Wednesday, February 25, 2004. Reverend Lyndon Harris, "Transitions and Transformations: Life at Ground Zero."

MS. BRIZINDINE: Good morning. Will you please take a seat so we can get started? Again, in honor of transitions, we all know that T.S. Eliot was just a little bit wrong. It's not April, but May, that is the cruelest month, and as we meet our May madness and think about the noise that is yet ahead of us, I want you also to think about the unusual silence that sometimes follows, and here's another poem, this one by Ree Whitamore, and it's called, "A High School Band."

"On warm days in September

The high school band is up with the birds

And marches along our street,

Boom, boom, to a field where it goes

Boom, boom, until 8:45,

When it marches, as in the old rhyme,

Back, boom, boom, to its study halls,

Leaving our streets empty

Except for the leaves that descend

To no drum and lie still in September.

A great many high school bands

Beat a great many drums

And the silences after their parting

Are very deep."

MS. GIBBS: Good morning, everyone. I just want to say again how wonderful that program was last night. Wasn't that great? You guys may want to take that show on the road.

I'd like to ask you, please, if you would be so kind as to turn off your cell phones. That would be helpful. I have also been asked to announce that there will be an ability to share cabs to the airport, and during the break you can sign up out at the registration desk, if you would like to do so.

Also, please complete your evaluations because we want to see what you thought, and please, not only tell us about the speakers, but also any suggestions you have for future years, things that you would like to see either in terms of speakers or format or just any ideas that you have. I know that the Council would be very pleased to have that.

We have two very wonderful speakers today, and I'm very pleased to introduce the first to you. I think that Bodie's poem was particularly apropos for the message that the Reverend Lyndon Harris is going to bring to us this morning.

Lyndon was the priest in charge of relief ministries at Ground Zero that were offered through St. Paul's Chapel, which is part of Trinity Church, after September 11th. Many of you will remember seeing St. Paul's Chapel, the respite center, which was that tiny little chapel located right at the foot of where the trade towers were, and it emerged from that unscathed.

For a full year during that time, Lyndon and his staff there provided a place of peace and respite for the rescue workers, the firemen, the police, the volunteers, and it was really quite a remarkable thing that went on.

Father Harris joined the staff of Trinity Church, St. Paul's Chapel, in April 2001, in order to develop at St. Paul's Chapel a laboratory for urban evangelism and alternative worship. However, from September 15th, 2001, to June 2, 2002, St. Paul's Chapel was converted into a multi-faith relief center for those working at the World Trade Center site.

St. Paul's offered food, massage therapy, counseling, chiropractic, and podiatry care around the clock. By the end of the operation, over one-half million meals had been served. For the work at St. Paul's Chapel, Father Harris has appeared on many major news networks, magazines, and newspapers. He now serves as a consultant in urban ministries and reimagining the city at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Harris is one of the leaders of the Nine-Twelve Community, a multi-faith civic organization seeking to rebuild lives and to help reimagine New York City in the wake of 9/11. Father Harris is privileged to travel around the country speaking about spirituality and healing at Ground Zero, and a new church for the 21st century. After you hear him today, I expect many of you may wish to have him come and speak to your students.

Lyndon is a graduate of Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina -- six degrees of separation -- and the School of Theology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Currently he is a Ph.D. candidate in Anglican theology at General Theological Seminary. Harris is a fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation, and has been honored to receive several awards, including the Dean's Medal for Exemplary Service from General Seminary and a distinguished Alumnus Award from Wofford College, and the School of Theology at the University of the South.

He lives in Manhattan, with his wife Kirsten and their daughter, who is a student at Hewett. Join me in welcoming Lyndon Harris.

FATHER HARRIS: Thank you, Linda, for such a fine introduction, and thanks for the invitation to be here with you. I have been looking forward to this for a long time. I haven't been to Savannah in 18 years. The last time I was here, I was on my honeymoon, and my wife and I stayed in an inn just on the other side of the historic district, which I set out to find yesterday. It's changed ownership, names, and all that jazz, but I was able to find it, and it's still in operation. Just amazing.

And also, gosh, I have learned more about mosquitoes than I ever knew. I am a theologian, and one of the questions that I have often pondered in my life is: What purpose does a mosquito have? You know, we believe that God created everything and that all creation is good, but I have never been able to figure out what good a mosquito is. I found out yesterday. An elderly gentleman who had retired from being the president of that association told me. He said, "Well, it gives people like me a job."

It's great to be with you. I want to tell you a little bit about what I'm going to do this morning. I want to share the narrative, the story of St. Paul's Chapel, both before and after 9/11, and invite you into that narrative so that at the end of our time together we may have a discussion about what it means to be in transition. Transitioning from rugged individualism, which is, I think, the original ascent of our country, transitioning from alienation into community, transitioning from individualism into communal life experiences. And all of this is very apropos, I hope, for your schools and your work in your schools, because in so many ways you're all about building community, building communities of trust, where students feel empowered to ask their hard questions, where they feel safe to share their life's experience, where they feel empowered and encouraged and challenged to be the best they can be, and that's what an educational community can do for our children.

