wfn.org | "How Then Must We Live? Spiritual Formation in a Broken

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

April 26, 2002

2002-97

Episcopalians: Trinity Institute seeks understanding at 
Ground Zero

by Nathan Brockman

(Trinity News) She was supposed to have died, but had switched 
with a colleague, and now the flight attendant pointed at the 
pit. "This is hell," she said. It was very early in the morning 
and the woman, who smelled of alcohol and was drenched in tears, 
seemed beyond the comfort of the attentive priest at her side. 

She had nothing to do with Trinity Institute, a conference for 
clergy and laity convening on April 5 at nearby Trinity Church, 
except that the priest accompanying her would attend the 
gathering. But her experience symbolized both the need of many 
visitors to New York to see "hell," otherwise known as the World 
Trade Center site, and the cry implicit in the conference's 
World." 

It was Trinity Institute's 33rd annual conference. Twice as many 
as last year (450 attendees) came from 37 states (as far away as 
South Dakota, Oregon, and Arizona) to be told how to live. To 
speak about how to live from Trinity Church's broad nave, laden 
with Easter lilies, was a tall order, as the speakers admitted. 
The priest counseling the crying flight attendant had difficulty 
assuaging her pain, and there was perhaps a similar struggle at 
the Institute. 

War stories 

This much was known: the notion of "conference" that has slipped 
into the American workforce parlance--chaste, sterile, boring, 
and likely held just off the Interstate--could be thrown out the 
window. By this conference's end, the Rev. Dr. Frederic Burnham, 
the Institute's director, said: "It grooved. They [the speakers] 
were all wounded." 

The first to try was publishing veteran Phyllis Tickle, who took 
the podium and apologized for any presumption. "Whatever I may 
say, or fail to say," she said, "I feel strong soft gratitude 
that we are here, that we are gathered in this place." 

Then she told a story. 

It was 1863. Eight civilians had been slaughtered by the 
Confederate Col. Witcher. Through her husband, Tickle's family 
tree includes Witchers, and the family would visit the "cool, 
silent" cemetery where the victims of the slaughter were buried. 
During the visits, "Mamaw," as the family called their maternal 
guardian, would eventually stand alone in the graveyard, 
"stopping awhile before a void into which no words can go." 

Only once did Mamaw put words to her feelings, and surprising 
words at that: "It is good to be here," she said. 

Tickle came to Ground Zero last October. There was a light mist 
from buildings being cleaned of dust and ash and she noticed 
that she and others were "leaning into the ashy mistreceiving 
it like a baptism." 

"I heard Mamaw's voice. 'It is good to be here.'" 

She apologized again near the end of her contribution at having 
to talk about September 11 at all. Her humility spoke for her. 

The shy life of the soul 

Parker Palmer took the podium. He is a Quaker, freely firing 
from his arsenal of Quaker jokes--a Quaker Power Point 
presentation is to hold up a strip of colored paper and talk 
about it; Quakers didn't get rid of clergy, they got rid of 
laity. 

Palmer is also a writer, teacher, and activist, who emphasizes 
educational reform. But girding his work is a nexus of ideas on 
the soul--which, unlike most of us, he takes the trouble to 
define, if not in its form, then at least by its functions, of 
which he says there are four: to keep one grounded, to connect 
to all life, to tell the truth, and to pass along the vital gift 
of life. 

People who are not grounded, remain unconnected, lie, and hoard 
do not lack a soul, he said. Rather, the soul was a "wild 
animal," and "exactly like a wild animal, the soul is also 
essentially shy. We know that if we want to see a wild animal 
the last thing we should do is run crashing through the woods 
screaming for it to come outWe must walk quietly into the 
woods, sit at the base of a tree for a long while sometimes, 
breathe with the earth, and eventually this precious wild thing 
we seek may put in an appearance." 

New commons 

Sharon Daloz Parks is associate director of the Whidbey 
Institute for Earth, Spirit and the Human Future. Previously she 
served in a variety of capacities at Harvard University's 
Divinity School, Business School and the Kennedy School of 
Government. 

She introduced her concept of "the commons"--the meeting places 
humans choose. However, she made the commons more abstract. "The 
commons is always both a place and an aspiration," she said. 
Ground Zero has "become a micro-manifestation of the new 
commons," which is, of course, global, complex, and not always 
friendly. 

It was this point that Burnham took up passionately in Parks' 
question-and-answer session. He wanted to talk about St. Paul's 
Chapel and its relief ministry to workers from the adjoining 
Trade Center site. 

"There are emergency workers working there, construction 
workers, train drivers, people who have lived on the rough side 
of life, who have suddenly found that they are accepted by the 
rest of us," he said. "There is a new humanity happening at 
Ground Zero that is extraordinary to see." 

Parks agreed, and shared a story of her own. She'd been part of 
a 10-year study examining the "common good." It was found that 
those who had achieved a consistent common good shared "a 
constructive or a transforming encounter with otherness." What's 
an "other" encounter? The "other" is a person from another 
"tribe" ("tribe exists wherever we would tolerate for them what 
we would not tolerate for us," she explained) and a genuine 
encounter inspires an "empathic response to the suffering of the 
other." 

