COMMENTARY: New York Is Again Haunted by Voices of Sept. 11

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Instead of climbing to a mountaintop to find God or religious experiences, come to noisy Manhattan where the mystical is more accessible than in most monasteries. The voices of the living, the dead and the dying now speak to us out of the fiery whirlwind of Sept. 11 on […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Instead of climbing to a mountaintop to find God or religious experiences, come to noisy Manhattan where the mystical is more accessible than in most monasteries.

The voices of the living, the dead and the dying now speak to us out of the fiery whirlwind of Sept. 11 on newly released oral histories, dispatchers’ tapes and phone logs. They were so vast, The New York Times tell us, “that they took up 23 compact discs.”


This contemporary Greek chorus also serves as a drill bit tapping into the unnamed sorrows that have long rumbled inside history, waiting for someone to remember and release them.

We must imagine the voices that speak to us from the silent Titanic or the cemeteries at Normandy. The Jews who wore yellow stars and the slaves who raised manacled hands weep as silently as Rachel far beyond our hearing. But these people now speak on their behalf.

Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the south tower of the World Trade Center, reacts to the tapes in that touching manner through which the heartbroken in all centuries reject pity to take a hard look at their sorrow: “Today we are one step closer to learning what happened … where we excelled, where we failed.”

Hear the anguish of all those who have battled death in the lament of the firefighters who watched medics treating a comrade struck by a fallen body. They “continued to work on him, carrying out hopeless resuscitation efforts in deference to two shocked firefighters who … kept yelling, `Danny, Danny, Danny!”’

A brave Everyman speaks for all those who long to learn more about their loved one’s last moments. Wall Street executive Richard A. Pecorella describes an “image he believes to be that of his fiancee, Karen Juday.” She is standing by a window, a fire behind her. “And I’m pretty sure there is another picture of Karen, falling. … I can’t be sure that she was a jumper. But it looks like her.”

Pecorella aches in the name of millions before him as he refuses to avert his eyes, instead gazing directly into the mystery of loss. Perhaps the tapes, he says, “can help me better understand the reality of what happened. … I would like to better comprehend the intensity of the panic, and the threat of the fire.”

Others name the devastation of the small, uncertain and increasingly painful steps of loss. Margaret Arce, whose firefighter son, David, died in the attack, tells of how just the arrival of the discs on her front porch was a wrenching experience. “She has now moved the package to her dining room table. Psychologically, she said, she had to prepare herself. `It’s not going to be today. There’s too much hubbub. I need the quiet of my soul.”’


Another mother, Mary Fletcher, says aloud what the grieving legions also know: “This is a long grieving process and I think each individual has to make a decision about how to deal with this information.”

Her plaintive cry rebuffs those who would try to package humankind’s grief quickly or insist that the sorrowing should set out immediately for the false grail of “closure.” Mrs. Fletcher says simply, “I don’t think I’ll expose myself to this. I have to be very careful. I think that to know what happened inside that tower is not healthy for me, personally.”

Such events break the earth open so that we can hear the long-suppressed cries of all those who have gone before us and who are so much like us. The searing heat burns away our superficial differences and our shallow pieties.

In the process, we learn the simplest and greatest of spiritual truths _ as psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan expressed it, “We are much more simply human than anything else.”

(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 END KENNEDY

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