Reflections on the anniversary of 9/11 from Bishop Stephen Bouman & Pres. David Benke

Life goes on, thank God The Rev. Dr. David Benke, President of the Atlantic District LCMS The bang, bang, bang? and pop, pop, pop over in East New York is NOT the sound of gunfire. It's the sound of hammer on nail. It's being rebuilt, is East New York, lot by lot, Nehemiah row house by 1800 new units where death and destruction once held sway. Life goes on. Five years after life as we knew it ended, life goes on. We're learning that truth in the uneven, scar-tissue, one step forward two steps back way that survivors learn. It's not that the memories of September 11, 2001 and the long aftermath grow dim. Those memories aren't going to grow dim. They're imbedded, neurologically hard-wired into the fiber of our being now. Every recollection of a victim, a rescuer who did not return, sears open those fibers. The sight of an FDNY or NYPD baseball cap can bring it all back, for crying out loud.  But life goes on. Thank God. Thank God for the opportunity to find and bring comfort. Thank God for the opportunity to find and bring renewal at all levels: spiritual, physical, psychic, familial.  Who knew that a home in Queens would become a millionaire's mansion? Who knew that the middle class would get squeezed the way it has been, right out of the City of New York? Who knew that our Lutheran schools in the City would be squeezed right out of their market along with their Roman Catholic counterparts? Who knew that those schools, our towers of Christian quality education, could fall beneath the load of low enrollment and bad debt? Who knew that people could and would be held without charge for years in pens in our City? Who knew what long-term counseling issues would confront an ever-anxious population and their caregivers? Who knew with what force the immigrant populations would be left stranded as the tide of opportunity receded with such force after 2001? Who knew? What we knew is that, thank God, life would go on. And this is the way it has gone on. What Lutheran Disaster Response of New York was founded to do, and has labored to do, and has done with some great measure of success, has been to bring comfort and renewal to all of the realities described above. We were there, and we are here, because life goes on, Thank God!  The Biblical vision of Christ on judgment day is not a description of the generals and high commanders being called up to describe the success or failure of grand schemes. It is a description of how people at the side of the road and off the media screen find or do not find comfort and renewal for their bodies, minds and souls. In the homeless, the hungry, the tempest-tossed, the psychically damaged, the wounded and long-time mourner we are told we see the face of Jesus. Who knew?  We did. We do. We in the community of faith. We Lutheran Christians. And by God's grace, as life goes on, Lutheran Disaster Response of New York will go on too.  I have been immeasurably gratified by the collaborative DNA that LDRNY has continued to offer to Lutherans, Christians, the interfaith care community and the wider civic and political arena. Such collaboration is not an option as life goes on. It is the way that life will go on.  As for me personally, my five year path has been uneven and patchy in terms of recovery, refreshment and renewal. Just like everyone else I know. I take comfort in that. And as we face together a landmark commemoration, I am going to make every effort to stop and thank God and thank fellow-travelers here in New York for the grace divinely given for us all to go on. May our fifth year commemoration be blessed, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!   *** See current photos of Ground Zero

