First Parish Unitarian UniversalistLove and Loss
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
February 3, 2002
A loved one of mine said after the death of her husband, "Now I know where my heart is, because it aches." And she touched her chest right there.
So, it was for me, though different, after I walked the perimeter of the World Trade Center site in New York City two weeks ago.
So it was. My heart ached. At dinner, I was surprised to hear the catch in my voice when I said, "I feel so sad for New York."
Different, though. This was about a place, not a spouse. And I haven't lived in New York City since I was four or so. And, I'd never lived on Manhattan Island anyway, only in Queens, one of the other Boroughs of the City of New York.
How did that catch in my voice get there? I've pondered this in the days since.
For those of you who have not been to the site of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, I will try to paint a picture in words. But the place is changing. So, if you go tomorrow, it will be different than it was two weeks ago (in fact, I read this week that they re-opened the World Trade Center subway stop, though it was boarded up when I was there).
And if you visited two months or even two weeks before I did, I am sure what you witnessed was different than what I saw.
How to describe it?
I can best describe it as a "destruction site." A de-struction site.
You've seen urban construction sites perhaps. You walk around them on temporary wooden pathways under scaffolding that supports catwalks through which rain drips unpleasantly. Your view is blocked off by makeshift walls of painted plywood and or chain-linked fencing around the site. In places the wall is decorated with graffiti or theatre posters and political notices. Here and there is a gap between boards, or a section of fencing, through which you peer, trying to see what's going on. You see a gaping raw rectangle or square of disturbed dirt. Nearby buildings stand firm in proud witness to progress and change. Trucks make their way in with loads of lumber, steel, bags of cement. During work hours, it's a beehive, either humming with activity or making a large-machinery racket.
At construction sites, buildings go up by plan.
At this "destruction site," buildings came down by attack.
It was eerily quiet at the World Trade Center site two weeks ago today, though not at all devoid of activity even on a Sunday. The trucks moved deliberately in and out, but they were full on the way out, empty on the way in. The catwalks were everywhere, in places, they span the distance between nearby buildings, covering the street completely. The nearby streets were still strewn, but not filled, with debris; they are empty of cars. At the closed off streets, the barriers were guarded by officers in police cars and everyone, even the truckers, showed an i.d. to get through.
Nearby buildings stood, not firm or proud, but as wounded sentinels. One was draped with black netting to catch falling debris, as if it wore a mourner's shroud. Another, belonging to the Manhattan Community College, had lost a corner in the attack, and the American Express Building suffered a major gash down one side wall. Chalky grey-brown dust covered nearby buildings still closed.
The wall boards and fences are covered, not with graffiti, but with love letters, mementos of lives lost, bouquets of flowers now dried up, Christmas wreaths, collections of yarzheit candles, a Bible, a Qu'ran, messages saying "we miss you, come home" or "missing: if you see her/if you see him, please call..."
We saw many posters. some displaying photographs of loved ones, solidarity posters from fire and police unions around the country, posters created by out-of-state visitors (very much like the one many of us signed that the Goldstein family took with them to New York last October). Posters hand-written by children. I remember one of those dedicated to Kenny, on which family members had written pleas and tributes, including one in a childish hand from his niece or nephew who wrote, "please come back so Aunt Kathie can be happy again."
We saw a ghostly dust-covered bicycle still chained to a street sign pole, locked there no doubt while its bike messenger owner dashed in with a delivery never to return-and it was amazingly (especially for New York!) still intact, no parts stolen-a memorial to "all the bike messengers who died on that day," said the sign, hand-lettered on green neon oaktag covered in saran wrap, taped to the street sign pole. Other messages there affixed named quite a few bike messengers; several notes were in Spanish. Now dried-up bouquets of flowers, a dusty flag, prayer cards were attached.
The plywood walls blocking off the Manhattan Community College building bore professionally printed notices explaining, "many of our 16,000 students-50% of them immigrants-attended class in this building, a gateway to the future for a diverse population. Help us rebuild our campus!"
Our walk around the perimeter was not a simple rectangle. It jogged around tall buildings that completely blocked the view of the site. We walked under catwalks overhead to catch falling debris from compromised buildings, and we stepped carefully over long stretches of temporary plywood housing for the miles of electric, phone and other kinds of cables that now lace the area on the ground, not under it, reconnecting those buildings that were able to re-open with the outside world.