I also want to say, before I get started, I tip my hat to you. I taught at St. Hilda's and St. Hugh's Episcopal School in Manhattan for three years, and I was chaplain there, and I taught everything from senior kindergarten to eighth grade. I had no idea what kind of energy and commitment it takes to be an educator. I had been teaching at the seminary level for a good while, but that's a much different experience. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate the work that you guys do for us. So my hat is off to you.

Transitions and transformations. To be alive is to be in transition. And transitions come with conflict. The only conflict-free existence, I tell my premarital couples, is death. It's not a matter of avoiding conflict. It's just a matter of what you do with conflict that comes up while you are in transition. Life is not a problem to be solved like a puzzle piece. You know, you get the puzzle pieces in just the right places and solve it.

Real life is different from that because the puzzle pieces change shapes, don't they? So life isn't about solving puzzles. It's rather an invitation to live creatively within the tensions of life. Transitions bring about tension.

This morning I want to tell you a story of transition, a transition from tragedy into transformation that took place at St. Paul's Chapel, both before and after 9/11.

St. Paul's Chapel is directly across the street from where the World Trade Center site is, as Linda had mentioned. I want to tell you this story not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as an invitation to each one of you to connect your story with this story, because regardless of where you were on 9/11/2001, you had your own Ground Zero. I want to wrap up the presentation later by demonstrating how that is true, especially for our children, some of the children's letters.

So regardless of where you were, you had your own 9/11 and I want to tell you this story, not to take us back to a horrific, grisly experience, but to invite you into a conversation about our future. Part of my stump speech as I travel around the country is that there are rare singular moments in history when communities become unfrozen and new possibilities for being community emerge. We're in one of those moments. Let us not lose this opportunity, both locally and nationally.

9/11 happened, I like to say, and it was covered by every media outlet in the world. But the real story, the real story of the past few years, has been the story of 9/12, the day we decided as individuals, as communities, as cities and as a nation to get out of bed and respond to those acts of hatred with hearts of compassion.

Especially did I see this in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 at Ground Zero. Your theme for this conference is transitions. The story I want to tell deals with one of the most important transitions of the human existential context, the transition, as I mentioned, from isolation into community.

Some of the background resources. You're educators. You want to know what informs my thinking. Some of the background resources of my research includes sociologist Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart, one of those really important books in my mind. And especially, more recently, Robert Putnam, a Harvard sociologist, who published a book entitled Bowling Alone. His basic premise, as probably most of you know, is that for the first time in the history of this country, you can travel around and visit those great old community centers in towns and cities across this country, places where community has been formed through bowling leagues and bowling teams, and you can see people actually Bowling Alone.

He points out that the real challenge for us now is to build social capital, to build community. That's what I took from my task at St. Paul's Chapel before 9/11. I wanted to build spiritual capital across the street from the world financial capital on one side, and just a couple of blocks away, world political capital on the other side. The World Trade Center, and New York City Hall. Building social capital is building community, and that's also a pursuit that you are engaged in, I know, in your schools.

Well, let's get started. This is St. Paul's Chapel. I was called to be the priest in charge of St. Paul's in April 2001, to create here a laboratory for alternative worship and urban ministries, and I was thrilled. This is the oldest public building in continuous use in the city of New York. We have to say it that way because it's not the oldest church. But it's the oldest church in continuous use. There's a Quaker meetinghouse in Brooklyn that beat us out by a few years. If something ever happens to them -- not that we wish any ill on them. But the oldest public building in continuous use.

George Washington was one of the early members of the congregation here. He visited often. There's a pew inside, a box pew bearing his name, because that's where he sat when he came.

This was an original Church of England chapel as part of the Trinity Church system, prior to the genesis of the Episcopal Church, and the revolution, so it's pre-Revolutionary. When the Episcopal Church was born in 1789 and we created our own prayer book, the biggest difference in the prayer books from the Church of England prayer book was that we removed the prayer for the king.

Well, legend has it that on the Sunday following the publication of the new prayer book, Washington showed up with an entourage of men, bayonets drawn, to forbid the priest to pray the prayer for the king. Now, if that doesn't demonstrate church politics as a contact sport, I don't know what does.

It's an amazing place, and if you're in the city, I invite you to come down and visit. They're doing some really creative stuff at St. Paul's now. They actually also have a program set up for students to come and participate in various things at St. Paul's. You can check it out on the web site, TrinityWallStreet.org.

Here's what was happening before 9/11. I was called to create a laboratory for alternative worship, so I knew that God was calling me to put together a jazz ensemble. We did. We called them Urban Blend, and that name came from a coffee, actually. I noticed that Au Bon Pain, where I used to get my coffee every morning, changed the name of my usual coffee from Cafe Blend to Urban Blend. Wouldn't that be a great name for a band?

