in social service having worked with the Missionaries of Charity in Kingston, Jamaica; the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, Kenya; and the Nativity School in New York City. Shortly after the planes hit the Twin Towers, he donned the Roman collar and did what he could for the days, weeks and eventually months that followed.

As a tribute to the firefighters, police officers and rescue workers he encountered during his tenure in The Pit, he penned the book Searching for God at Ground Zero (Sheed and Ward, 2002). Fr. Martin was gracious enough to chat with Becky about how this former lukewarm Catholic became a Jesuit priest and then during 9-11 ... let's just let Fr. Martin tell his story.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: What kind of Catholic were you growing up?
FATHER JIM MARTIN: I would say I was pretty much a lukewarm Catholic. My parents were both Catholic and my dad even went to a Catholic grade school. I would go to Mass occasionally and we would certainly go to Mass every Christmas and Easter. My family didn't favor the types of devotions that a lot of the very pious and very devout Catholics did, like reciting the rosary, daily Mass, and saying grace before meals.
DOOR: What was the turning point that caused you to leave General Electric and become a priest?
MARTIN: I finally realized I was miserable at my job. I had been working for GE for about six years, and the work just got more and more stressful and I got more and more miserable. One night I came home and turned on the television set and started watching a documentary about Thomas Merton. I was so totally captivated by his story that I went out and tracked down a copy of his biography, The Seven Story Mountain. I read it, and decided that I wanted to do something nearly like what he did the rest of my life.
DOOR: What was the reaction when you told people you were going to do this?
MARTIN: Since I'd had such a stressful time at work, a lot of them thought I was kind of running away from things. I didn't really have very many religious friends, so I really didn't talk to them about the decision. A lot of my friends thought I was crazy and joining some sort of wacko cult.
DOOR: Some people do consider the Jesuits to be a wacko cult. Like the Franciscans. But why choose the Society of Jesus when becoming a diocesan priest would have been a much quicker way to go?
MARTIN: I always tell people I could have been a brain surgeon in the time it took me to finish my Jesuit training. Basically what appealed to me initially was that you could be, for example, a teacher and a priest, a social activist and a priest or an artist and a priest, or an architect and a priest. You could do all those things in the Society of Jesus. As much as I admire what the diocesan priests do, I felt that for me being a parish priest was Š how do I say it?
DOOR: Boring?
MARTIN: No, a little too limiting. And that's not to say what they do is not good and holy work, but for me I like the idea that you could combine a particular occupation or vocation with your life as a Jesuit.
DOOR: How does the Jesuit leadership style differ from the GE "Jackass Theory" of career advancement?
MARTIN: This is not to generalize too much, but I found that when I worked at GE that the company rewarded people who acted like jackasses. So, I had this thing called the Jackass Theory. The jackasses were rewarded because they were tough as nails. They seemed to lack compassion and they treated their employees like dirt. As you moved up in the organization, with a few exceptions, you became more and more of a jackass. I was very surprised when I began interviewing with the Jesuits, that it was quite the opposite. The higher up I got in the Jesuit hierarchy the nicer the people seemed to be-and that really appealed to me. I thought there is something here that makes a lot more sense than the GE way of things.
DOOR: What does it mean to be a "contemplative in action"?
MARTIN: I love this phrase that Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, popularized. It means that one may change their contemplative stance, which is being aware of God around you and being mindful of the Holy Spirit in your life while you are living out your day-to-day life. So, it's almost like a monk in the world. That's another way of looking at it, that you are contemplative but you are also engaged. It's maintaining that prayerful attitude during your day-to-day life.
DOOR: How did your prior missionary work prepare you for your work post 9-11?
MARTIN: I'd like to believe that anything you do in your life can be brought to bear on current experiences and that God sort of prepares you for these things, for your present is bound by what you did in the past or what happened in the past. Basically, when I was in Kenya working with the refugees I saw what it meant for people to face enormous suffering on such a widespread scale. That's something I definitely experienced at Ground Zero, not only the depth with which people were feeling and suffering but also the breadth of the suffering, so many people being affected. That was the same for the refugees in East Africa.
DOOR: One of the criticisms for doing rescue work down at Ground Zero is, "Why aren't you working with the homeless instead?"
MARTIN: You could make that criticism about any kind of work. I mean, you could say to someone in the hospital, "Why aren't you working in a soup kitchen?" and then say to someone in a soup kitchen, "Why aren't you working overseas?" I think we can do only so much and each person has to respond to whatever they feel is the individual call in their own lives. It's like St. Paul said-the Christian community is like a body. It's like saying the hand can't say to the eye, we don't need you anymore and then the eye can say to the hand, well we don't need you. Does everyone have to do the same thing? I think that's a strange response.
DOOR: Speaking of strange responses, where do you think God was on 9-11 when the planes hit?
MARTIN: It's a hard question. That's the question of the mystery of evil and the mystery of suffering. Quite frankly that question of the theocracy has no real satisfactory answer.
