Crux

Firefighters from Spain to Greece have been battling blazes for months, with fires in Spain and France garnering sustained headlines all summer. Just this week, one of the largest fires ever recorded in Belgium was burning largely out of control, despite weather that eased conditions for hundreds of firefighters engaged in the battle. Those combatting the fires need spiritual care as well as logistical and other moral support. Speaking to Crux Now, the fire chaplain at the Utrecht Safety Region in the Netherlands, Leon Bal, said firefighters need acute spiritual support to help them carry on with their jobs in the face of trauma, guilt, and loss. “The overwhelming wildfires, where you cannot see the beginning or the end, and when firefighting sometimes seems to make no difference at all—that overwhelming experience, and the experience of powerlessness to save homes, and sometimes human lives—certainly calls for heartfelt and spiritual care,” Bal said. “That begins with acknowledging someone’s experiences, with listening in complete confidentiality and safety, as only spiritual caregivers can. And with finding comfort, courage, and renewed inspiration, to be able to pick up life again, to be able to bear it,” he added. According to the European Commission, since the start of the year there have been 1706 fires in the European Union that have burned 600,494 hectares. Bal, a Christian who has been a fire chaplain for five years and is himself a volunteer firefighter, told Crux Now he recently lost one of his colleagues who had been fighting the fires in Spain. he said. “Sadly, one of our colleagues also perished last week while fighting a wildfire,” he said, noting as well how several of his colleagues “have also been to Spain to provide support there and to learn from them.” “That has a tremendous impact on all of us,” he said. “I am very aware that we in the Netherlands face a different challenge than in southern Europe,” he said. “At the same time,” Bal added, “the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and wildfires very quickly pose a threat to villages.” Bal said that working as a firefighter involves being confronted regularly with mortality. “In our daily lives, we do live with a certain myth of immortality. That also makes life bearable. But the loss of colleagues brings this realization back to the surface,” Bal explained. “From the perspective of the fire chaplain, this is in some ways not a bad thing; it immediately reminds us of the seriousness of our profession, but also strengthens our motivation and sense of purpose,” he said. The full interview with Bal is below. Crux Now: In your time as a chaplain with firefighters, what type of support have they needed the most? Leon Bal: I have been a fire chaplain at the Utrecht Safety Region in the Netherlands for five years now. In this role, I support approximately 100 colleagues per year, both professionals and volunteers. By far the majority of colleagues come to me on their own initiative, or on referral from their supervisor or the occupational physician, with mental health issues that can be briefly summarized as: Life has become too much for them. They sleep poorly, their relationships suffer from the impact of the work experiences, they suffer from chronic fatigue or stress, they no longer feel like themselves, or they suffer from flashbacks, have lost the joy and motivation for their work, or even for life itself, for a shorter or longer period of time. The reason for this interview lies in the large number of wildfires raging across Europe, but to stick with this metaphor, when it comes to the mental burden on my colleagues, these are more like heath fires that affect more and more of their lives beneath the surface, rather than a single fierce, raging fire. We must dig deeper, beneath the surface, to discover that the profound events we experience at work (I am a volunteer firefighter myself) touch upon the way we give meaning and purpose to life, the way we view the world, how we deal with grief and mourning, and in many cases, that we are inclined – because of who we truly are and how the incidents really affect us—to avoid the emotions. Increasingly, we find ourselves in the role of the emergency responder who thinks they can handle anything. Until the system no longer works. Then we must give attention and love to our heart and soul, to find more connection again—with ourselves, with our loved ones, and, in a new way, with our work. My role as a fire chaplain is to guide them through this process. In my opinion, it doesn’t help to emphasise that someone has a problem; in most cases, you do not need a diagnosis or therapy. At most, we can establish that you do indeed have a heart, and one that can be moved; that you are, therefore, a human being after all. With a heart and a soul, which calls for a little love and attention. As a fire chaplain, I hope to be a guide on that path, from head to heart. If a Christian firefighter goes through a particularly gruelling experience, what solace does their faith provide them? It is usually not a single grueling experience that pushes firefighters to the point where they can no longer do their job. Rather, it is an accumulation; or in other words, every person develops, already in early childhood, their own style of dealing with traumatic events. As a child, you might adopt this from your parents—in a safe setting, open and self-aware—or in an unsafe setting, to protect yourself. Most of this happens unconsciously. Until you go through such intense experiences that no longer fit in your style of processing. The system then cracks and needs care. Science teaches us, including research on PTSD, that attention to meaning can be helpful in finding your way back to a system in which you learn to interpret the world and these experiences in a different, more healthy way. From my Christian faith, the theme of hope is crucial in this. Hope for an open future. A perspective in which you move beyond the paralysis and begin to see and find meaning in life again. Faith helps to interpret the experiences. Like Christmas, in which the coming of Jesus Christ signifies a light for a world trapped in darkness, or Easter, where so many have died and all hope is lost, yet there is a new morning and new life. Faith also offers us rituals, such as prayer and ways to lay an experience at the cross, to light a candle, or to visit a holy place – to seek the silence that is not an empty one, but filled with comfort and compassion. Have there been any experiences you’ve had, or heard about, that have really stayed with you? If so, why? I already mentioned that I am a firefighter myself. That means I have images imprinted on my retina that I will never lose. There are some places where an incident has occurred and someone has died—in a traffic accident or in domestic situations—that were so distressing that I truly wandered through them, searching to find a way through them, to find peace. The strange thing is that, fortunately, not all incidents affect you like that. But sometimes it becomes personal; you feel a connection through something small you recognize, or because it involves people you know. In my role as a fire chaplain things sometimes affect me deeply. You see how PTSD can disrupt the life of a colleague and their family, how working becomes impossible, sleep changes because of nightmares, and spouses sometimes suffer so much that a partner simply cannot cope, or can barely cope, anymore. I also do home visits. One time, a colleague with PTSD, whom I visited at home monthly, simply stopped answering the door. He could no longer handle the pressures of