So this is Urban Blend. We did everything from gospel to jazz, did a lot of Miles Davis, John Coltrain, all kinds of interesting jazz. We also did jazz so far out there that it doesn't have melody. It's called sound painting, so it's just like primal sounds. It wasn't for everybody, but in a lab you have got to experiment.

One of the things I'm most proud of is that I think we'll go on record as having created or commissioned the first setting of the Mass in hip-hop. Again, that wasn't for everybody, either. But in a laboratory you have got to experiment. I took for my motto, "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space."

So they hired me to push the envelope, and being the closet mad scientist that I am, I was thrilled to do that. We were using images in worship, all kinds of video clips. One of my first sermons was on a video clip I showed from the movie "The Matrix," so it had a bite to it. We had a lot of fun with this service.

This is an image of St. Paul's interior during that time. Absolutely gorgeous Georgian architecture. You see the chandeliers there. 1802 Waterford crystal chandeliers. Just really beautiful, beautiful place.

This is the advertisement I placed in a lot of the New York publications getting ready for our relaunching of the worship service that summer of 2001. So you can see it has a visual rhetoric to it that I really liked. I mean, you're driving down the road, you can make a choice between going nowhere or somewhere. And of course, where is the church recessed? Under the "Somewhere" sign.

We take a turn for the tragic for just a minute, but we won't dwell there the whole time.

This is the cover of The Village Voice in which the ad appeared. We were supposed to reconvene on September 17th. But 9/11 got in the way. People used to ask me how many members I had in my congregation. I'd tell them 60,000, because that's how many people worked at the World Trade Center. I saw that as my parish. Here's the steeple of St. Paul's Chapel on the day of 9/11. Horrific. Horrific day.

This was taken by a fellow by the name of James Wheel, who's a lawyer in New York City, and he lives across the street. I don't think I would have stayed in my apartment to take this picture, quite frankly. But he did, and I'm glad we have it.

This is building 5 in the background. As you can see, it's indescribable, the kind of stuff we saw that day.

I was in my office at Trinity that morning, and when the first plane hit, we assumed it was an accident, a little Cessna or something that had hit, so no big deal. Then we found out the extent of the attack, and then began immediately to evacuate our children.

Trinity has a preschool, so we got our children together and evacuated out the back side of the building. We were running south, away from the World Trade Center towers, going to the Staten Island Ferry. And as we were going down, the second tower collapsed and just consumed us with ashes and soot.

I was carrying a little girl named Jasmine, and I was really concerned about her mental state in the midst of all this. I asked her if she was okay. She said, "I'm okay. Just keep running." Children have a way of cutting through a lot of stuff, getting to what's important.

This is the cemetery at St. Paul's Chapel the next day. You can see it's covered with debris, ashes, blown-apart computer monitors, any number of different awful stuff. This is a picture of the background, the twisted carnage of the buildings behind St. Paul's.

Well, I walked down to St. Paul's Chapel the day afterwards, on 9/12, fully expecting the place to be demolished. I had two goals. I was going down to help out with the rescue operations, because we assumed people were still struggling for their lives at that point. And the second goal was to rescue the Great Seal of the United States. Hanging in St. Paul's is one of the oldest paintings of the seal of the United States in oil. It's Ben Franklin's idea of the national bird. A trivia question for you educators who know this, of course. What is his idea of the bird? The turkey, yes.

So as I walked down, I saw the chapel still standing, and going into the chapel right after 9/11 was the most eerie feeling I have ever had. Walking through, I felt as if sparks were flying off my boots. I couldn't believe the place was standing.

We took that as a sign. Nothing magical or mysterious. We took it as a sign, not that we're holier than anybody who died across the street, because that would be a theological mistake on a supreme level. But we took it as a sign that maybe we had a job to do. We've got a building, we're close to the site. What can we do to help out?

Well, we started out by serving meals on the sidewalk. Until I got the building checked out to make sure it was safe, I didn't know I could let people in. I didn't want to get people in there and have the building collapse on them. So we set up a food service operation on the corner. This became affectionately known as Barbecue on Broadway. I took this photograph -- and I'm not a photographer, I just got lucky -- but it tells a lot. The texture of the food, the grime on the outfits of these men and women.

You won't be surprised to find out that the Health Department had some problems with my food service operation. In fact, they came along and shut me down twice a day. But in defiance, we cranked the coals back up as soon as they left.

One day the woman from the Health Department came by and took all of our burgers off the grill, threw them in the garbage can, and poured lye all over them. I told the police captain, whose station was next door, and he said, "Well, when that woman comes back, I want to know about it."

She had quite a reputation. She wore high heels into this mess. Usually she would come with an entourage of about five guys and while one person stuck a thermometer into the burger to check the temperature, the other five were sitting over here eating plates full of them. They weren't too afraid of the food.

