5 January 2002. Thanks to Frank Morales.
A few days after the destruction at the World Trade Center I received a call
from a staff person at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine who asked me
if I, being a priest, would be willing to journey down, through all the
militarized checkpoints that had been set up immediately following the bombings,
to perform last rites for the dead. "Frank", she said, "we're really not
talking bodies here, you know, it's mostly body parts". She said that my
name had come up in discussions as somebody who might have the stomach for
such an assignment. I instantly accepted, taking the 11pm - 7am shift, feeling,
probably like a lot of people, that I could be useful there, that I could
help. Little did I realize then that it was I who would be helped, that it
was me who would gain so much from the wisdom that was smoldering there.
Walking down Lower Broadway into the heart of darkness I could clearly smell
the stench of death, a perfume, I thought later, of a sacrificial fire, a
human pyre, deeply sacred in it's essence. How was I to know this wisdom
locked within that incomprehensible scene? After awhile, I passed through
the last of the checkpoints manned by National Guard people at which point
I was escorted to a series of tents set up along the Hudson, facing due east,
situated in the belly of the monster. I stood along with dozens of fireman,
construction and rescue workers within what oft times appeared to be some
kind of opera set. In front of me, a full 180 degree semi-circle, floodlit
in the dead of night, I could see the entire devastation, spiked remains
of the south tower, whose lower portion reminded me of the Parthenon, an
earlier testament to a doomed civilization, to the left, a 2000 degree pit,
the infernal ruin of the north tower. The entire deathscape cast in front
of me, sitting in my directors chair, in a remake of Apocalypse Now,
I could see the tiny machines and men traverse the mountains of twisted steel
and rich brown earth, the whole picture so large as to defy comprehension.
Standing there I was approached by a fireman, a 40ish football player looking
guy from Queens. This fireman, whose name I never got, told me he'd been
there since immediately after the catastrophe. Spitting up blood and popping
antibiotics, he told me that the wives of his friends buried somewhere beneath
the burning toxic earth were calling him everyday and asking him if he'd
found their husbands yet. I told him to go home, that he was sick. He looked
at me and said, "I know I'm going to lose ten years of my life here, but
I can't let my buddies down. I can't go."
Recognizing that I was somewhat overwhelmed by the spectacle of devastation
all around us he said to me, "Father, you don't see any chairs or tables,
no desks, do you all you see is steel and earth." "Look at the earth", he
said, "the people are in it." As he said this he motioned me to examine the
soil that I was standing in. It was rich and moist, enriched with the ground-up
bodies of the dead. My feet inside my boots began to tingle. At this point,
recognizing that I had truly arrived in hell, I was moved to utter in his
presence, possibly for his benefit, that "hey, if I had somebody in this
mess, I'd be pissed as shit, and yeh, I'd wanna get those mother fuckers",
at which point he put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, "hey, it's not
about that." "You wanna know something" drawing near to my ear, "Bush and
Bin laden have the same banker."
And even though I was stunned by his grasp of current events (another fireman
would later advise me that the whole situation was one of "rich people fighting
over oil with all of us caught in the middle") what I came to recognize slowly
was that the message of these men and women who were rubbing shoulders with
the dead 24/7 was quite at odds with the then prevailing ethic, and that
was that it made no human sense to inflict what was in front of us on anyone
else. For beneath the uninformed m.o. of the long distance bomber and the
long distance arm chair warrior is a lack of appreciation of death up close.
Living with the dead, squeezing their bloody acre between your fingers, lifting
small bits of fingers from beneath your boots, placing the pieces in red
plastic seal up "one pound bags", one loses the ability to replicate the
violence, loses the desire to duplicate that which one becomes a kin to,
namely the murder of innocent people. In other words, for the people at ground
zero death was real and hence, not to be taken lightly.
All night I found no one who was in any kind of mood to inflict that which
we were living in on anyone else. It was instinctually not viable. Slowly
the lesson of ground zero dawned on me, the lesson that the vicious circle
of violence breeding violence was passe' here, a bad joke hoisted upon a
dehumanized complicit public, unsupported by those in the know at the ground
zero of moral wisdom. Of course, this explains the documented inability of
many soldiers during WW2 to kill another, even the manufactured "evil one",
in a direct one on one confrontation.* And yet, while we do all in our power
not to kill, we are manipulated into pulling the trigger, they kill in our
name. Truth is, killing and humanity (who we are) are opposites and the guys
at ground zero knew this better than anyone, and this was their message:
"Hey Father, tell them out there that they should organize buses for people
to come through here, everyone should see this" they said, everyone should
get this innoculation against the sheep like murderous idiocy that was rising
like the smoky spirits of the dead from the ruins in front of me.
As dawn approached, men covered in the grey brown soot which was everywhere
approached me and as if in a fit of elation mentioning that they had found
an intact body of a young girl. Given the circumstances, this was cause for
muted celebration. I tagged along with them to the boiling 2000 degree pit
which was the north tower, a cherry picker emblazoned with an american flag
fitted with the image of a native american with peace pipe lowered in the
lonely place of death to retrieve the girl who looked to be a teen, in a
striped dress, raised her from the dead, resurrecting her identity and placing
her at my feet. We gathered there among the smoke and flames and despite
the inescapable stench prayed for her spirit, her family, for one another,
for this broken world, in this exiled place.
(Dedicated to John Lennon)
*See On Killing, Dave Grossman, 1995