So, it was only on certain corners that a tall person could peer around the plywood barriers and fencing to get a glimpse of the pile of debris. Though now the excavation is below ground level, there was still a visible pile of twisted steel and who knows what else mounded up ready to be hauled away.
If you go to the New York financial district any time soon, and want to view the site from the official viewing stand, be forewarned to show up at the kiosk on Fulton St. to pick up your ticket early in the day; and even then, you may be too late. We were there early Sunday afternoon of a holiday weekend and they were issuing tickets for Monday. I was just as glad to have experienced the perimeter at my own pace, though, rather than share a brief exposure with hundreds of others. The ticket-holders might have gotten the best view, but we spent the two hours they probably spent waiting in line, experiencing the site, seeing it (admittedly in snatches) from all sides and directions.
And had we spent our time in line for the viewing stand, we would never have seen what I found to be the saddest display of all. It just so happens that on the Hudson River side of the World Trade Center, as part of a new riverside promenade park, several years ago the City of New York erected a memorial to fire fighters and police officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. It's an elegant, sweeping outdoor marble wall etched with the names of the deceased, now-how shall I say it?-now unfortunately all too appropriately located.
Along one side of it of the memorial, the wall has a step in it that creates a kind of shelf on which people have propped or displayed memorials to the firefighters, police officers, and other public servants who died responding to the emergency on September 11th. As we had seen elsewhere along the perimeter, there were homemade signs and posters, mementos and candles, but here there were also uniforms and hats and official tributes to specific fire houses and police units hard hit by the disaster. An awning had been erected to protect this now sacred altar from the weather. People formed a silent line passing slowly by.
Passing slowly by, when we came to where we had begun, I was reluctant to leave. Let me experience this fully, this tragedy, this attack. Let me view the open wound from all sides. Let me feel a wee bit of the pain of the mourning families, even the family of my own second cousin who lost her life. Let me imagine the terror of my two friends who fled for theirs, having seen leaping bodies falling from the inferno. Let me experience for myself what remains of this center of global commerce, the destruction of which called our nation to war.
Let me see the City of New York rise to the incredible task of closing in around its wound and cleaning it out. Let me feel sad for New York. Let me hear its lamentations and feel the power of its place. [in reference to the Reading, a poem "Power of Place" by Deena Linett]. Let me linger. Let me discover my love for it, in its loss.
As I said, I never lived on Manhattan, only in Queens, and that for only four years. But, we visited there from nearby on Long Island often during my growing up, and so New York City was never a fearful place for me. Instead it felt alluring, rich with culture, manageable, stimulating, diverse, exciting.feelings that I must also have known were not totally realistic. Of certain, things, yes, I was all too aware.
I knew about the pollution in the city, for example. As a little girl, in the car on the way home from my grandparents', I discovered that when I blew my nose, the tissue would be black!
I knew about its sordid areas. If walking along 42nd Street was the fastest way to get to where we were going, my parents didn't feel it necessary to shield us from the "dirty" book stores and "dirty" movie theaters, as they called them, and the "winos" and "bums," as they called them, camped out in the entryways.
I knew about New Yorks' incredible contrasts, but not much first-hand about the lives of people who lived there. Often if we had houseguests, my father piled everyone into the car for a tour of New York and he loved to show them everything! There was the grandiose Rockefeller Center with its festive skaters and giant Christmas tree in the winter, and sparkling Fifth Avenue, and side streets where the wealthy gentlemen and ladies in their wool and fir coats and their fancy dogs entered their proud homes with elegant wrought iron railings. We gawked at them, my sisters and I, or at least I did.
But he always drove us through Harlem, and I gawked there, too, at the gray tenements, the poorly clad, poorly shod children. I felt afraid sometimes, or pity, or envy if it was a hot summer day and the kids were getting soaked at a fire hydrant. I gawked in busy Chinatown, where so many people were out in the street shopping and what-not that they over-flowed into the streets, and I gawked on Delancy Street at the Orthodox Jewish men who my parents referred to as "beavers" for some, to this day to me still unknown, reason. I gawked in Washington Square, at the bohemians; on Wall Street at the important men in their business suits. The UN, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, Riverside Cathedral, St. John the Divine.Of course, on one tour, you couldn't see them all but over time the city came to feel somehow like mine.
