Birds are about -- juncos, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, titmice, blue jays and mourning doves, to name a few.  Some are basking in the sun, some are searching for seeds and berries.  A few of their songs sound distinctly spring-like; or I could be imagining it.  I am told, though, that bluebirds are already making nests in the bird boxes at the bottom of the orchard.  

The bells of Melrose are clanging through weekly practice.  I think the ringers are becoming steadier, more rhythmic (dare I say more hearer-friendly?).  The mini peals echo through the woods and accompany me up the road to the pond. 

Recent ice on the pond has melted, and the swans have returned from their brief hiatus further south.  Mama and Papa swan, whom Sr. Emmanuel years ago christened Hugh and Odette, swim close to the shore with their one remaining baby out of three, who is now almost as big as they are.  The water's windless surface mirrors the sun so powerfully that I have to shield my eyes.

Time to turn back.  It's a short walk, but much needed.  On the way back I dig my hands, now feeling frozen, deep into my pants pockets while I reflect on the morning -- a typical Sunday:  various farm and other chores; Lauds, Eucharist with music, good preaching (Suzanne, this time) and a good friend, Janet; followed by a brunch of scrambled eggs, bacon ( a treat!), homemade bread and various pickled dishes, a real farm breakfast.  And after breakfast Erin and Anne stopped by to visit and tend to various things.  I feel content.

Back home I warm my fingers by the radiator and calculate the number of days since the winter solstice and the number until the spring equinox.  It turns out we are exactly halfway!  Happy mid-winter to all!

The steady plod of donkey feet

triggers bone-deep pain

foreshadowing a tearing anguish to come.

In the stillness between hollow hoof-clops

She ponders growing fear.

Endless hours later,

her lifeblood fresh on a stable floor,

a tiny, soundless thing

stares through newborn eyes

at the pattern of her face;

and she ponders new Being.

Strangers appear

from the monotonous nowhere of

humble labor—

impelled by terror through the night,

shy witness to the Mystery unfolding before them;

she ponders the strangeness of family.

Exhausted, her weary

eyes drift into the black night sky

where one star, brighter than all the rest,

captures her gaze a moment too long.

Sudden Light pierces her soul;

and with shuddering, shattering clarity

she knows, beyond understanding, an awe-filled future ...

tears spill, hot and unbidden,

mingling underfoot with straw and blood.

For years to come

she will ponder all these things in her heart.

The women travel to the manger

Then I unwrap the people and animals from their boxes; musicians, peasants, travelers, shepherds and sheep, pigs, a goat, and a little cat family. I also unwrap Mary and Joseph who begin their travels toward the creche somewhere far across the room. Jesus is hidden in a sugar bowl. In another room altogether, the kings begin to discern the star but won't arrive until Epiphany on January 6.

Mary and Joseph will arrive at the cave on Christmas Eve, but Jesus won't arrive until after Christmas Mass. We'll sing around the creche. All week, various groups of creche figures will come to the mouth of the cave and reverence the child.

May this Child whose birth brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven, bless you and keep you in deep love, peace, and reverence. Amen.

Here's a beloved poem which Sister Elise set to music and which we love to sing at Christmas.

We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,
Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw Thine eyes break from the East,
And chase the trembling shades away:
We saw Thee, and we blest the sight,
We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.

To Thee, meek Majesty, soft King
Of simple graces and sweet loves!
Each of us his lamb will bring,
Each his pair of silver doves!
At last, in fire of Thy fair eyes,
Ourselves become our own best sacrifice!

—Richard Crashaw 1613(?)-1649
Verses from the Shepherd's hymn

Afterwards I went to Ground Zero to pay my respects for the first time at the new memorial that has been created there, opened to the public on 9/12/11.  I had obtained a pass the month previous, and when I arrived at the security post announcing the entrance, there were hundreds of others in lines six-deep which snaked round and round through various checkpoints.  As I joined the throng and inched forward with the pack, I felt claustrophobic and wondered if I could make it.  Relief came from looking upward into the sky visible between buildings, but I could feel panic rise within me everytime a plane flew behind the newly emerging Freedom Tower (too remiscent of 9/11).  Turning in the opposite direction, I was floored to discover that an entire building was missing from the last time I was here.  The Deutchse Bank, which was heavily damaged but still standing after 9/11, stood for years wrapped in a giant black tarp, a sullen shroud covering a hulk of a building, a gaping reminder.  But now it was gone!  My sense of the geography of the place experienced a seismic shift.