Grace: Sept. 11 in New York, five years later The Rev. Dr. Stephen P. Bouman, Bishop of the Metropolitan New York Synod of the ELCA On September 10 2001 our daughter Rachel moved into a Manhattan apartment on 61St in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge, with three guys from Dublin, a guy from Paris and a woman from Omaha, strangers all. On the morning of September 11 she was to go to work downtown at Lutheran Social Services, around the corner from the World Trade Center.  On the morning of September 11 my wife Janet headed into New York City from our home in Rockland County, about twenty miles north of the city. She was going to a meeting, also at Lutheran Social Services downtown. On the morning of September 11 our son Jeremy rose in Jersey City to pack for a noon flight from Kennedy Airport to Nairobi, Kenya. He was going to visit our son Timothy and daughter in law Erin who were teachers in Bukoba, Tanzania on Lake Victoria.  On the morning of September 11, Timothy and Erin woke up to teach their classes at the Kibeta English Medium School. They were anticipating Jeremy's visit which was to include a climb up Mount Kilaminjaro. I remember driving across the George Washington Bridge early on the morning of September 11 because the sky was so unusually blue, the air warm and clear, the view of the buildings stunning in the bright sunlight. The skyline was moored by the downtown twin towers and I smiled looking at them from the car, as I always did entering the city I have loved for so many years. Sitting in my office on the 16th floor of the Interchurch Center at 120th street and Riverside Drive, windows looking South, I was meeting with two of my staff. At a little after nine I noticed black smoke rising in the distance. "Jersey," I remembered thinking and gave it no more thought. We had lived for eleven years in New Jersey and were familiar with the dirty socks smell of the Turnpike near the airport, and of all the lousy Jersey jokes told by the world. The smoke continued to rise in the background as we met. I was getting a little curious when my assistant Joanne Strunck, entered my office. I will never forget the stricken look on her face. "Turn on your radio. Look at the computer. There's been an attack downtown."  We all bolted to the window. The towers were wreathed in smoke, black clouds hovering over the harbor cutting through the perfect autumn blue. And so it began. Like the rest of the world we began to seek out family. Gary Mills of our staff was trying to reach a nephew who was a waiter in tower two, working a breakfast on the fortieth floor. I could not get a call through to Lutheran Social Services but was able to reach a leader in our synod whose law office overlooks New York Harbor downtown. There was no answer at the office of Lars Qualben, a vice president for Marsh McClennan whose office was on the 92nd floor of Tower 2. My wife called. She was stopped at the George Washington Bridge and was able to make a u-turn and return home. No word from Rachel or Jeremy. A second plane roared down the Hudson, past our office. Our air force scrambling, I thought, not knowing it was headed toward the second tower. Someone watching on his computer came in and told us that the plane had hit the tower. We watched the buildings fall, the downtown skyline obliterated in smoky ash, enveloping everything. At noon we met to pray in the chapel of the Interchurch Center. Hundreds gathered. My part was simple. I said the twenty third psalm by heart. I invited people as our prayer to name the names before God of those downtown about whom we were worried, whose fate was unknown to us. My life changed in hearing the names come at me through clenched teeth, strained voices, sobs, shouts. "Rachel, Jeremy, Lars,"? I muttered, adding my own names. I called every church in Manhattan. They were starting to receive refugees from the carnage. I encouraged and prayed with the pastors who were meeting the horror with cold water, open sanctuaries, and listening embrace. The time of lamentations in New York had begun. People began calling to tell their stories of rescue, loss, worry. They gave me names to pray over. Plans for communal prayer, participation in rescue, disaster response began to be formed. At some point I sat down and wrote a brief email to let people know what was happening here in New York. Those periodic online journals became one form of my ministry to others across the country and around the world. Initially they were a way for me to stay steady, to begin to grieve, to let out the feelings, vent the fear. Sometimes the phones worked, sometimes not. Cell phones were especially unreliable.

Maybe that's why I haven't heard from Rachel, I prayed. At one point President David Benke of the Atlantic District of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod-my partner as Lutheran leader in New York and dear friend-called. He was stuck in Brooklyn and wanted to know where I could use him. No one could get into Manhattan. I sent him to Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, designated as a primary trauma center. He stayed with them into the evening, through the initial rush of wounded, then the long waiting as few came and the horror of the scale of death revealed itself. In mid afternoon I spoke to Anthony Harris, director of Lutheran Social Services. The engine of the first plane fell through the roof of the building of LSS on Park Row. It ignited a fire. They had to evacuate everyone in the building: staff, foster children, other clients. They went north, joining the soot covered retreat, and arrived safely at St. John's Lutheran Church at Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. I still did not know if our daughter had gone to her meeting in the building which was now burning.

Jeremy called. His trip, of course, was canceled. It would be days before any flights entered or left the metropolis (later in the week I would pray at St Peter's, 53rd Street with the Delta pilot who flew the first interrupted flight into New York). Jeremy had walked the few blocks to the river and watched the inferno from the Jersey side of the harbor. He and his fiancee helped those who escaped by boat and made their way back to Jersey City. 

Janet called. Rachel had slept in. She was safe. It would be another day before we could get a call through to Tanzania. Timothy told us that Bishop Buberwa and some others had come to their home and prayed with them for his beleaguered city. For days people stopped them on the streets: "poli sana," they said. In Swahili: "we are so sorry."

The urge to be home was overwhelming. The rest of the afternoon and early evening was spent on the phone, getting a bead on what was happening downtown, checking in with many, formulating the beginning of plans that would evolve into Lutheran Disaster Response New York. As the sun descended I just wanted to hold my wife, Janet. At the entrance ramp for the George Washington Bridge I waited in a line of snarling traffic. A bomb scare had closed the bridge. I saw for the first time what would become a familiar site. People with guns were looking into cars. I drove on the shoulder, showed my clerical collar to someone with a gun and received permission to take a u-turn and return to the city. In the smoky evening I was the only car traveling south on the east side FDR expressway, a road which had taken years off my life in the past. I got off at 96th street and drove through empty streets to our apartment where we usually stayed during the week, on 88th and Lexington.

I walked to get a slice of pizza and looked down Lexington. Downtown was shrouded in a pillar of smoke and fire of Biblical proportions. Weary people were trudging home, eyes glazed. People greeted one another in muted tones. Dazed New Yorkers began telling stories. It was somber. My collar seemed an invitation. People asked for prayer. "Father, will you pray for Vinnie? I don't think he made it." ? It took me an hour and a half to walk the two blocks back to our apartment.