DOOR: ???
MARTIN: I prefer to look at where was God after those things happened and God was very much with the rescue workers. I'm sure God was there in a mysterious way. It's very hard for us as human beings to see where He was at the moment that the planes hit
DOOR: What prompted you to volunteer your services?
MARTIN: I felt the immediate need on Sept. 11th to volunteer at a hospital, so I went right over to Saint Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, which was a few blocks away from my Jesuit community that night and just volunteered. On a very human level I wanted to help and on a different level, as a priest, I knew that they would probably need priests at the hospital. It turned out they didn't need anyone, so I went down to Chelsea Piers, which was a sort of triage center and they also didn't need anybody. I went back the next day to a family counseling center down at Saint Vincent's Hospital and helped counsel some of the family members and friends of the victims. The next day I went back to Chelsea Piers and they were overbooked with priests, ministers and rabbis. When I was standing on the street outside, I asked a police officer if they needed any help downtown and he said yes. He waved his hands and a police car materialized. The door opened, I got in and they took me right down to Ground Zero.
DOOR: What was your initial reaction to the site?
MARTIN: I found it very disconcerting and very confusing. I really couldn't take it all in. I think part of it was that I was very frightened of coming on body parts and things like that. There was also a lot of adrenaline going through me, so I really wasn't able to take it all in. There was so much going on, as there were huge crowds of firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers milling about. There was trash, paper, crushed fire trucks, water, dust, ash, fires burning, smoke and metal. It was very difficult to take it all in and I felt like I was seeing only a very small part of a very big picture.
DOOR: What made you keep coming back?
MARTIN: It sounds odd but I ended up wanting to go back numerous times because, first of all, I felt a great need. This is very similar to my experience in East Africa. When I worked with the poor in East Africa there was never a question of whether or not you're needed. It was the same at Ground Zero. There was never a question of whether or not the Jesuits were needed. There were hundreds of Catholics there and they were always very happy to see us. I just felt very welcome there and also very useful, so that was one thing. Also, on a human level, as a New Yorker and as an American, I wanted to help out.
DOOR: What drew you to the site from a spiritual standpoint?
MARTIN: I really felt the Holy Spirit sort of calling me there. Also, I think I felt, if I can speak about this in a spiritual term, I had a very deep and very profound experience with the Holy Spirit and I wanted to experience that spirit again.
DOOR: How is the story of the rescue workers at the World Trade Center a parable of our times?
MARTIN: Like any parable, it's a very simple story drawn from real life that as the scripture scholars say, tease the mind into active thought. In the parables in the gospels you have questions like "What is God like?" Jesus uses a number of metaphors such as a mustard seed, a pearl, and a banquet. I would say, "What is God like? God is like the firefighter who goes into the burning building to rescue people." That's a real parable. I think that story of the firefighters and the rescue workers rushing into those burning buildings and giving up their lives affected people because those stories spoke to them in a very deep and spiritual level. But I think God in the midst of this suffering was offering us this very profound parable, this very profound sign of the way He is and the way that God's love is.
DOOR: Firefighters and police officers are a breed apart.
MARTIN: I had never really worked with firefighters or police officers before. One of the things that the Holy Spirit does is create community. So, I think it's perfectly sensible that people would feel this great bond together because the spirit unites.
DOOR: What does it say to you that the first dispute you encountered, on Saturday, Sept. 16, was a religious one, when someone told you that the workers didn't want you to say Mass, but rather talk to the men?
MARTIN: What that said to me was that even though I thought the Holy Spirit was bringing us together, we still have a long way to go. And it also, in a very ironic way, pointed out the genesis of this crisis, which was fundamentalists doing something in the name of religion.
DOOR: What was your experience of celebrating Mass at Ground Zero?
MARTIN: Deeply moving, I tell the story in Searching for God at Ground Zero that the first Mass we had was on the weekend following the attack. We were all at a very small dust-covered table with the chalice, the paten, and the bread and the wine on top of it and we celebrated Mass. There were quite a few firefighters and police officers gathered around. After the Mass, we had distributed communion to all of the firefighters who were coming up to us. A lot of them were falling to their knees in the middle of the ash and the dust. It was very poignant to see these people who were needless to say extremely busy and taking time out of their day for some sort of spiritual sustenance.
I also tell the story that around the site there were signs placed everywhere. Some signs would say "Eye Wash Station," "Morgue," "Glass," or "Danger." After we had celebrated Mass, we moved to the side and were distributing communion, when someone placed a huge sign next to the altar that said "Body of Christ" on a big wooden plank, spray-painted in orange letters. It was very moving and I thought, "Yeah, this is the body of Christ. This is the body broken and bloodied here at Ground Zero. It's the body of Christ brought together in the spirit of community and it's the body of Christ that's really the church. The church is here with these people-and I'm not just talking about the Catholic Church but the Christian church. This is the church here with these people and this is the body of Christ resurrected in this situation where so many people have been brought together in this desire for new life."