Finally we arrived at the gateway to the site itself, one more security point through which to pass - bags on conveyor belts, personal screening by x-ray and hand-wanding .  At last I was free to walk the remaining 100 yards or so to the entrance.  The moment I stepped onto the site, my sense of place was rocked again.  The last time I was allowed onto the site, nine years ago in the final days of the recovery operation, The Pile had become The Pit, an enormous hole, acres across and several stories deep, mostly empty save for the last standing I-beam and for some reconstructive work already starting on the subway line.  Now there was no more Pit.  Instead, everything was ground level - a serene patchwork of lawns and walkways, dotted with sycamore and other trees - all, that is, except for two giganitc pools, fountains, really, which exactly outlined the footprints of the two towers.  The names of those who perished that day stood at waist level, cut into smooth metal bands three feet wide and extending all the way around each footprint. In from this steel frame flowed waterfalls, falling straight down, all the way, I assumed, to the bottom of what was once The Pit.

The plunging water catapulted to its destination like a glissando.  My eyes followed it down, pulled as if by a force beyond my control into the inevitability of the water's course; I don't know how long I stood there, transfixed.  What a transformation: from the desolate pile of jagged steel and fractured lives, which smoldered for months, to the empty pit that resulted after nine months of excavation and tears, to this graceful yet mesmerizing play of musical water, cool metal and sudden disappearance into an abyss.  The sound of the water alone transported.  It drowned out the background of city noises, lifting me seemingly out of the city altogether and into the present moment.

When I finally "came to" I realized that my hand was resting on a name, carved into the metal bannister in front of me.  It was Mychal Judge, the beloved chaplain of the New York Fire Department, a Franciscan priest, and one of the first to die inside the towers when the firefighters first began racing into them.  I moved slowly around the entire "South Tower," silently praying the names, and then the "North Tower," like making pradakshina around a sacred object.  Eventually I sat down on one of the many stone benches provided for contemplation.  I watched the sun set behind the newly emerging towers, then offered up the names, thousands of names, millions of open letters removed from the metal arms embracing the footprints, leaving holes in the metal where the letters were, emptiness, an alphabet of lives suddenly vaporized.  The sky progressed from powder blue to orange to azure to black.  The city re-emerged around the edges of the site, a million points of light, as though a counterpoint to the millions of letters that now seemed ascended into the open heavens.  

I could have stayed there much longer, but I had gotten drenched when a sudden wind picked up the mist rising off of the waterfalls and doused some of us.  Now it was dark and I was cold, so I slowly made my way back across the sixteen-acre site, walking as slowly as I dared in the brisk night air, reluctant to leave.  At last I came to the exit from this enclosed and incomparable little world.

Suddenly I was in a carnival, the pulsing and raucous night life of Zucccoti Park, kitty-corner from Ground Zero. Occupy Wall Street!  Drummers exploded with raw energy, the unleashed rhythms of discontent and youth and hope, translated into a percussive roar that echoed powerfully off of the surrounding buildings, a canyon of change and revolution, a womb of the new and the possible.  

I had been at Zuccotti Park the day before, participating in an interfaith service and then joining a number of other representatives of the interfaith religious community as we marched to the bronze bull sculpture at the tip of Manhattan, carrying a homemade golden calf, a symbol of our objection to the way that those with extreme wealth, particularly corporations, have co-opted the elected decision-making bodies and officials in our government.  One of the things that had struck me yesterday was how much the camp at Zuccotti Park was like the early days of the recovery operation at Ground Zero:  makeshift kitchens on the sidewalks, food donated by many people who wanted to show their support for the effort, volunteers coming out of the woodwork to serve the food, clean up, help organize, facilitate communication, deal with the incoming clothes and shoes and other supplies that were daily pouring in from concerned citizens everywhere.  That's just what St. Paul's was like in the first weeks after 9/11.  Now this same outpouring was happening at Occupy Wall Street.

Six weeks passed before I had a chance to set down these thoughts, and in the meantime the protesters have been swept out of the park, their camp dismantled.  But the movement lives on.  

