A 911 Memory

           

            What I remember most vividly is the taste, that metallic gritty gray taste, in my mouth as my friend Marika and I walked in silence around the huge crater we call Ground Zero. It was November 2001. The ruins of the Twin Towers still smoldered. The people on the streets of lower Manhattan washed and scrubbed clean of ashes, were ashen still.

            But I get ahead of myself.

            I heard the news, as we all did, with a numb shock. I slept in that morning after a long church meeting the night before. I was dressing to go to a committee meeting when my mother called and told me to turn on the TV. I rarely did that first thing in the morning pre 911 and almost always do now.  Just one of 911’s aftershocks in my life. 

            My dear friend Luanne’s husband Fabrizio and son Jack were to fly to Italy that day for a family wedding. They were, of course, the first to cross my mind.  Where were they?  It was some hours before I knew so the catch in my throat was specific, had faces, names, a shape and a history.

            As the numb day crept by, I did what pastors do. I checked on my people and organized a prayer service for that night, candles and psalms of lament, comfort and a deep stretching for hope.

            Over the next weeks we shuddered through our new lives, didn’t we? Bits of truths and half-truths surfacing and submerging daily.

            The church where I was pastor in Birmingham Alabama was evacuated one day, in October I think, because white powder had been found in envelopes delivered to the Birmingham News Building next door.  Confused men in HAZMAT suits told us to take the 70 children in our child development center to the old church basement and stay there.  The little ones formed straight lines as they had been taught, holding hands fore and aft, like baby elephants trunk to tail in a circus, as they followed their teachers down the dark rickety staircase. 

            “Is it time for us to die yet?” one little one asked.

            “No honey, no,” his teacher assured in a honey voice as she shifted the two infants in her arms a little higher on her hips.

            Shortly the fire crews came back and told us to go home. They handed us surgical masks as we filed out to the parking lot. Baby powder, as it turns out.  A cruel and expensive hoax.

            In those early days we changed, as hard as we tried not to. As desperately as we did not want to give the terrorists that particular win, we changed. Our young country grew up in a way. War on our shores with an enemy so amorphous as to be nearly invisible made us look at each other in different ways. Arab taxi drivers in New York plastered their cabs with American flags. Sikh men, the most peaceful of religions, were detained everywhere simply for wearing their turbans. Despite ourselves, our shock and confusion lashed out at ‘foreigners.’ Even Muslim Americans whose families had been in this country for decades became pariahs in their workplaces and communities.

            We did not know what to do with our fear.

            We did not know what to do with our outrage.

            We did not know what to do with our impossible need for things to go back to the way they were.

            ******

            Each fall my mother and I took the Amtrak Crescent from Birmingham to Penn Station for a week of theater going. We were scheduled for our trip in November. We debated.  Should we go?  Would we be safe?

            We watched on television as New Yorkers valiantly tried to respond to the tragedy. We watched the streets empty of tourists. We saw clips of Broadway actors tap-dancing their hearts out to nearly empty theaters. We decided that we would go, if for no other reason, to support in our small way the economy of New York and to see our friends who lived there.

            *********

            As the train rounded the awesome curve in the tracks past Newark, we saw the snaggle-toothed skyline. Like a third grader’s smile in a class picture, the city’s face was set in a grimace. A plume of smoke still rose into the air. We could hardly bear to look. Mama and I decided then and there that we would not go down, we would not visit the crater, gawk at the scene of the crime.

            And yet.

            One of my parishioners, Marika, had recently moved to Westchester County. We had made arrangements weeks before to meet for the day to catch up. The plan was to go up town to the Cloisters Museum to see the Unicorn Tapestries, great medieval tapestries rich with as yet unexplained symbolism. And so we did. Meeting with a long hug, we made our way to the museum, just the two of us in a sea of shaken people.

            After we saw the gorgeous ancient things--the soft colors almost felt living--

we sat in a quiet chapel together talking about everything. I don’t remember debating it or even really discussing it at all.  Suddenly we just both knew that we needed to go to the site. So we took the subway as far as the line went, destroyed as it was, and walked the long blocks to Ground Zero.

            It was a clear day up town, but down town the air was still thick with dusty particles that we shuddered to think about. The area was huge, blocks and blocks and blocks. Fences were erected all around the perimeter.  Sheets and tarps covered them to shield mourners from the total grimness of the task taking place in the deep, deep pit.

            It was possible, if one tried, to look through cracks and see the responders in their protective gear, their search dogs like small insects moving through the charred and smoking rubble. The so-called cathedral girders stuck up eerily.

