wfn.org | Presbyterians cling to faith in time of horror

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Note #6846 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

17-September-2001
01328

Presbyterians cling to faith in time of horror

Pastors, congregations in New York area comfort the heartbroken

by John Filiatreau

NEW YORK CITY - Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Seminary, was in
Louisville for a meeting when terrorist suicide pilots in hijacked airliners
brought down both towers of the World Trade Center (WTC), changing America's
skyline forever.

She made it home by car the following day, and found home unnerving.

"The city was so oddly quiet - empty," she recalls. "When I came into town,
there was no one; it was like a scene from On the Beach. The New Jersey
Turnpike was empty. The whole city was empty of people. ... It's closer to
normal now, but it's still smoky, and it smells bad. And the grief is so
concentrated that you can almost touch it."

Bill Golderer, the director of Auburn's Center for Church Life, put on his
clerical collar - "People expect you to be a Catholic," he says, "but they
feel relief when they see a visible sign of the church, feel a palpable
sense of relief and comfort" - and went down to Chelsea Pier, an athletic
complex whose thermostat had been turned down low.

"They had converted this ice rink into a morgue," he says. "You go in, and
there are all these bodies in bags. You walk across this ice rink and
realize that just weeks ago, this was where you'd go to see youth league
hockey. And you're there helping families positively identify victims. ... I
felt completely overmatched.

"But then I remembered that it was not my own presence there that was
important, that I was supposed to represent the presence of God."

Many of the Auburn students, recruited as volunteer grief counselors, were
making the same representation. "They may not know everything there is to
know about systematic theology," says Golderer, also the seminary's
principal counselor for Presbyterian students, "but this experience is
certainly teaching them how to be there for people who are lost in sorrow.
... They're showing the ways in which Christianity, or religion in general,
can be a healing and constructive force. ... No amount of theological
education or pastoral experience can ever prepare you for something like
this."

"I've been kind of alternating between helplessness and hopelessness,"
Golderer adds. "You run the gamut of emotions each day. Yet there's
something in the students that makes me really hopeful. The students just do
things that astound you, with such emotional generosity; their willingness
to do anything to help has been pretty amazing."

Amazing and astounding are words that apply to much of what is being seen in
New York City these days.

Golderer says St. Vincent's Hospital put up a scribbled sign asking whether
anyone in the area could provide emergency housing for some of the medical
personnel who had been waiting to treat the wounded - and had more than 800
offers in a matter of hours.

Churches of all descriptions flung open their doors and put up Magic Marker
signs saying they were open for "reflection and worship," and people
promptly filled them up - "with no denominational distinctions made," he
says.

In tiny Riverside Park, just behind the seminary, Golderer says, "Not
infrequently we see children on swings - accompanied by child-care
professions. But what you see there today are intact family units, people
speaking to one another as neighbors. ... We are overwhelmed by a ... desire
to draw upon the resources of our faith."

Feeling that impulse, Auburn students, like Katherine Higgins, are pitching
in. Higgins sent an email message to students of Auburn, Union Seminary and
nearby Columbia University last Thursday:

"In an effort to provide spiritual support and presence during this time of
crisis, we will be traveling downtown to pray, sing and witness. Please join
us, bring your instruments, voices, prayers and love as we minister to those
struggling to survive, save lives and understand this tragedy. Wear
comfortable shoes for walking and bring plenty of tissues. ... Donations of
socks for the rescue workers are desperately needed, so bring those if you
have any to spare."

In the days just after the tragedy, Golderer spent several hours with some
of the thousands of medical professionals who gathered at nearby trauma
centers in hopes of treating people wounded in the attacks and the
subsequent collapses of buildings.

"I went down to St. Vincent's, in the Village," he says, "and what was
apparent is that they had been hoping to have more injured than there were.
It really wasn't appreciably busier than any normal day. They were all
gathered in teams, bracing for what they thought would be heavy traffic, but
everything was quiet. It was really kind of ominous." What became more and
more apparent as time went by was that very few people in or around the
buildings had managed to survive. Golderer spent his time comforting the
medical people and reflecting on what a privilege it was "to be welcomed
into someone's pain."

"People who have a sense of New York City that it's withdrawn and closed and
almost hostile - well, it is," Golderer says. "Sometimes it is. But it isn't
that way now, not that way at all. ... I hate to say it at this time, but I
believe God can bring love and beauty - and lives - out of any deep
darkness."