But as you can imagine, there was no quality control over this food. You certainly wouldn't serve this to your students, I know. Because if somebody wanted to poison us, they could have. By the grace of God, I guess, or a lot of luck, no one got sick.

But we fought this battle for about two weeks. And one episode in the middle of that two weeks was really interesting. When that woman came back, I went over and told the police captain, and he came over with an entourage of his biggest guys, about eight of them, and they surrounded the Health Department entourage and marched them off the premises. The next day I talked to one of the police officers in the middle of that and he smiled really big and he said, "Well, the last time I checked, the Health Department doesn't carry guns, and we do."

So it was really amazing to see the police department being the ones who were defying the rules. But they loved us. We were keeping them going. We were serving about 500 meals a day, maybe about 2,500 burgers, because these guys were hungry. And I certainly was eating my share of them, too.

But finally they shut us down. They came in the night, one night, with a trump card that they hadn't played yet. It had the name Giuliani on it, and he was their hero, the police department's hero. So they took a step backwards and saluted, and that was the end of my Ground Zero food service.

However, simultaneously with its shutdown, we started having parish potluck dinners on the steps of St. Paul's, and we'd have the same people showing up for it. In fact, we did even more meals on our property. By that time, I had a structural engineer check out the building. It was safe, so we just moved the food operation inside and I brought on board a fellow who had just lost the lease on his restaurant. He was without a job, and he had a Health Department certificate and a lot of friends in the business, Martin Cower, from Albany, Georgia. He came on board and helped us out and organized the food service and it was amazing. I had no idea. He took us on a quantum leap forward. It wasn't long before St. Paul's Chapel had a food reputation worthy of Zaget's, because when he came on board, he brought all of his buddies with him and we had the Waldorf-Astoria doing our dinners, we had Zabar's and Eli's Bread doing our lunches, and the famous New York chef David Boulet doing our breakfasts. So we didn't go hungry. We were doing about 2,500 meals a day at that point.

Let's go on a quick virtual tour of St. Paul's chapel. As the building opened up, we created some ministry stations, and I'll just tell you briefly about those. As you come in, you're greeted by someone at the sign-in table. There are also small supplies here, like Chapstick and throat lozenges and aspirin.

Interestingly enough, this is Katherine Avery from Spartanburg, South Carolina. She came up with a group called Labor of Love. Well, I had no idea Catherine was coming up until the night before she came up. Catherine was in my youth group in a church in South Carolina, and I hadn't seen or talked to her in ten years. And just serendipitously, she comes up to help out and quickly became the sweetheart of Ground Zero. We're taking bets on whether or not we can get Nicole Kidman to play her in the movie.

Here's another view of the station. Behind the people here, you can see there's an altar. That became a memorial altar, on which people would place images and photographs of their loved ones who were lost in the attack.

We had another supply table with sweatshirts and all kinds of rain jackets and that sort of thing. And we had music. We had music around the clock. The music-givers union came on board with us and began offering many concerts three and four times a day, and it was spectacular. These men and women would come in to have one of those great meals, and they would hear a string quartet of some of the finest musicians in Manhattan playing for them. The musicians were thrilled. Everybody has a gift.

I think this is apropos of your schools. Every student has a gift and has a talent and an ability, and the real challenge, I think, is finding ways to incorporate those gifts.

That's what happened at St. Paul's Chapel. We had bands, interestingly enough, like Bon Jovi and Dishwalla, and people like Judy Collins begging to play St. Paul's. It became quite the gig. In fact, we had so many volunteers on a waiting list to serve that New York Magazine that Christmas said that it was harder to get a gig volunteering at St. Paul's Chapel than it was to get tickets to see "The Producers" on Broadway.

We also had a lot of firefighters coming in to play, and police officers and others. This guy loved to play the piano. Really only played one song. But it just happened to be the song that probably he and I both listened to in high school, so I loved hearing it, an old rock song.

Here's the food service. Eventually we moved it inside, when the weather got cold. Again, we had a lot of volunteers helping out. We had probably close to 7,000, 8,000 volunteers helping. It was a multi-faith group. Our largest group of volunteers came from B'nai Jeshurun Synagogue. They were really terrific.

We had chiropractors working around the clock with eager beavers sitting in line waiting their turn. One of the highlights of the chiropractic station was when Jerry Rice, the famous NFL player, came in one night and was willing to let the chiropractor give him an adjustment. Forty people gathered around.

We had podiatrists working around the clock, working on the feet of these men and women. Of course, if you'll remember, this was the longest-burning fire in American history, and their boots literally were melting off their feet. Their feet were in such a sad state. So we had podiatrists who really were angels of mercy.