So, as a friend of mine said, "Whoever painted the sign was very theologically astute."
DOOR: In what way do you think these rescue workers are a living example of Jesus' love?
MARTIN: The firefighters who raced into the burning buildings are a clear example to me of self-sacrifice. You know, greater love has no person than the one who lays down his life for others. That's what those firefighters did when they raced into the buildings. I think that's a very counter-culture image because we're so used to people doing things for personal aggrandizement and personal advancement. It's a very Christian image.
DOOR: How did the image of Jesus as a suffering servant inform your ministry there?
MARTIN: I think that the suffering servant tries to put themselves in whatever ministry they're doing. What I tried to do was to basically do my best and when I was tired or minor things like my feet were hurting, I tried just to be there.
One other point, I felt like I was ministering to the suffering servants, who were the rescue workers that really were putting themselves on the front lines. It encouraged me to find Christ in that and to find the suffering servants down there.
DOOR: How did you know when it was time for you stop the ministry and let others take over?
MARTIN: At the very beginning there was a great need that I hadn't really felt before. But towards the end there were other people ministering down there, as there were more and more relief workers. Also, there were fewer and fewer firefighters and police officers because they were being brought back to their station houses and firehouses. So it really did feel eventually toward the end that I was getting in the way. I thought, "Well, that's it. The spirit had sort of called me down there, and the spirit was saying, 'Okay, I think your work is pretty much done.'"
DOOR: What does it say to you that Fr. Mychal Judge was the first person pulled from the rubble? They gave him the number 0-0-0-1.
MARTIN: I think it shows the enormous respect that they had for him, I found his story very poignant and very inspirational and they loved him. They were always talking about Fr. Judge, and actually he made my job going down there a lot easier because they really accepted me a lot more readily.
DOOR: What was your initial reaction to the catch phrase "Ground Zero?"
MARTIN: I hated that term. It sounded too jingoistic and Hollywood. It's become sort of the general lingo but I noticed down there that people would refer to "the site." They would say, "the site" or they would say, "down there." When you were down there they would talk about "the pile." Very few people down there say Ground Zero. Now it's kind of entered the common parlance, which is one reason I had to use it in the title of my book.
DOOR: As the relief efforts wore on, there seemed to be this turf war going on among the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and Trinity Church. Are you familiar with that?
MARTIN: Every time people talk about disputes in the church and whatnot, I always point them back to Peter and Paul, so it's not a new thing. But at the beginning it was just chaos, it certainly was hard to tell who was running what, you had this alphabet soup of everybody.
DOOR: When the Salvation Army took over the respite center in the Hot Zone in early December, they brought in a significant number of their missionaries-in- training, so they could get some practice down at Ground Zero.
MARTIN: There is a fine line between ministering and proselytizing. Both of those are the work of evangelization but there is a time to proselytize and a time to just minister and listen. I guess some people forgot that down there.
DOOR: In fairness, they soon stopped having them down there.
MARTIN: That's kind of a strange laboratory. To use Ground Zero as this lab to train people is kind of strange. I would think that given the magnitude of the crisis you would only want the best and most well trained people down there.
DOOR: What was your reaction to Jerry Falwell's comments blaming certain liberal groups for creating the climate the led to the attacks on 9-11?
MARTIN: First of all he apologized for those, and I was glad to hear that.
DOOR: Did his comments bother you?
MARTIN: I think any thoughtful person would have been offended by that kind of comment. It's really blaming the victims. I said to somebody, "he was talking about the pagans, gays and lesbians bringing this on themselves but what about the good and holy people that were killed in the World Trade Center? They certainly didn't bring it on." I don't think anyone brings evil on to himself or herself like that. I certainly disagree with that, but he apologized for it.
DOOR: Given that many of the relief workers are Catholic, what role can the Catholic Church play in this whole process?
MARTIN: One thing would be to help minister to the ministers. Also, mental health professionals who are Catholic can help Catholics who have worked there come to terms with understanding their own emotions that they face, as well as trying to reflect with them on the spiritual meaning of what they saw down there, and what they did that night.
DOOR: To say that a lot of those Catholic priests are pretty drained and exhausted would be an understatement.
MARTIN: I know that early on it was extremely difficult for the Catholic priests who were doing the lion's share of the funerals and counseling the survivors.
DOOR: I noticed in your book that you pretty much put yourself in the background.
MARTIN: When I wrote my book, one of the publishers said to me, "We want to put more of you in there." I thought that was exactly what I did not want in the book. I put my own thoughts and emotions in, but the book was primarily about the firefighters and the rescue workers and how I experienced God in them. I really wanted to keep myself out of it and I thought it would have been really monstrous to say, "Oh, how difficult I was having it," because in point of fact they were having it much more difficult.

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