            The street was silent, thronged with people just walking, looking and feeling. The fences, thick with flowers at the base, were covered with messages in dozens of languages scrawled or carefully written on the fabric coverings.  Tiny Japanese, Korean, Chinese characters in neat up and down rows.  Sharp Russian with its hard edges.  Round and sweeping Arabic.  Dimly remembered Hebrew and Greek. Tamil’s tiny circles. Guttural German, fluid French, melodic Italian, bent shouldered Polish.  Too many to identify.  Too many to number.

            Pictures of the lost were stapled to the sheets.  A third grade picture and the words “I love you son, Mom.” Someone’s New York Marathon medal hung from a wire: “It wasn’t the same without you.”

            In a churchyard, volunteers handed out sandwiches to workers on break and held grown men in full fire gear as they sobbed with their faces lost in their hands. Murmurs of comfort and the wracking crying of the responders were the only sounds that I remember. That and footsteps, hundreds of muffled footsteps.

            So we walked.  We just walked.

            The next week I knew that I would preach on Jesus walking on water; that mysterious image of Jesus coming to his frightened friends in the midst of a great storm, across the sea…an ancient symbol for chaos. Perhaps that was what was running through my mind.  I don’t know. But suddenly, take my breath away suddenly, I could see him. Not with my eyes but with my soul. Suddenly I could see Jesus there, in that horrible pit, picking through the rubble, patting a firefighter on the shoulder, scratching the dogs on their chins, and lifting heavy objects with those whose shoulders could no longer bear the load.

            Suddenly I saw him there, like he always is, in the very midst of our pain, suffering, chaos and confusion. Suddenly I saw him there, intimately there and a part, hallowing even our worst hour.

            I will never forget it.

            *******

            Marika and I made our way back up to midtown and stopped for an early supper at a half empty Italian restaurant. I told her what had happened and we cried together. When finished our meal, we hugged once more and she went on her way home. I went back to the Algonquin, that precious little hotel where writers gathered at the round table in the 20’s and where Miranda the cat greets guests as they check in.

            That night, a valiant group of actors tapped their hearts out to us in a half empty theater and Mama and I wept.  We clapped our hands numb.

            *******

            As I shared this memory with my own little flock today, we wept again together.  We sang prayers for peace.  We dug deep for hope and forgiveness.  And we made a solemn vow: We will not become the people our enemies think we are.  We will not add to the sum total of violence and fear in the world.  We will live on the other side of 911 as people of a different way. 

            In a hundred years 911 will be no news at all, just a piece of history’s long trek of human violence and mayhem.  How we respond, though, now that could be news.  If, against all odds, Christians decided once and for all that we were going to live like Jesus and become the change he died to offer the world, that would be redeeming wouldn’t it?  If, against all odds, we decided

            to return to no one evil for evil,

            to banish the notion of enemy,

            to stop drinking to poison of unforgiveness,

            to give up our right to avenge, that would indeed be news for the history books.  

           Then horror of 911 would become a bit like the cross, a blasphemy that God used to reconcile the world.

******
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The Man in the Blue Flannel Shirt

            It was a late autumn afternoon, one of those crisp perfect days in the Deep South when the humidity goes down and southerners begin to feel spared, invincible, able to cope again after the grueling summer.  The sun peeked through the long needle pines and soaked the world in a honey light as my host dropped me off at the Pure Station on Highway 61 somewhere in northern Mississippi.

            One retreat behind me, another starting the next day, I was heading to Memphis.  Highway 61, sometimes called the Blues Highway, runs from New Orleans to Minneapolis right through Memphis and St. Louis.  I remember feeling a kind of writer/artist’s romance about the whole thing.  Like the writers who gathered around the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in the 1920’s or expats who fled to Paris to write poems with fountain pens while they walked by the Seine, I was traveling a path about which songs were written.

            “The Bus Station is that little room on the side,” my driver told me as she helped me with my ‘before-wheels-were-standard-suitcase.’  “Don’t let time get away from you,” she continued.  “Because if you aren’t standing outside when the bus comes by he won’t stop.  That driver doesn’t like to stop.  They say he likes to drive but he’s not so sure about people.  Okay, then.  You got what you need, Eugenia?”

            I looked at the empty service station, closed on this Sunday afternoon, and at the open door into the little side room.  I hoped fervently that I had what I needed.

            “Yes, I’m fine,” I said.  “Thank you so much.” 