South African Farid Esack, a visiting scholar at Auburn this semester, is a
Muslim. He says the seminary is "in some ways rather isolated from what
happens outside," and anyway it is "some blocks down the road from the Trade
Center" (about 150 blocks; Auburn/Union is almost as far away as you can be
without leaving Manhattan, yet the Trade Center's tall twin towers were
visible from some points on campus); but Esack has not been immune to the
anger many New Yorkers and others have directed at Muslims and people of
Arab descent.

"I have not seen any behavior of hate, or any suggestion that I or my ilk
have been responsible for this," he says, "but I have heard about things
that have happened to other people - scarves pulled off heads, shouting,
cries of hate, 'these Muslims, these Arabs, these bastards.' I never
internalize any of those things. It hurts, but it's not a personal hurt,
this pain of people shouting invectives. ... It is natural for people to
feel anger, to feel hate. Well, I don't know if it is natural; if I say it's
natural then I say it comes from God."

On the contrary, Esack says, the verbal and other violence comes from people
"who are not at one with themselves ... who are involved with their own
lower self."

"Forgiveness is intrinsic to Christianity," he says, "but don't ask people
for forgiveness immediately. I see this in the South African context, and
one problem we had there was, 'Who do we forgive?' Eventually the
perpetrators must be punished - and they must be forgiven."

Esack says he "cannot help but also have empathy with the very many men who
are trapped in their very macho selves. At the heart of these men, under
their bejeweled uniforms, are tiny little boys, spiritually extremely
impoverished people. ... It is a time for seeing the presence of God in
everyone: to see it in George W. Bush, and then to see it in Osama Bin
Laden."

First Presbyterian Church of New York City is just 25 blocks from the pile
of rubble that was the World Trade Center. Its pastor, the Rev. Jon Walton,
was walking to work along Fifth Avenue when the first plane came roaring in,
right over the church, bearing down on the WTC's north tower.

"The first plane flew low over First church, down so low that everyone on
our staff and people on the street knew immediately that something was
terribly wrong," he says. "We knew that that plane was either in trouble, or
whatever was in its path was."

Walton, who has been at First church for just a month (after 17 years as
pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, DE), said his
church's doors have been open since the morning of the disaster, "and people
from our community are coming in, just flowing in, really," finding church
deacons and elders there "to console those whose loved ones have been
reported disappeared and missing."

For a few days after the buildings collapsed, St. Vincent's, just around the
corner, was sending distraught survivors to First Presbyterian. "They direct
people who wish to pray and to seek consolation to come to our doors,"
Walton wrote in an email the day after the tragedy. "They have been
overwhelmed by families coming to seek what they do not yet know, and ask
questions that they cannot yet answer. The chapel there is overwhelmed."

"For a while we were the first line of defense," he says. "We tried to help
so many of the people who were hysterically fearful and upset."

Five members of the First church "family" are among the missing. The church
secretary's husband, who was working on the 100th floor of the south tower,
has not been heard from. A family member joined the sad parade of survivors
making the rounds of hospitals, showing relatives' photographs, hoping
against hope for good news, to no avail. A church custodian has had no word
from a nephew who worked in the financial district. Three other church
members, two moms and a dad, all with children in First church's nursery
school, were caught up in the horror and lost. "The silence in the absence
of word about them is unnerving," Walton says.

Everyone at First church is stubbornly clinging to hope, he says, even "as
hope dims."

Sunday's worship service started with "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and
ended with "America the Beautiful." During one part of the service, people
called out the names of loved ones and family members and co-workers lost in
the rubble - "all the people they were expecting would be in church that day
but were not," Walton says - and the sad list went in for an awful, long
time. At the end of the service, somebody draped an American flag over the
balcony. Attendance was almost 900 - more than last Easter.

"I had told the staff here that they should be ready for a crowd the size of
Easter," Walton says. "If not of an Easter expectation, at least of Easter
numbers."

The pastor says he has since walked a few blocks from his church, to Union
Square, which he says is the site of "a makeshift memorial" that reminds him
of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, "because the walls and fences all
around are plastered with pictures of what I call the disappeared."

"I so appreciate the sentiment and the hope behind those pictures. ... This
is just devastating to the soul and spirit."

Asked how he is coping with the sorrow and pressure, Walton replies, "Well,
uh, I'm praying a lot, and, uh, I'm struggling with it. It's not easy."

"This is normally a pretty lonely job," says Jane L. Seargeant Watt,
executive of the Presbytery of Southern New England, "but it hasn't been
lonely this week. Since the disaster, I basically have tried to be a pastor.
I just finished polling all our churches, and  there are a number where
people are missing."