Now, one of the funny things about this -- and I want to interject a lot of levity, so it's not so heavy, because it was. Even in the midst of that tragedy, there was a lot of humor. When they asked me where they could set up, I thought, given the Valley Forge campaign, where else would we put them but Washington's box pew. And here's the box pew. It became the podiatric relief station. And you'll see cards and letters taped on that, and I'll say more about that in just a minute.

We had massage therapists working around the clock. We had a lot of fundamentalists, more conservative religious groups, outside laying on hands, praying for healing for the people walking by. I used to chuckle that while they have missionaries doing that outside, inside we have massage therapists laying on hands praying for healing. We wanted to minister to the full person. Body, soul, mind, spirit. And massage therapy, I think, was probably one of our most important ministries, the human touch and working through the trauma that those bodies took on. It was really important.

I used to joke with them. I used to say that holiness presumes wholeness. We had beds, cots set up all around the place, people sleeping in the pews, people sleeping upstairs. On any given night we could have up to 100 workers sleeping in St. Paul's, and they all, interestingly enough, loved the teddy bears. Here's a fellow sleeping in a pew. Someone sent us a bunch of teddy bears, and it was so wild to see these big strapping guys come in. This one police officer came in, he must have been 6'6", 250 pounds. He went over and laid down on one of the cots, moved the bear off his cot to the next one, covered up, and then reached over and got both the bears and was snuggling with them. It was a human touch, a very tender touch, that meant a lot to them. So the teddy bears were indeed a ministry.

Look at all the things on the walls and on the columns. When I first walked in one morning and saw all this stuff up, I hit the roof. We had just spent $300,000 repainting St. Paul's, getting ready for the work I was doing. I got over it in about 15 minutes, and I told them to plaster the place. I don't think it's ever been any more beautiful than it was during the height of this time.

These are icons. Now, look at this one. This was the first one to go up. It's a tribute to Ladder 20. It says, "You ran in when we all ran out. For that we are forever grateful."

We felt at St. Paul's Chapel that we couldn't do enough for these men and women who sacrificed so much of themselves for that work. This banner was the first one we got, and it came from Oklahoma City. We thought, well, if anybody knows the suffering that this community is going through, it's Oklahoma City.

And a lot of children's letters. The children were very much a part of the community. They weren't there physically, but they were there mentally, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically. How do you like the smile on the Statue of Liberty? I'm going to say more about the children's letters in just a minute.

St. Paul's Chapel was in a section that was not open to the public until around Thanksgiving 2001, but when we became open to the public, we were swamped with people. The whole downtown area swarmed with throngs of people, and they began leaving stuff on the fence. Look at all that stuff on the fence. We had everything from a scout shirt to a bag of marijuana left on our fence to a canoe. We had a canoe also. A group working in the mid-Hudson region of New York state, a group called "God's Love: We Deliver," delivers meals to people living with AIDS. They wanted to be in solidarity with the work of St. Paul's so they decorated their canoe, got in the canoe, and paddled all the way down to Manhattan, got out at the World Trade Center area, marched the canoe over, and left it on the front steps of St. Paul's. It stayed there for about a month. And I don't know what happened to it, either, because I had some plans for that canoe. It was a great canoe.

So here you see all the people gathering around. We decided to put some canvasses on the fence to see if anybody would sign them, just to connect their grief, in some way express themselves. This is the first one we put up. It was filled in half an hour, and they now have over 400 canvasses that people have signed. I always thought that this would be a really interesting exhibit to travel around the country if anybody was interested in it, getting the canvas, and just seeing how people poured out their grief. We had everything on it from, "Scottie, we miss you, we can't go on living without you," to someone expressing their anger at what happened.

Close-up. I like the halo over the Trade Center with the wings on it. Just another image. Another angle. I love to show this one, because it reminds me to tell the story about the group in Hawaii who called up on Easter weekend to inform us -- not ask us, to inform us -- on which flight the 300 pounds of fresh fish would be arriving, and the 5,000 fresh leis. Now, per chance if you were watching the news around Easter weekend in 2002, and you saw people walking around Ground Zero with big orchid leis on them, they got them from St. Paul's, most likely. What are we going to do with them? They were absolutely gorgeous, so we just gave them out. We found a restaurant to cook that fresh fish. Fresh tuna. It was really good.

I used to call home every day. My wife finally caught on to what I was doing. About 5:30 I'd call to see what was for dinner that night. If it was some kind of casserole, I automatically had to work a little bit later.

This was the Associated Press photograph taken Eastertime in St. Paul's Chapel. Take a look at the flag over there. This is another really important artifact. This was sent to us by from a middle school in Michigan, and the stripes are made up of the hand prints of children. They made hand prints on construction paper and wrote a little note on it and put them together to make the flag. Such a beautiful piece.

I was brought on to start a community, to start a church, really, at St. Paul's. I thought I was going for the Generation X'ers and some others in the downtown area. But it's not the congregation we got. We got a congregation of superheroes, we like to say: The firefighters, the police officers.