            “No, honey, we thank you,” she said giving me a quick hug and sinking back down into the soft leather seat of her Lincoln.  She needed to get home.  It had been a full weekend and she was steeling herself for whatever had transpired while she was away.  You could see it in her, almost smell it on her.

            I was exhausted, not so much from the leading of the women’s retreat but from the sheer effort of keeping my mouth shut after the University of Alabama rather spectacularly proved that God was in heaven and all was right with the world by beating Ole Miss something like 60 to nothing.  I hadn’t said a word, not even when the hangdog Rebs had goaded me a little. I was feeling pretty righteous about it, too, as I dragged my suitcase into the little room; briefcase and purse tucked under one arm.

            I wore my 80’s “I am woman” suit, a plaid skirt that looked like it had been dyed in the piles of leaves outside the station, rust colored pumps that matched my hair and a big shouldered nubby jacket over a silk charmeuse blouse. I was on the road working in leader development for women for the PCUSA and it was a heady wonderful time.

             A rusted sign hanging on a swaying chain was the only indication that the room I entered was indeed the Greyhound Bus Station.  It was a small room with white plastic chairs lining three walls and an old bare mattress on the floor in one corner.  The word ‘clean’ did not leap to mind but I wasn’t afraid to sit down either.  I had two hours to wait for my bus so I got out my notes for the next event and sat to go through them one more time. 

            A little while later, a young man, maybe 30-35, came into the station.  He picked up a bus schedule from the little Lucite rack by the drink machine and sat down across the room from me. He studied it seriously as long as he could. 

            He wore a blue flannel shirt with golden lines. He had it neatly tucked into his jeans.  I’d like to say that his belt buckle said Ole Miss, but I don’t really remember that.  What I remember is that he had dark wavy 70’s hair, and deep eyes the color of the shirt with tiny golden sunbursts.  They were beautiful eyes. 

            I kept right on working.

            After a few moments he asked, “Where you headin’?” 

            “I’m going up to Memphis,” I said.  “You?”

            “St. Louie, for me,” he said. 

            “Ah,” I said.  There was silence.

            “You traveling on business or for pleasure,” he asked eyeing my briefcase and sizing me up. 

            “Business,” I said. 

            “Oh,” he said, “What line of work are you in?” 

            “I’m a Presbyterian minister,” I said brightly.  Then came the double take.  I watched it in him. 

            “Oh,” he said.  “Well, do you pastor a church or are you a roving evangelist?”

            I laughed.  “I’m a roving evangelist I guess,” I replied.

            “Well, son of a gun,” he said.  “I’m a believer myself.  I got saved back in May of 1969.  Have you saved any souls yet?”

            I laughed.  “I’m still praying,” I said. 

            “Well, you keep on praying.  You’ll get one.” He was trying to comfort me.  “Where you from?”

            “Alabama,” I said.

            “Oh, Lord,” he said.  “Y’all sure handed our butts to us yesterday, didn’t you?” I smiled and the conversation went on to the safer ground of college football and the social ordering of southern self esteem that it provides.

            I have thought of him often over the years.  Not so much the blue eyes to match his shirt.  Not the sideburns just a little past fashion.  Not even really the surprise that registered as he tried to fit this young woman into his image of minister.  What I’ve gone back to again and again is the idea of being a roving good news person. 

            For nearly 30 years while pastoring churches or serving in judicatories, I’ve roved the highways and airways to towns too many to remember.  30 new suits. 5 new briefcases. Souls saved?  Not a clue, that being the Spirit’s business and not mine, of course. 

            Still, as I sit now in my ‘chair of inspiration,’ laptop on lap, I think of all the faces of the thousands of strangers I have taught or preached to over the years. I wonder if real good news somehow leaked from me in some way. I pray that it did.

            There is a vast good news shaped hole in the heart of our culture, the core of our hearts. It is a gaping hole dug deeper by the evening news, the betrayals of life and love and body. I think of the young me sitting on the Blues Highway with a briefcase full of hope and plans, and no notion whatsoever of real Blues. She makes me smile.

            But now I do know.  I know of blues and success, of failure and grace. And I know the wonder of my own Blues Highway on which I have been found by Grace and saved again and again and again. I want that same small triumph for all those who find themselves stumbling into life, scraped up and unheld. I want that for those who find no solace in church, no news at all in Christ, the roving evangelist we follow.

                        “You keep on praying,” the man in the blue flannel shirt said. “You’ll get one.” 

                        And so I rove on.