Like the memory of those who died on 9/11.  Like the irrepressible music of Bach.  Much to reflect on as we move into the season of Advent.  

So I was very moved when I read an appreciation of a recently disceased member of the Association of Contemplative Sisters in their latest newsletter. Gert Wilkinson writes about Therese Haughey's love of the Eucharist:

The last months of Therese's life were spent at holy Family Residence, a nursing home run by the Little Sisters of the Poor. This was extremely difficult for her, but she knew she had to be in a place where she had the care she needed. She told one Carmelite that the Eucharist had always been the love of her life. She tried to make it real for her in the nursing home. While at the dining table with other residents, she saw it as a place for Eucharist. When her table companions couldn't hear or weren't interested in pleasant talk, she thought of Eucharist. She consciously made a daily choice to share Eucharist at the table by kindness, interest in the other, and by trying to make the meal pleasant and peaceful for others. How appropriate it was, and not just a coincidence, that it was just after she sat down for dinner, that she died ... at her Eucharist table.

Therese's brother, a Jesuit priest, presided and preached at the funeral Mass. Wilkinson quotes from the homily:

I feel she wants to say something about herself through me for all of us still on the sense side of the mystery... She wants me to say: “heaven was something happening to my soul at Mass...” [Eucharist] connected all the dots of her life... She has gone from sign to sight, from ritual to nuptial, from receiving communion to complete communion.

Observing sacred places and sacred moments, signs and sacraments, have the effect of revealing that all places, all moments, unveil the mystery of union with Divine Love.

Can’t we all just get along?

Exactly ten years ago September 13th a number of us who at the time lived in Manhattan heeded a call put out by New York's General Theological Seminary to volunteer to serve food to workers at what had become Ground Zero. At dusk we loaded a van with food and drove it down to another Episcopal institution, the Seaman's Institute, passing through numerous checkpoints guarded by military and police. We spent most of the night there cooking on barbeques (no electricity), serving food, talking with workers and helping to organize the piles of donated supplies.

We did the same thing again the next night. During that shift, someone asked a couple of us to drive some of the supplies down to St. Paul's Chapel, an Episcopal chapel that stood across the street from the now collapsed World Trade Center. After unloading the supplies, we were then asked to transport some of these supplies to the site itself. We loaded up wheelbarrows, donned hard hats and masks, and went to what had already been termed “The Pile”. It was a transformative experience, seeing a familiar part of town that now looked as though it had been hit by an asteroid. I was never the same again.

The relief ministry gradually shifted to St. Paul's, and we continued volunteering there. A young woman from South Carolina, Bethany, was hired to coordinate the relief ministry, and one day she told me that she thought it would be really nice to provide music for the workers who came to St. Paul's to eat, rest and get medical treatment. There was a beautiful Steinway grand there, and Bethany asked me if I knew anyone who played the piano. And that is how I came to play Bach at Ground Zero. I wrote a short article about it after the first night I played, which you can read at the end of this blog entry.

As the weeks wore on, and then the months, someone volunteered to contact other musicians and coordinate a rota, so that there was music in the chapel most days and/or nights. Some of the best musicians in New York eventually played at St. Paul's – singers, instrumentalists, string quartets and other small ensembles. I never got to hear any of them, because when I wasn't playing myself, I was out on the site, bringing supplies and talking to firefighters and officers and ironworkers and others, but I understand that it was a phenomenal musical offering.

Ten years later, two days ago, I went to Ground Zero and St. Paul's to commemorate the tenth anniversary. On the anniversary itself there were many wonderful services in the city. Some of us went to the Cathedral for a Eucharist celebrated by our bishop, Mark Sisk, and to hear the preacher, Katherine Jefferts-Shori, the presiding bishop. Afterwards a couple of us went to St. Paul's for a moving service honoring the workers and volunteers at Ground Zero.

I had read in the New York Times that there were to be many wonderful performances of Bach's music at St. Paul's and Trinity Church during the week leading up to 9/11/11. I was terribly disappointed that I was unable to attend these concerts, since I had other commitments in Brewster. While at the service on 9/11/11, however, I learned that there was to be yet one more performance the next day. I had planned to be in the city the next day, so, elated, I made plans to go to the performance.