life. To be honest, I was sick of that too. Ultimately, my faith helped me through that as well, in a Matthew 25 way. I visited the afflicted, the sick, the dying, in the name of Christ, that is my faith. I did not leave him alone. That is where I find comfort. For the firefighters currently dealing with the wildfires in Europe, what will they be going through? What sort of support will they need? I am very aware that we in the Netherlands face a different challenge than in Southern Europe. At the same time, the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and wildfires very quickly pose a threat to villages. Colleagues of mine have also been to Spain to provide support there and to learn from them. Sadly, one of our colleagues also perished last week while fighting a wildfire. That has a tremendous impact on all of us. In our daily lives, we do live with a certain myth of immortality. That also makes life bearable. But the loss of colleagues brings this realization back to the surface. From the perspective of the fire chaplain, this is in some ways not a bad thing; it immediately reminds us of the seriousness of our profession, but also strengthens our motivation and sense of purpose. We know what we live for. And sometimes, as it says in the Gospel of John, “Whoever gives his life for his friends…” And then it is even for every person we do not know: we help, save, and go through the fire. The overwhelming wildfires, where you cannot see the beginning or the end, and when firefighting sometimes seems to make no difference at all—that overwhelming experience, and the experience of powerlessness to save homes, and sometimes human lives—certainly calls for heartfelt and spiritual care. That begins with acknowledging someone’s experiences, with listening in complete confidentiality and safety, as only spiritual caregivers can. And with finding comfort, courage, and renewed inspiration, to be able to pick up life again, to be able to bear it. You mentioned previously that you help firefighters with issues around identity and ethics. Can you expand on that? The work I do as a chaplain within the fire service is new in the Netherlands. I am the first chaplain with the fire service, and the only one in the Netherlands with this title. I am a pioneer, and I am working on a national network to make spiritual care just as commonplace as it is within the armed forces. It is simply the case that emergency responders experience so many traumatic events that a great demand is placed on their sense of meaning, which requires a great deal of reflection, wisdom, and understanding of human nature, whereas most firefighters are practically trained people who do not have many words to speak the language of vulnerability. There is not a single firefighter who has remained the same after 20 years of experience; experiences shape you and can also make you cynical, or you can become numb, hardened. Many firefighters also speak of being a firefighter as perhaps the greatest, most defining part of their identity. Then it is no longer a role you fulfill, but who you are. During potentially traumatic events—where you experience the powerlessness and limitations of the work, where we cannot save or prevent—those experiences can become very significant and heavy. My suspicion is that such a person may have joined the fire department because he had a diffuse identity, not sure who he was, who he wanted to be, or how he could connect with other people. While these roles—whether as a soldier, police officer, ambulance worker, or firefighter—can derive a strong identity from them, he also finds it difficult to distinguish between his professional and personal identity. There are risks involved if the work has in some cases no successful outcome. Who are you then? In the realm of ethics, the situation is slightly different. In defense and the police, there has traditionally been more attention paid to ethics due to their mandate to use force. As firefighters, we do not have to intervene in such cases. In that regard, we are different emergency responders. However, the moral compass is in a different way, still relevant during major incidents, such as wildfires, regarding where you draw the line of fire. Do you sacrifice homes to the fire, and how certain are you then that there will be no casualties? And as an officer, to what dangers do you expose your people, and where do the boundaries lie? Our leading officers receive hardly any training in this. Spiritual care offers a supplement to that. How does faith help firefighters deal with grief and mourning? Over the past five years, through the hundreds of colleagues I have supported, I have become increasingly aware that how we deal with grief and mourning is strongly determined by the work we do. This happens largely unconsciously, but how we handle it is like a muscle we train to temporarily switch off emotions in order to effectively combat the incident. During the incident itself, this is very helpful. However, it is not a switch we can simply flip from work to private life. The images remain imprinted on our retina, in our memory, and we remember certain incidents and victims in our hearts and souls. Especially when children are involved. In the years I have been doing this work, I have become increasingly convinced that we must inform our new firefighters about this; moreover, that we must provide them with the mental tools to maintain or learn a healthy way of dealing with grief and mourning. It is not uncommon for people to apply for positions in these caregiving professions who already carry a considerable burden. It is part of their sense of purpose to be able to care for others now as well. Care that they themselves may well have missed in their early childhood. That means that they probably also did not receive, during their youth, the mental tools to process grief in a healthy way. Viewed in this light, this work also offers them a chance to grow as human beings; it is not without reason that firefighters ultimately belong to the groups of professions that top the list of the happiest people. This certainly has to do with the growth we can experience as human beings in this work and the meaning we can have in saving people and animals, and, in wildfires, creation and biodiversity. Perhaps it is not directly about Christian values such as conversion and redemption, but certainly about contributing as rescuers of the Kingdom. What has been your biggest lesson from working with firefighters? Ultimately, I fell for the beautiful fellowship I experience with the fire department. We go through fires for each other. It reminds me of the three friends in Daniel 3. They refused to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar, even though they ended up in the fiery furnace as punishment. They said: “We believe in God who saves. But even if He does not save us, we still will not bow down to You.” This is the unwavering determination that I encounter time and again in my colleagues—perhaps most of the time not expressed so literally, but present at the deepest level—which I also recognize in myself. The storm may rage, the fire may roar, but when we are called out, we will be there. If necessary, we will put our own lives on the line to save another. That is how we do it. And whatever the outcome may be, we stand on the right side, that keeps us going, even if we do not all make it home. This is about a holy fire. I am grateful for being part of that fellowship and that I may do my job as the first fire chaplain in the Netherlands. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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