Watt said the phone calls she has been making often are quite brief: "I just
call people up and say, 'I am praying for you; I'm with you; God bless,
Jane.'"

She says pastors in the presbytery have been dealing with "survivor guilt"
on the part of people who escaped the disaster because they "missed their
train" or otherwise varied their routine on the fateful Tuesday. Ministers
have also been providing services at shelters and organizing prayer
services.

One of the 166 clergy in the presbytery is a fire company chaplain. 

"The firefighters are just in shock from what they've seen," Watt says.
"Those that have gotten out are absolutely traumatized. ... I probably felt
saddest about the people trying to do recovery work." She said she also
sympathizes with the many survivors in her community who normally commute to
Manhattan to work but now have nowhere to report and in recent days have
been "wandering the streets," often dropping into churches to pray and
reflect.

"In an environment like this," says Watt, whose office is in Old Saybrook,
CT, "people tend to feel that their lives are somewhat under control. They
are affluent, they have multiple homes, they are doing well; they feel
secure. This attack has been a terrible shock to them, and has shattered
their sense of safety."

Watt says she and her colleagues have been so overwhelmed by the demands of
the past several days that they have had virtually no time for themselves:
"I have friends I haven't even tried to find."

The Rev. William A. Evertsberg, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of
Greenwich, CT, say his congregation's prevailing mood these days is "one of
overwhelming gratitude."

"Almost half of my congregation (commutes) to downtown Manhattan five days a
week," he explains. "It's almost miraculous that our whole congregation was
spared. ... We lost nobody."

One member of Evertsberg's church, who worked on the 88th floor of the south
tower of the WTC, survived because he was late for work on Sept. 11, but
"lost 60 of his colleagues, including 30 he describes as his closest
friends," in the pastor's words. And a prospective member on the 73rd floor
of one tower managed to get out before the building collapsed.

Evertsberg says a special, unannounced prayer service on the night of the
disaster attracted 200 worshipers by word of mouth alone; another impromptu
service on Friday attracted 200 more; and his Sunday service at First
church, which on average is attended by about 300 people, drew more than 600
on the first Sunday after the tragedy.

In a prayer written just after the attacks, Evertsberg sounded a note that
many Presbyterians have echoed since: "Lord, send your spirit to city,
national and world leaders who must make difficult decisions in the coming
hours and days. Give them a spirit of restraint and wisdom and
understanding, that the cycle of vengeance and violence might not continue
to spiral away from us."

Similarly, the Rev. Timothy Oleksy, of Turn of River Presbyterian Church in
Stamford, CT, says he tried to suggest in his Sunday sermon "something along
the lines of at least initially turning the other cheek, and giving peace a
chance." He says he was reacting to "the component which says, 'Let's go
over there and bomb the hell out of them.'" Like many other Presbyterian
pastors, he found that the crowd for Sunday worship included a number of
"people we had never seen before."

Oleksy, who serves as chaplain of a local fire company, was in the local
firehouse last Tuesday while a squad of firefighters was preparing to leave
for New York to help with the rescue effort. He says it was "touching to see
the concern and grief in the faces of those men."

The title of Oleksy's sermon on Sunday: "Where Was He?" Referring to God.

"God was on those planes," he said. "God was at the Pentagon. God was inside
the World Trade Center.  God was with every one of the victims. ... God was
with the hijackers, even in the midst of their abominable deed. ... God was
with us, wherever we were, whatever we were doing. ... God is with us now."

Noting that it once was possible to see the WTC from the beach in Stamford,
Oleksy says, "This congregation is grieving, as the whole nation is."

The Rev. J.C. Austin, of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, composed a
beautiful prayer for his church's worship on the first Sunday after the
disaster. He prayed, in part:
  
We pray for your power and grace to rest upon all who are in pain and grief
over loved ones; for those who wait to hear news, and for those who know too
much; for those who were able to speak before the end, and for those with
things left unsaid; for those whose faith is battered, and for those who
search anew for their forgotten faith; for all who struggle to understand.
...

We pray for those who were able to escape the Towers and the Pentagon, and
for those who feel they should have been there, could have been there; help
them to feel thankful for life and not guilty for it. We pray for all of us
traumatized by the images we have seen, the stories we have heard, the
things we have imagined; help us not to give in to fear or hatred, nor to be
blinded to your grace at work even now. ...

We commend to your love all those whose lives have been ended by this
tragedy: investment bankers and security guards, secretaries and
stockbrokers, firefighters and police officers, janitors and receptionists,
soldiers and civilians. ... We hold all of them before you as those whom you
gave your image to carry and your Son to redeem.

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