I arrived at St. Paul's the next day with seconds to spare. Julian Wachner, the music director at Trinity Church, walked out and said a few words about the two cantatas about to be performed, and with that, he gave the downbeat. Instantly the chapel erupted in an utterly fantastic explosion of sound – lush strings, valve-less horns, baroque flutes and a choral fan of beautifully trained voices. Without warning, my heart opened up and tears began streaming down my face. This was a cantata I knew very well – BWV 79, “Gott her Herr ist Sonn and Schild”, or, “God the Lord is sun and shield,” but had heard only on recordings. To hear it live in the present moment was stunning, and to hear it in that space, mere feet from the worst terrorist attack in our country's history, was overwhelming.

There is just nothing like Bach. Many things have been said about 9/11, many things written, many art forms employed to express the varied responses to that day and it's aftermath. In the end, no one has said it better than Bach. He was a man who knew sorrow from an early age. He lost his parents before he had reached puberty, lost a beloved brother, his first wife and many children over the years (although, with twenty-two children altogether, enough survived that he could have had a whole orchestra of Bach's!). Bach wrote achingly beautiful Passions of almost unfathomable depth, and many of his cantatas are based on texts that have to do with grief. His music gives expression to grief in a deeply profound way.

Julian Wachner, surely the architect of the shape of the week's performances, created a musical arch that was sheer genius. Early in the week preceding 9/11 he and his wonderful musicians performed cantatas that expressed grief and sorrow – one, for example, “Aus der Tiefen ruhe ich, Herr, zu dir”, BWV 131 – was written by Bach to commemorate the anniversary of a terrible fire in a nearby village. As the week wore on, the themes of the cantatas changed to comfort (a New York Times article about the series called Bach “the great comforter”) and then hope. There were no Bach performances on the day itself, as far as I could tell, but the day after, September 12^th, a date which is already hugely significant in the minds of New Yorkers as a symbol of the hope and the new life that lies beyond September 11^th, the themes of the cantatas scheduled were “God is sun and shield, and will all no good thing to be lacking”, and “Now thank we all our God, with hears and hands and voices”. In just a week, one went from sorrow to comfort to hope to gratitude. What a transformative process, and one accomplished entirely by sacred text embodied in musical sound!

I listened to every note of the two cantatas with rapt attention, and when the music ended, the congregation burst into spontaneous applause. I rose from my chair and went straight to Mr. Wachner and gave him a huge hug. He may have been embarrassed to be hugged by a nun, but I explained that the experience was simply overwhelming, and that the magnificence of the performance and the artistry of the musical arch of the week had compelled me to throw my arms around him. (I think he figured that I was somewhat crazy, but he was polite about it.) I told him that the experience of hearing Bach so magnificently played here completely redeemed the whole experience of violence and terror on 9/11.

After I released Mr. Wachner, I made my way outside. The iron fence around St. Paul's had been transformed by tens of thousands of white ribbons that people had tied onto the bars. “Remember to love”, the ribbons said. The black bars of the fence were practically invisible, having been transformed into what looked like white columns. The ribbons fluttered in a faint breeze. Indeed, hate had been transformed into love.

I left St. Paul's and went down to the corner, across from Ground Zero. Although the newly built memorial was closed to the public for the time being, I could see the new buildings jutting into the sky. They were encased in reflective glass, so that they blended with the sky and the clouds. They almost looked like a mirage. They almost weren't there. And yet they were.

The footprints of the two towers of the World Trade Center have been preserved, and are now reflecting pools with waterfalls, with the engraved names of all who perished that day nearby. I am glad that the footprints of the buildings have preserved in this way, because they are really cemeteries (the remains of many who died that day have never been found). It would seem sacrilegious to me to build on top of them. But I was heartened to see these almost mystical buildings rising behind the pools. This, too, seemed like a symbol of new life and hope.

I know that this is unusually long for a blog, but if you have made it this far, thank you for indulging me. It has been helpful to attempt to begin to process the many feelings of the past weekend. I would be interested to know how the tenth anniversary of 9/11 has been for you, too.

September 27, 2001

Back at Ground Zero

I've spent the better part of the past two days at Ground Zero. Most of that time I've walked around the site, talking to the rescue/recovery workers, asking them how they'e doing, chatting, letting anything come out that wants to, and just being a presence there. It's a small thing to do, but it seems to be genuinely appreciated. Several of us have been doing this whenever we can.