I'll tell you a little bit about these guys, but first I'm going to read to you a letter from a little schoolgirl. She's 11 years old, in Scarsdale, New York. And this is illustrative of the quality of letters we got from children. I did a presentation at the National Association of Pediatric Academics last year in Seattle on the children's letters and am actually working with a research pediatrician to do a book on the children's letters, they're so profound.

But listen to this. "Dear firefighter. There are many deaths that I can die. Cancer, heart attack, AIDS, hepatitis, leukemia, natural causes, choking, being strangled, shot, or hanged." Active imagination. "I could get the death penalty," P-E-N-I-L-T-Y. "Be in a car crash, get rabies or a snake bite, or a wild animal could attack me. I could get run over by a car. I could fall, slip, get a concussion, get smallpox, or be stabbed and crack my skull. Or get poisoned, or have heart disease, or get stung by too many bees. And many, many more." Although I can't imagine a whole lot more than that. "But I know that I will never ever die in a fire, because people like you, great people, would go into the flames to save an ordinary person like me. And that's what makes you so great, courageous, brave, terrific, wonderful, special people."

She must have had a thesaurus handy or something of the sort.

Here's one of the pictures we got. "Thank you for saving us." I mean, that's how the children felt. You know, children didn't make the geographic separation of 9/11. We got letters from children all over the country, all over the world, and one letter from a little girl in California said, "I couldn't go to school today. I couldn't get out of bed I'm so worried. I cried all day long. Will I be attacked, too?" And she was all the way in California. "Because of you, I feel safe."

Before he died last year, someone asked Mr. Rogers what recommendation he would give to those who cared for children. And his recommendation was this: To tell the children to keep their eyes on the caregivers and the rescuers, and that's what they did. They found security in the idea that the firefighters and police officers and sanitation workers were really working to resolve this major crisis.

And the children, interestingly enough, found their connection, too, and they wanted to help out. One of the most important pictures I think we got -- and I think it's my next slide, but let me tell you about it before I show it to you -- was a picture of the World Trade Center on one side of the page, huge gnarly, twisted lines, dark heavy lines, representing, of course, the devastation. But on the other side is a bright, colorful crane helping out, cleaning it up.

What's so interesting about this picture is the one word on the side of the crane. Tonka. Isn't that amazing? The little boy sees himself helping out.

The slide I just skipped over is one I would like to share, too. Let me go back to it. You can't really see it so well, but let me tell you what it says. It's a letter addressed to the rescue dogs. It says, "Dear rescue dogs. What kind of dogs are you? I have a dog. His name is Lucky. Love, Sky." It's a little girl in Tennessee.

Now, if you notice in that rainbow-colored box there is a paw print, kind of smudged. It says, "Lucky's paw print." I think there must have been quite a struggle.

This is one of the banners that went on the fence at St. Paul's done by a young woman, an art student at Cooper Union College. She was one of the members of my congregation, and was instrumental in helping me both before and after 9/11. I would like to pause at this slide just to tell you a little bit more about some of the people in the community. This image became really the icon of the whole movement, because not only was it important for us to have courage, but -- you can't really see it from where you are -- in the bottom right-hand corner in gold paint is the following quotation from Annie Lamott. It says that courage is fear that is said as prayers.

How could you not be afraid of something like this? How could you not be fearful of the sight and the devastation and the dangers and the stuff in the air? But moving through and beyond fear is an act of courage, an act of hope. And that's what the community was like at St. Paul's.

One of the most important experiences we had early on was a gift an elderly African-American woman gave to us. She must be in her 80s. She got on the subway up in the south Bronx and came all the way down to lower Manhattan, got out in lower Manhattan and walked her way up to the site, talked her way through the police lines -- which at that time was no small miracle to do -- and then she talked her way through the bouncers who were in front of St. Paul's Chapel making sure that we kept that space sacred for the workers.

She came into St. Paul's Chapel, hobbled in, gave us her own cane, because she heard somebody had hurt his leg working in the site. And then she hobbled off and went back home. Oh, my gosh. What an amazing gift. Amazing story.

Let me tell you about Joe Bradley briefly. And this is published in Spirituality and Health Magazine. I think it's around the Christmas issue of 2001. And I'll tell you a couple of more stories and wrap it up so we can have a conversation. But let me tell you about Joe Bradley, because his story is indicative of the community that emerged at Ground Zero.

Joe Bradley's a crane operator. He said, "I have never seen so many people pull together. One unit, one thought. We were going to rescue a survivor. It was amazing to see firemen and policemen hugging each other. Unions who had refused to work together buried hatchets. There was search and rescue from every state. As I walked toward the site, I walked down Church Street and prayed for the courage to stay together because at 22, I had helped build the World Trade Center. My thoughts were racing and I was kind of mixed up. But the 23rd Psalm came into my head. The dust and the ashes and debris. All I could hear was, 'As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.'

