A beautiful day: WTC as seen from Queens
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHH GARVEY A BEAUTIFUL DAY A horrible event On September 11,1 heard that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers, and thought it was a terrible accident;...
...but the truer history of the human race is the daily fact of cooperation, help, and even love...
...That was apparent in many ways after the attack...
...the subways she needed weren't running...
...I thought of Saint Paul's words about the truest prayer: the Holy Spirit prays in us, with groans too deep for utterance...
...This must be understood by faith...
...And while the vulnerability can make us more tender, it can also make us want to strike out...
...It occurred to me that on this side of the grave the cross is the most obvious fact: human beings suffer and die...
...Gandhi said somewhere that what we usually regard as history is a history of failures, a history of human beings behaving in disastrous ways...
...The birds sing, a breeze is blowing, the trees are lovely...
...That's how we are praying now...
...It wasn't an easy night to be alone, but I was glad she was safe...
...One woman in our congregation told me that she found it hard to pray after this horror...
...and I felt a deep foreboding, one I feel every time I see an airplane now...
...It is not a small thing that while all the Gospels describe the crucifixion of Jesus, not one describes the Resurrection...
...We know more than ever how small and vulnerable we are...
...I was reminded of a chilling passage in Endo's Silence...
...Commonweal 7 October 12,2001...
...Almost any words said in the face of this sort of evil sound pale and trivial...
...Archbishop Anastasios of Albania has said that the Resurrection begins in the cross, and this is where our faith must be, especially in a time when we are confronted with evil and hatred on such a massive level...
...The Sunday following the disaster was, on the Orthodox calendar, the Afterfeast of the Elevation of the Cross...
...and while there are nervousness and anxiety on the streets, there is also a tenderness I have never seen Commonweal 6 October 12,2001 before...
...When I mentioned this to my sister she said, "There's something sacramental about that," and it is a dark truth...
...When I looked west down the Long Island Expressway I could see the horizon full of smoke...
...there were the people who lined up to donate blood in such numbers that the system could not accommodate them...
...As I drove to church toward the end of the week I saw a few planes in the sky and had two emotions at once: things are returning to some sort of normality...
...There was the heroism of the firefighters and rescue workers...
...The small Orthodox church I serve as pastor is usually full on Sundays...
...She spent the night in Harlem with friends...
...When he appears to the disciples at Emmaus the risen Lord appears as a stranger...
...While some response is clearly called for, if it involves innocent civilians it will harden not only the hearts of our enemies, but our own...
...It is not, however, a faith that on this side of death everything will be all right...
...My wife called to say that she probably couldn't make it home from Manhattan that evening...
...But we do have members who know people who were...
...I live in eastern Queens...
...the cross is all too obvious, and we can be stopped by it, we can think that this is all there is to life...
...When I woke late at night I heard an airplane, and knew it was a military plane...
...We are shown the empty tomb...
...During the persecution of Christians in Japan a priest is told that unless he renounces his faith, those he has been serving will be drowned, one by one...
...within minutes another plane sliced through the other tower, and we all knew that it was not...
...I thought of the attention to breath that is important in meditation practice, and wondered as I breathed not only what I was breathing in, but who...
...the cross is its beginning...
...All I could think to say was that while we can't help being obsessed by this mystery of evil, by the hardness of the hearts behind it, there are also mysteries of goodness...
...we do not see him rising in glory...
...Faith in the Resurrection does not cancel out what happens on the cross...
...There is nothing obvious about the Resurrection, nothing easily seen or grasped...
...We were lucky, in a way...
...The light and air on the day of the attack were beautiful...
...A couple of days later the streets in our neighborhood were filled with the smell of burning and a haze that stung the eyes, blown in from lower Manhattan...
...I realized that this was an unusual thought for an American to have...
...The Sunday following the horror it was packed...
...and as they are dying, Endo makes a point of the fact that the day was beautiful...
...no one in our congregation was lost...
...there was the fact that so many of those final phone calls, from the towers and from the planes, were not calls for vengeance, but final declarations of love...
Vol. 128 • October 2001 • No. 17
