wfn.org | ACNS - Trinity Institute seeks understanding at Ground Zero

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

ACNS 2980 - USA - 8 May 2002

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 symbolised
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 title:
"How Then Must We Live? Spiritual Formation in a Broken 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 counselling 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 Revd 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 apologised 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 apologised 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 coloured 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 emphasises 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 Organisational
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 behaviour 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
organisations. "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 levelled 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.]

_______________________________________________
The ACNSlist is published by the Anglican Communion Office, London.

Please send QUESTIONS or COMMENTS to acnslist@anglicancommunion.org. Any 
comments about the content of the article should be directed to the author. 
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY to this message, as any replies are discarded automatically.