Special
Report Moments of grace during a day of terror
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
This morning, Tuesday, Sept.11, I
picked up the phone in my room in Jersey City, N.J., and it was Bryan Kelly in
Japan to tell me he was watching CNN, and the World Trade Center had been hit
by two planes.
At my fingertips were photos Bryan, a graduate of Fordham
Univeristy in New York, had taken on his visit home in July. They showed the
two of us, on the Jersey City waterfront, with the twin towers of the World
Trade Center across the Hudson River behind us.
I had never admired the architecture of the Towers and I had never
wished them to be there; but they were there, at the bottom of Jersey
Citys Montgomery Street. I loved to usher guests across the river and up
to the observation deck where they could look down on the Brooklyn Bridge.
From the roof of St. Peters Jesuit Community, at the top of
the hill, I watched the smoke billow up, and, with my camera, recorded the
disappearance of each tower, and asked how I could explain this to my freshman
theology class at 11 a.m.
We were working our way through Genesis, where the Lord, who seems
reasonable only part of the time, banishes Adam and Eve for wanting to know too
much, where Cain has let his jealousy evolve into anger and into murder, where
violence spreads, where Cains descendant Lamech kills a young man who
merely strikes him, where God floods the earth to stop the killing. Then
Noahs descendants at Babel (geographically, todays Iraq) want to
make a name for themselves, so they build a tower to the heavens.
And God punishes them for overreaching and scatters them throughout the earth
with separate languages. And human communication is scrapped.
What more do we need to know?
But all classes are canceled. At the college Mass, St.
Peters president, Fr. James Loughran, challenges an auditorium packed
with students and faculty to make this tragedy a moment of grace to which they
must respond with overtures of peace, and he predicts that within the next days
they will see an outpouring of generosity and sacrifice as New York and its
neighbor, Jersey City, respond to the crisis.
Distributing Communion, saying the Body of Christ, as
I place the host in each extended hand, I say to myself that this is reason
enough to have Catholic colleges and universities, to teach the young how to
mourn together in crisis and reach out to a world suffering more than
themselves.
Toward the end I start running low on hosts and break them into
little pieces, saying the Body of Christ, and, to myself,
Yes! The Body of Christ broken. Christs body broken in the men and
women who jumped from the top floors after the plane hit, broken in the bodies
of the airline passengers whose last life image was that of the buildings
walls looming ahead.
In my room, the TV and radio chatter all day. I see the plane sail
in from the right of the screen and the red fireball burst out from the left
and the towers implode in a Hiroshima-like cloud again and again and again and
again. Dan Rather tries to tell us in the same breath that President Bush is in
charge, that we dont know where he is, that hes at an Air Force
base in Nebraska.
Phones down, my e-mail screen fills with messages from friends
throughout the United States and France asking if Im OK and praying for
America.
From the start, the official talking heads -- I swear that super
hawk Lawrence Eagleburger is kept in a freezer at PBS and thawed out to talk
tough in emergencies -- are calling this WAR. A code word for
justifying the most brutal, indiscriminate retaliation.
At the Jersey City Exchange Place waterfront this afternoon,
tugboats and police boats ferry victims across the river to be transferred from
one of five landing spots to local hospitals. Around 4:30, D. Martin, Jersey
City Emergency Medical Service supervisor, tells me 1,500 people had been
processed. I see a half-dozen fire fighters, their uniforms encrusted in white
dust, seated as nurses wash their eyes, or wheeled by on gurneys, heads or eyes
in bandages. Perhaps 200, we are told later, of their comrades lie beneath the
rubble.
Kelli Ann Greenwood, a former student of mine at Loyola University
whom I have not seen in 10 years, looked up from the Jersey City Grove Street
PATH (New York-New Jersey subway) station at 9:05 and saw the second plane loop
around and crash into the second tower. A lawyer, in July she had interviewed
with a firm on the World Trade Center 81st floor and was devastated when she
did not get the job. Her mother had consoled her: Everything happens for
a reason.
A young man on a bike curses the @#%*! who did this and offers to
volunteer for a retaliation raid. Would you volunteer to blow yourself
up? I ask.
No, Id volunteer to push the button.
He reflects on what he has said and apologizes for his anger.
My wife was over there, he says. Shes OK, but she could
have been hurt.
Two writers in Wednesdays New York Times compare New
York and Washingtons suffering to that of the Israelis -- to justify
Israels assassination policies and identify Americas plight with
Israels. But if this terrible day proves anything it is that no national
policy based on retaliation and revenge works. Indeed, the Palestinian-Israeli
mutually destructive cycle of escalating violence -- as Genesis warns -- has
reached its logical culmination.
President Bush says we will not distinguish between the terrorists
and countries that harbor them. Ex-Sen. David Boren told the Lehrer News
Hour that we must hit the infrastructure of those countries.
We tried that in Iraq and since that war we have been held responsible for the
deaths of millions of children from disease and malnutrition.
Why are we surprised that hundreds of Arab children dance in the
streets as our towers fall? For every mad Muslim we or the Israelis take
out -- killing his neighbors on the side -- two more ignorant, fanatical
youths stand ready to step forward, strap on the dynamite and hijack a
plane.
Only Mario Cuomo, interviewed on TV Tuesday morning, said:
We must discover and solve the grievance that drives men to do these
terrible acts.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is Jesuit Community Professor of
Humanities at St. Peters College. His new book, Dante to Dead
Man Walking: One Persons Journey Through the Christian Classics, has
just been published by Loyola Press.
National Catholic Reporter, September 21,
2001
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