One of my father's claims to fame was that he could always find a parking spot on the street in New York. That's no easy feat there, but he certainly wasn't going to pay to park in a garage! It always seemed that a spot would be open in the very next block, or that someone was just getting ready to pull out as we approached. It was like magic, and we always marveled at his luck.
On the other hand, my parents could never find a restaurant. Mostly, we packed our own food, but I have distinctly unpleasant memories of driving around in the dark, passing this restaurant and that, one too expensive for a big family and the next too skuzzy for children, those same children-hungry-getting more and more quiet in the back as the adults in the front got louder!
My parents loved the city. Both from immigrant families, they attended New York City Public Schools and used its libraries, navigated its bus routes, subways and elevated trains, window-shopped at its department stores, and sat in the bleachers at its stadiums, but they chose the schools and backyards of the suburbs for their own children. Still, they passed on to me a love of the power of that place, with all it offers and all its problems.
It was their love that I discovered in the catch in my voice two weeks ago when I said, "I feel so sad for New York." It's been so horribly hurt. It has a terrible, gaping wound and it is valiantly working so hard to expose and clean the wound and to heal from the injury. But, it still hurts, and will for some time to come. With memory and with hope, the wound will heal.
From what I've seen, New York will heal from the attacks it took on September 11th. The first steps of memory toward healing and hope have been taken. Soon after the eleventh, the New York Times began running a full page entitled "Portraits of Grief." A team of reporters was assigned to gradually interview friends and family members of every person who died that day and publish a portrait in words, sometimes with a photo, for each and every one. I found on the New York Times website, the portrait of my second cousin, about whom the headline declared, "she saved forty co-workers" (September 29, 2001).
On Sundays we get the Times and I read the "Portraits of Grief" every week. I am struck by the incredible variety of people portrayed-married, single, gay with partners and without, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, and lovers.of so many ethnicities, talents, and hobbies, some clearly very well-off and others barely getting by. I'm frankly surprised that the Times committed itself to a goal so expensive in terms of staff time. Memory, then hope.
Already, the New York City Historical Museum has an exhibit about that day. It features enlarged photographs taken by members of a lower-Manhattan based documentary photographers agency who captured in striking images the immediate impact of the planes; the collapse of the towers and eerie aftermath; and the grief that enveloped the city in the days afterward. The exhibit also includes the opportunity to view a video shot by someone who was in the vicinity just after the first tower was struck, and taped the swirling debris, the bewildered people watching, the police vacating street-level shops, and even the second plane zooming into the second tower and the explosion that ensued. Watching it, we got a taste of the nauseous terror of the moment as the camera lurched, sometimes even shooting sideways, and swooped from image to image as the person behind it tried to capture the chaos while in its midst. Finally, the exhibit includes a marble slab on which the names of all those who are known to have died that day in New York have been inscribed. Memory, then healing and hope.
Last Sunday, the Times ran a front-page article about yet another step of memory toward healing and hope. "From the Rubble, Artifacts of Anguish" explained how "even as the firefighters were still battling fires and digging through the mountains of rubble," a team of architects, museum experts, city officials and others were recruited as curators to salvage pieces from the wreckage for "future museum exhibitions and a memorial that do not yet exist." Spread out on an unused runway tarmac at Kennedy Airport and several other locations, the gruesome and grotesque artifacts are accumulating.
The Times reported, "When the architect assigned to comb the debris field at ground zero arrived in late September with his digital camera, ready to take snapshots of the items the team wanted to preserve, he recalled an angry group of firefighters.
`What the hell are you doing? This is a gravesite. Our brothers are out there.' Unsure of what might happen next, the architect waited for a pause and then politely tried to explain the mission: `We have to start thinking about an archive, a memorial. Pieces of this have to be saved for future generations to understand what has taken place.'
And with that, they understood. Soon enough, everyone was a curator, with even the scrapyard workers.report[ing] strange objects they had found." (January 27, 2002, p. 1). Memory, then healing and hope.
Sometimes, in both our public and our private lives, we suffer losses that show to us what we love. Without love, there would not be the pain of loss. Whether it is a city or a person who suffers the loss, memory comes first, then healing and hope.
Amen.