"I ran into a fire chief who said he'd like to clear the debris field three feet deep and with a heavy iron on top. And I turned around. There were four or five ironworkers there. They asked if I had a crane. I said yes. So they said they'd like to work with me.

"So I had a machine and a crew. And like a miracle, 25 firefighters showed up right then with tanks and torches. Then we had a mission.

"So we went to work. No supervision. No foreman. We worked as smooth as you could imagine. Everything went perfectly, but we were soaking wet, working in 18 inches of water, straight through the night.

"The first body we found was a lady in a business suit, middle-aged. And it was remarkable. She wasn't even dirty. We laid her down on a stretcher, fixed her eyes and her lapels, and I remember the firefighter on the back of the stretcher who fell, but when he fell, he lifted his arms up over his head so that as he went down, the body wouldn't hit the ground.

"After that, I was sitting on the curb with my head in my hands. It was in the middle of the night, and that's when the Salvation Army kids appeared in their sneakers with their pink hair and their belly buttons showing and bandanas tied around their faces.

"One was a little girl pushing a shopping cart full of eye wash through the muck. They came with water and cold towels and took my boots off and put dry socks on my feet. And we kept going all night on the 12th and the morning of the 13th, and were relieved in the afternoon.

"When I was finally relieved and started to walk out, I thought to myself, Joe, you did pretty good. You did your part. You can go home and get back to normal. Then my mind flashed to the hostages coming home from Iran and the tickertape parade when the Yankees won the World Series. I had always thought that's what New York was about, those kind of heroes.

"But it was the little girl with the pink hair that became my hero that night, not Tino Martinez. And when I got to Houston Street, a bunch more of these kids, all pierced and tattooed with multicolor hair, had made a little makeshift stage, and they started to cheer as we came out, and that was it for me. I never identified with those people before, but I started crying, and I cried for four blocks.

"I have been a construction worker all my life, and I have always felt I was viewed by the public as a pest, as rude. And now I was so vulnerable.

"I got home and saw my wife, who asked, 'Joe, are you okay?'

"'Sure,' I said. You know, the bravado came back.

"But she said, 'Are you sure? Go look in the mirror.'

There I was, with my filthy, dirty face, with just two clean lines running down from my eyes. You become like a child after you get banged around a bit. She cried with me, gave me something to eat, drew a bath. I don't take baths. She put me to bed for six or seven hours. I told her I wasn't coming back. And now it's December 3 and I haven't missed a day."

People like Joe Bradley were working at the site 12, 14, 16 hours a day. What we tried to do was to create a hospitality center to support these men and women. And it wasn't my idea. It wasn't Trinity Church's idea. It just converged. The goodwill and the altruism and compassion of the human community poured out and created a community on the edge of the devastation at Ground Zero, and we discovered in the middle of that that we could be a little kinder to each other than we ever felt we could; that we could trust a little more than we ever thought possible; that we could give a little more than we ever thought manageable. And for New Yorkers, that's a pretty big discovery.

What happened at St. Paul's and at Ground Zero was all over the place, not just at St. Paul's. There emerged a community of compassion and hospitality and people poured in from all over the country. Usually when I give this presentation I ask if anyone here actually came and volunteered. Is anybody here? Because we had schools from around the country come in, as well. Not too many. But we did have some. We had massage therapists from Michigan who came out every other week to work three shifts in a row, then go back home.

It was an outpouring of love and compassion that came together right on the edge of the devastation of Ground Zero that gave us hope, that gave us courage, and gave us a model for moving into the future as communities of compassion, altruism and hope, and courage.

And that's where I'd like to bring it to a close. This is an image that someone took of St. Paul's Chapel with the twin towers of light in the background, because I wanted to end on a very hopeful note. We have been given this experience not to squander, but to be stewards of it, and to share the story so that other people can connect their story with this story.

My goal at this point in my life and my emerging vocation as I'm writing a book on the experience, and possibly doing a video, as well, is not to tell this story out of nostalgia in any kind of way that fetishizes the past, but to tell this story so that people all around this country will be invited into a conversation about what it means to be in community, whether that's a school community or a civic organization.

What does it mean to be a community of compassion and hope and courage, and how do we create and build the social capital of that kind of community? What does it mean for educators to embrace this kind of transition in a new way of being a community? I don't have the answers to that. But I do want to raise the questions.

Now, lest you think that Ground Zero was utopian or perfect, let me just throw in another humorous story about a guy named Frank. Frank came to us in the middle of all this. He was a construction worker who had lost his job. He came to St. Paul's and hung out with us. He was worried about paying his rent and all that, so he served coffee, he helped serve meals, he swept floors.

He stayed with us like three days, and then on the third day, I found out from Frank that his mother had just died, and he didn't have the money to bury her. So he asked me if I could help him with the funds for that, which I did from my discretionary account.

When she found out that he had done this, however, she took out a warrant for his arrest. Because even scammers have to have some kind of standards, don't they?