Pathos, arguably nectar for the pilgrims attending Trinity 
Institute, and day one of the conference came to an end--but not 
before the showing of a video in which Trinity staff related 
their September 11 experiences. Priests asked questions of God, 
and others spoke of the darkness after the fall of the towers 
and the booming crescendo of collapse: 

"Huddled in that corner with my wife and child, I thought this 
was the end." 

"I remember a woman's blouse going by the window." 

"I was just thinking of the communion of saints, that phrase, 
the communion of saints, that I was witnessing this mass death." 

Silicon spiritual masters

Andre Delbecq is a professor at Santa Clara University, where he 
was dean of the Leavey School of Business for 10 years. Burnham 
told us that at the pinnacle of his career, Delbecq began 
studying the world's spiritual traditions. Now he directs the 
Institute for Spirituality of Organizational Leadership at the 
university. 

"I'd like to spend a little time finding God across the street, 
on my side of the commons," said Debecq, with a nod to Parks. He 
moved furthest from the issues raised by the Trade Center's 
remains up the street, gazing instead out of the great bronze 
front doors of Trinity Church down Wall Street. He spoke about 
the spiritual habits of successful people--in this case, Silicon 
Valley executives. 

But he talked first about place, and what a "thin" or "holy" 
place was. A place was made holy by years of prayer, suffering, 
and great energy, he believed--including the energy 
characteristic of Wall Street. 

Calling the leaders of private industry "eagles," Delbecq asked, 
"What could I learn from observing the behavior of mature eagles 
who fly, people of spiritual maturity who lead in those kinds of 
circumstances?" 

The first thing such people did was to reaffirm the true purpose 
of their organizations. "What's the metaphysical purpose of a 
construction company? If they're building a dam, it's to bring 
water to the thirsty." 

Secondly, in times of turmoil, these leaders "move into an 
elegant pattern of shared discernment," talking to the parties 
involved, listening to the ignored, taking counsel. He recited a 
litany of the "right spiritual stuff" that such leaders had to 
possess--and it sounded more like the qualities we expect from 
priests than power brokers: Openness. Humility. Patience. 
Willingness to fail. 

"How do they do it?" he asked gently. "These are people of deep 
prayer," both traditional contemplative prayer and the highly 
unusual rite of praying "the agenda of their day," he offered.

Two stories

Roberta Bondi is the author of numerous books and professor of 
church history at the Candler School of Theology at Emory 
University in Atlanta. She began her talk with a story of the 
"good old days" of 1950s America, when people were safer, life 
was simpler and led by happier souls whose roles were neatly 
defined and precisely followed. She summed up the era with a 
catch phrase her audience completed in unison with her: "The 
family that prays together, stays together." 

"Then came September 11," said Bondi, and "a shock we still 
can't seem to get over." 

Christian formation was to some degree about giving people tools 
enabling them to "follow Jesus' great commandment" to love the 
Lord with our whole hearts. "Nobody comes to Christian formation 
whose heart has not been pretty well formed very early" through 
human relationships, she said. 

She turned to a key question for those who have sought a nuanced 
response to being attacked. "What does it take to form 
Christians who are primarily able to respond to the events of 
September 11 out of love, rather than out of anger, panic, or 
hurt, or despairor opportunism, or jingoism? One primary thing 
we can do is attend a lot more carefully to our storytelling." 

So she rewrote her opening story. 1950s America was a difficult 
time, unique with problems that probably seemed insurmountable: 
racism; homophobia; sexism; religious persecution; unreported 
domestic abuses; archaic attitudes toward mental illness; the 
threat of nuclear annihilation. 

The list went on, just as it does now. Said Bondi: "Our 
Christian tradition tells us clearly and consistently that since 
we live in a fallen world, a broken world, that is the way we 
should expect life to be." 

100 years 

As the conference moved into the closing panel discussion, it 
seemed the speakers had strayed from what the pilgrims ached to 
hear, for what the flight attendant craved to understand. But 
then again, Tickle had made considerable impact with her distant 
Civil War story--and she had said that it was too early to meet 
the subject head on. Asked how long it would take Americans to 
incorporate the events of September 11 into their collective 
experience, she stated confidently: "100 years," basing her 
number on life in Eastern Tennessee: her family still talked of 
the Civil War, but less as she aged. 

Were the pilgrims disappointed? Not likely, Burnham told Trinity 
News. There were two giveaways for people attending the 
conference. One was a ticket to the public viewing platform 
overlooking the WTC site--the one on which the flight attendant 
had stood. The other was a tour of St. Paul's Chapel. Both were 
popular. 

The ministry at St. Paul's has been off-limits to the public, 
but to many people of faith it resides at the harrowing, 
heartfelt junction of loss, memory, and meaning. Said Burnham, 
"The people who went to St. Paul's invariably speak of it and 
thank us. Seeing St. Paul's was a very important experience for 
people who came to New York from out of town." 

"That's not voyeurism. That's pilgrimage," Tickle had said 
earlier in the conference, addressing criticism often leveled at 
Ground Zero visitors. Audience members, many of whom were 
staying overnight at the Marriott Hotel overlooking the site, 
murmured, nodded, and sighed approvingly. 

For those keeping score, and for the flight attendant in all of 
us, that's one Institute down, ninety-nine to go.

------

--Nathan Brockman is managing editor of Trinity News and of 
Trinity Wall Street's website.