The story about the fate of Christian hope in a post-Sept. 11 America began on Sept. 12. The Rev. Lyndon Harris told Wednesday’s night’s gathering that the response came from people who were mourning. Harris was the priest in charge of St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, which became a haven for Ground Zero rescue workers.
People wanted to do something, Isaac Everett recalled. Everett directed the house band at St. Paul’s and helped provide continual music in the chapel during those months. Everett said that “something” took many forms, including the night he began playing the chapel’s piano only to be joined by a flutist and an accordion player. He wondered what prompted the people to come to their shifts at Ground Zero with their instruments. He said he now thinks it was the same force that called tourists to write on canvases hung on the chapel’s fence.
“People found their joy in the act of creation,” he said, adding that Wednesday night’s gathering showed that “we’re still finding our hope in the midst of making things out of that destruction
Harris said there is no closure to an event such as Sept. 11. The Rev. Flora Keshgegian, theology professor at Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, agreed. “Hope does not erase the trauma or make it go away,” she said.
The disciples had trouble recognizing the risen Jesus, Duke University professor the Rev. Michael Battle, reminded the group. “It was the wounds that made him most visible,” he said
His words echoed the Rev. Canon Lucrecia Littlejohn of Christ Church Cathedral in Houston. She said that September 11 made North Americans see they are not the only ones who suffer trauma. “This is an on-going pain that all the world is suffering,” she said
She said she wonders about the long-term response to Sept. 11, asking “How long can we continue to ignore our baptismal promise to resist the evil forces in the world?”