You never knew what was going to happen at St. Paul's. You never knew what was going to happen at Ground Zero. I understand Faith Popcorn, whose presentation I'm thrilled to sit in on in just a little bit, is going to maybe talk a little bit about Britney Spears.

Well, Britney sent an entourage to St. Paul's when she was in town for a concert. She sent over a life-sized poster of herself that she and her whole staff had signed, and of course, she signed the navel. So I wondered what the heck we were going to do with this poster. It disappeared. I had some schemes for that, because I thought, well, you know this brings money on eBay. But it was quite an experience, and an invitation to think about community in a way that we never had before.

Thank you very much. I'll be happy to take any questions you might have.

MS. GIBBS: I want to say something about what it was like to be in New York at that time. It was on September 12th that I think I became a New Yorker, a southern girl, and I remember there are so many things that happened during that time that Lyndon talked with us about this morning.

I live on the upper east side, far away from Ground Zero. My little terrace, lest you think I have a fabulous apartment, looks south, and you could see each morning the smoke coming up from Ground Zero. You would see people on the building next door going out first thing in the morning and looking out and seeing that smoke rising.

And I remember the day that the faces went up on the street corners, up there, when it moved uptown.

And most of all, one of the greatest memories I have is on the Friday night after the Tuesday of Ground Zero, if you recall, they had asked that all Americans light a candle that evening for the losses there.

I looked out of my terrace. I didn't know if I was going to go down there. It was hard at those times to know whether you wanted to be outside or inside or where you wanted to be. But I lived two blocks from a fire station, and I could hear music. I looked out my terrace and I looked out and there were people going with candles. I went downstairs from the 19th floor, and that whole community -- speaking of community reminded me of it -- just everyone went to that firehouse with their candles in their hands. That firehouse had lost 13 firefighters.

We all went there. The firefighters were there. They were handing out cookies. There had been so many cookies brought that they were handing them out to us. Truly, to be in New York and to experience that -- you expect that in the midwest, but New York really became a small village at that time. It was quite remarkable, and from my perspective, as horrific as it was, all of it, it was a blessing to be in New York City at that time.

FATHER HARRIS: Thank you for that. I agree. We became New Yorkers at that point, too. And you know, when you see the cover photograph of the French newspaper with a bunch of Parisians standing out with a sign saying, "We're all New Yorkers," that's miraculous. Unfortunately, that's fallen by the wayside.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Well, exactly. Apropos what you just said, fallen by the wayside, you said that is a moment that we should hold and be good stewards of and not squander it.

Maybe this is more of a reassurance from you that I'm looking for than that there is a real answer. But my great concern is that it has been squandered, that we are more divisive and less unified as a community. Certainly the level of discourse on the national level suggests that.

And can you give me reassurance that we can and what do we do to somehow try to bring that back? Because I'm deeply distressed about that fact.

FATHER HARRIS: Yes, thank you. That's a really important question. What I saw at Ground Zero and what I saw at St. Paul's Chapel was a glimpse of the kingdom, and that glimpse will haunt me the rest of my life. Not in a bad way, but in a good way. Because once you have tasted the good wine, it's hard to go back to the cheap stuff. I think we're drinking a lot of cheap stuff right now, and it's very disappointing.

I don't think, however, we've lost the potential of what can be. You know, even at Ground Zero now, the families who lost loved ones and the firefighters' families who lost their loved ones are duking it out over the memorial, you know. The contractors and the architects are fighting over what Ground Zero is going to be, what the World Trade Center site is going to be developed into.

So in many ways, I think this was a moment, and we've returned to another mode of being. But I don't want to give up hope that we can continue in our own communities, in our own way, regardless of the national discourse, embrace a courageous and hopeful vision of who it is we are and who it is we can be.

Now, you know, Dr. King said, "Each one teach one," or, "Each one reach one." I think as we in our own communities embrace some of the principles that I have alluded to in the talk this morning, or principles that you have in your own experience that corroborate what I have said, I think the more we try to be intentional about embracing that, the bigger difference we can make.

But you're right. I think we are in a very different time now. One snapshot I have, however, about the hopefulness and the potential of who we still can be comes from last summer when the blackout occurred in New York City. That was the greatest case to see if New Yorkers still had civility, and we passed that test with flying colors.

So there is a groundswell of this new way of thinking and being still alive, but we have to be intentional about creating that and building on that. We can't just assume it's going to happen, and that was the vision I had for the 9/12 community, which, you know, hasn't really met the expectations I had for it, but the idea was that we would connect with communities around the country who want to embrace these hopeful, forward-thinking, forward-looking principles about being community, and I'm still working on that. But some days are better than others.

MS. GIBBS: Thank you, Lyndon.

Now after a break, at 10:45 we'll start promptly, and Faith Popcorn is going to tell us how we can get to community and all the obstacles that are up against us, and they are busy ones. So go enjoy your break.