COMMENTARY: Grand Vision for Ground Zero Grounded

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Within a few moments at Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, everything changed for all of us. In the long years since, however, so little has changed there that the Wall Street Journal describes the site in lower Manhattan as “an empty canyon.” The vast space has become poet […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Within a few moments at Ground Zero on Sept. 11, 2001, everything changed for all of us. In the long years since, however, so little has changed there that the Wall Street Journal describes the site in lower Manhattan as “an empty canyon.”

The vast space has become poet Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain,” not “where ignorant armies clash by night” but where money-obsessed tycoons battle by day. We are singed by what another poet describes as “fires in the burden’d air,” ignited by the skirmishes between those who want to construct more retail stores and those who want offices instead.


Even Donald Trump, who will never be mistaken for a philosopher, much less a prophet, laments the failure in Old Testament tones. He describes the proposed designs as “a series of broken-down angles that don’t match each other,” plans that lack the majesty of the original Twin Towers that he now wants to rebuild.

Surprised as I am to agree with the flamboyant entrepreneur, he has put his finger on why so little has been achieved in this place where so much happened.

The hot lava of politics always flows into the vacuum left by religious leaders who invoke cliches from quotation books rather than insights from their own experience.

That is less the fault of moguls than of monsignors; that is, the managerial class of religious leaders who are so preoccupied with building plans, parish boundaries and bottom lines that their reactions are more like businessmen than pastors who wept with the grieving and buried the dead. Aside from their usual piety, they show little grasp of the great mystery into which we were all so suddenly taken up on that cruelly clear morning.

Ground Zero is suffering from what Joseph Campbell terms “mythic dissociation.” When people are cut off from their deep spiritual roots, they lose the sacramental sense of life.

He describes this isolation from one’s spiritual roots as a “loss of identification with any spiritually compelling, structuring group” and “a loss of any sense of either identity or of relationship with a dimension of experience … any more awesome than that … held together only by lust or fear.”

As a result, people find themselves in what T.S. Eliot called “The Waste Land,” exactly the description now given to Ground Zero. Many so-called spiritual leaders still fail to recognize it as the site of the great sacramental experience of our time. We saw revealed _ in this staggering mystery of loss _ the profound goodness of the men and women we mistakenly term “ordinary.”


Only recently have poets and novelists and artists, following their calling, begun to explore the spiritual impact of 9/11. In Shakespeare’s words, they seek to “give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”

The wrangling interests think their problems are commercial when they are fundamentally spiritual. The official spiritual leaders have offered little help in correctly naming and dealing with the basic problem of identifying the right symbols to raise on sacred ground.

The New York Times tells us, however, that the families of the 2,792 victims “feared that the events … were cooling into half-remembered, half-understood myths.” On the site, they have erected three signs “that lay out the timeline of Sept. 11, beginning at 6:32 a.m., sunrise over New York City, and ending at 11:30 p.m.” After their unveiling, “a white-bearded man sat on the ground and played … `Amazing Grace’ on his flute. Couples hugged and parents held their children’s hands as they read the Sept. 11 timeline.”

These people are not as famous as Donald Trump or as rich as the deadlocked developers, but they understand what has been missing. They have given sorrow words to heal the “mythic dissociation” that now plagues Ground Zero.

A sacrament is defined as an external sign of an inner grace. That is what these people who never get their names in the paper have done for all those who do get their names in the paper but don’t understand Ground Zero at all. The old man with the flute was right. It is an amazing grace for all of us.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)


KRE/RB END KENNEDY

Editors: Check the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Ground Zero to accompany this column

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