The men and women we talk to are fire fighters, special search and rescue crews, police officers, army reservists, FBI agents, and workers involved in demolition and construction. I had never had a particular affection for the New York Police Department (or any other, for that matter); if I thought about the NYPD at all, it was usually in critical terms for widely publicized abuses, racial profiling, and so on. I had also never thought much about the New York Fire Department, or the FBI.

These past two weeks have changed me. In many ways, obviously, but in particular in my view of the men and women who make up the police and fire departments, the FBI, the military. I've seen heroes. I've seen people who've been laboring at the site of the rescue/recovery operation ever since the two planes slammed into the Twin Towers, working sixteen-hour (or more) shifts, day after day, with no days off. I've seen their unflagging devotion, their urgency to get their brothers and sisters out, even now, when there is no longer any hope that they might be alive. I've seen men and women who won't crack until their work is done, who have lost literally hundreds of comrades and friends. They're still in there, pulling bodies and parts of bodies out of the rubble, still pouring water on fires that won't go out, still moving debris from piles as tall as some of the surrounding buildings.

They are heroes. And their fallen comrades are, too, the ones who ran in when others were running out. I've seen heroism up close, and I've found it in ordinary people I had scarcely noticed before this tragic event.

After two days of being in the smoking ruins and seeing nothing but mountains of jagged, burnt steel, chunks of concrete and unidentifiable mush (you can't recognize a single object, not a chair, a computer, a light fixture, a desk – nothing) I was glad when a woman who was helping coordinate the relief effort at St. Paul's Chapel asked me to provide some music for the workers who came into the chapel to sleep, eat, relax, pray or get medical help. I didn't know if they would like to hear the kind of music I can play (mostly classical, with some gospel and a very few popular tunes). Nevertheless, I came down to the site today armed with Bach and Chopin and Mozart.

I felt really self-conscious when I first started playing, but only for a few moments. As the sound of Bach filled the chapel, I began to realize how badly it had been needed. Within moments, the music took hold of the place, and I realized that everyone, including myself, was getting a desperately needed shot of sheer beauty. What a relief! It was as though everyone who had been laboring on the smoldering mounds for so long was starved for beauty. How fine to put Bach into the air! It felt as though those present soaked it up, workers who probably don't normally listen to Bach, maybe haven't even heard of Bach.

After Bach, there was Brahms, then other classical composers, and now and then a gospel hymn like “Shall we gather at the river” or “Leaning on the everlasting arms.” I threw in a couple of Beatles tunes (I actually know a few), which some of the guys appreciated, and a few patriotic hymns, and then kept coming back to the refined harmonies of Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Brahmns.

Harmony. Counterpoint. Rhythm. It was all so needed at Ground Zero. I never expected, when I began going down there, to play music at the site of the worst act of terrorism in our country's history. I never expected, when I trained as a classical musician, that this gift would be used to help revive exhausted, grieving firefighters and police officers, in a little chapel turned into a relief station.

As I played, I looked down at my feet. The grand piano was surrounded by hard hats, rubber boots, bottles of water, rappelling gear, bags of granola bars. It was so incongruous, yet so perfectly right. I thank God for the opportunity to bring a little bit of beauty into that tortured scene of unbelievable destruction, to men and women who have laid their lives on the line, and are now my heroes.

So I came home, laid down my hard hat and my identification badge, and went up to chapel, reeking of smoke. One of our friends, a former St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's student named Jenny Goodnow, was leading a group in prayers for peace. And I sat down in my mud-covered boots and joined them.

And I continue to pray for peace. For an end to sixteen-acre bomb sites and to incomprehensible violence that shatters lives. And I pray that the extraordinary heroism and courage of ordinary people can someday be directed from cleaning up the damage caused by ideologies of hatred and greed, power and privilege, division and exclusion, into building a world that reflects the intricate and beautiful harmony of a Bach fugue.

“Let me have your boots,” says Sister Helena Marie.

I understand immediately.

I take off my boots and she puts them in a plastic dishtub.
She takes the tub out to the little convent garden. She rinses my boots, and then hers in the little tub, then prayerfully pours the ash-water of Ground Zero into the ground.