wfn.org | John Street pastor addresses 'open wound' from tragedy

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

Sept. 20, 2001       News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212) 870-38037New York
10-21-71B{415}

NOTE: This report is a sidebar to UMNS story #414.

NEW YORK (UMNS) - About 20 members were able to make it through police
barricades to worship on Sunday, Sept. 16, at John Street United Methodist
Church, near the site of the World Trade Center tragedy.

Here are some excerpts from the pastoral prayer offered by the Rev. James
McGraw, pastor:

"We come before thee, O God, in stunned sorrow and numbed anguish, still
suffering the aftershock and still reeling in the wake of unprecedented and
unparalleled tragedy in our land. ...

"Precisely synchronized slaughter and cunningly calculated carnage has not
only permanently altered the Manhattan skyline by leaving a gap where the
twin towers once stood in magnificent testimony to human architectural
genius and construction accomplishment, but also has left behind an open
wound in the corpus of human community and the body politic. We are, O God,
both a local human community in pain and a global human community in crisis.

"The shock and sorrow, grief and anguish so suddenly thrust upon us and so
alien to our previous assumptions, expectations and experiences has
nonetheless served to directly relate and remind us of the sufferings and
sorrows of our fellow members of the human family.

"The hordes hurrying north on Tuesday, having been evacuated from both
occupational and residential dwellings, bore striking resemblance to
refugees throughout the world, past and present, fleeing for their lives in
fear and trembling, dismay and despair. The twisted, tangled and scattered
debris from buildings destroyed and flattened lay in stark reminder of prior
destruction: London, Dresden and Berlin, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and similar
sites of devastation.

"The bodies of the dead buried beneath such tombstones of destruction,
stacked in numbers defying immediate calculation, were gruesome family
reminders of mounds of human flesh piled beside the battlefields of civil
strife in Africa or tossed into the massive graves of concentration camps in
Germany and Poland. ...We are all born as full-fledged members of the human
family, but this week we have come to know, feel and experience what other
family members have known, suffered and endured for so long. 

"...We look to Jesus in a climate of personal emotion and political
calculation which seeks a widening rupture of family wounds rather than a
reconciling renewal of family ties. ... Amidst the rising chorus demanding
revenge, correct our vision to move beyond myopia to mercy, hearing the
words of Jesus urging us to love our enemies and to pray for those who
persecute us. ...Grant us the clarity of vision which comes from seeing with
eyes of faith, whereby we will recognize that sacrificial love and forgiving
reconciliation are the true marks of the divine image in which we have been
created.

"Finally, God of love, mercy and compassion, we ask thy comforting presence
and healing grace to be with those who have suffered and continue to suffer
most directly from the tragedy which grips us so tightly..."

# # #

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
http://umns.umc.org