The walls of the apartment closed in on me. After talking to each one of my family except Timothy and Erin in Africa I got in the car and tried again. I just wanted to be home. The bridge was free. I couldn't look downtown. All along the Palisades as I traveled north was the sound of sirens as fire, police and rescue vehicles rushed south from Hudson Valley cities and towns toward ground zero. We were one metropolis that night. Ground Zero was a hole 50 feet deep and 50 miles wide. It would be Wednesday before I was able to return to the city. Shortly after I crossed they shut down all the bridges and tunnels and locked down Manhattan.

Home. Tears and embraces. Janet and I watched coverage long into the night. We called our pastor and arranged for a prayer service at our church for the next morning. We poured a drink. We prayed. One family in the New York metropolis near the end of a long day, repeating what millions experienced around the world. 

The long day did not seem to end, sleep was elusive. It would seem a long, protracted day in the months ahead, as losses were accounted for, life as we knew it changed irrevocably, war loomed.  Endless day as we learned-one by one- of the 47 children in our schools who lost parents. Endless day as we lived through the memorial and burial season, day after day of remembering the dead.  Endless day as terror changed the landscape of our metropolis.  Endless day as the residue of trauma, depression, anger, grief, sadness, doubt ran through the initial adrenalin rush of response and courage and deep faith, leading to spiritual enervation, a sense of hopelessness. Endless day as the stranger among us became hunted and blamed, as the economic migrants and the poor plunged into deeper poverty in the ruined economic landscape. Endless day. Day after day. How we longed for the night and true rest.

Rest would come in the midst of the bright and garish day of suffering. Five years later my memories are also about spiritual rest, communal prayer, countless acts of solidarity, kindness, compassion. Rest and refreshment came in hearing bible stories as if for the first time. As we read the old, old story into our unfolding narrative Scripture came alive, it carried us. Isaiah 65 reminded us that we would be called "a city not forgotten." In Isaiah 58 we grasped our vocation to be "healers of the breach, restorers of streets to live in."  Baptism took on new meaning when we heard how one of our Lutheran chaplains had run across the Brooklyn Bridge to the morning of the attacks and anointed with oil the brave fire and rescue personnel who asked for this baptismal reminder as they rushed into the towers and up the smoky stairs. We rested in telling our stories and speaking our pain, encouraged by the opening words of Lamentations: "how lonely sits the city!"  We saw the heroes in the towers as angels ascending and descending on Jacob's ladder. For a brief time our houses of worship were the most important places in the community and the Bible was a living document of drama encompassing our own. 

In the weeks after September 11, I would visit each of the 18 conferences of our synod with only one agenda: how is your soul? The stories which unfolded were a part of the lamentations which must come before the beginnings of healing. The week after September 11, President Benke and I had formed Lutheran Disaster Response New York with twenty million dollars sent to us from Lutherans and others around the country and around the world. Through LDRNY we walked with the victims of 9-11 and their families, accompanied the economic victims of this tragedy, provided respite for pastors and teachers, counseling for children and many other opportunities for comfort and renewal. We formed a bridge with many partners-public, interfaith, ecumenical, private-and created associations for victims' families, unmet needs tables and more. I traveled around the country and many places in the wider world bringing a perspective from the ground in New York to the altered landscape of our world. Attending meetings and speaking at events in places as disperate as Bergen, Norway, the Berlin Film Festival, Kampala and Bukoba in Africa, or meetings with Mohammad Abbas and President Katzav in Ramallah and Jerusalem, I was always stunned by how deeply these attacks in America registered in hearts around the world, how wide open the window once was, the opportunity for solidarity which has been squandered.

Interfaith dialogue, communal worship, presence in the firehouses, conducting memorials and funerals, deep conversations about faith and doubt and the presence of God, explaining life on the ground to friends around the world, became part of the fabric of every parish in our synod. 

Several days after the tragedy every Lutheran pastor in our synod and district gathered with our national leaders and President Benke and me at Holy Trinity on the West Side. After coming back from Ground Zero with our national leaders I told those assembled: we have been baptized for this moment. My memories, five year later, are about that baptism.

Although, five years later, I am remembering and telling the story of a small slice of the fabric of the New York metropolis, the fashioning of spiritual care by the Lutheran religious community and the account on the ground of one bishop, it is also a story with global dimensions, wide presence and participation. Over these five years I have challenged a Sharia Judge in Ramallah about what Muslim theology and scriptures would have to say about terror in New York; challenged a World Council of Churches delegation about political lectures while we could still smell our brothers and sisters downtown; led a mass for peace covered by every television network shortly after the war in Iraq began at St. Peter's in Manhattan, a church in a building included in warnings about future terror attacks; planned at Cardinal Egan's office with former mayors Koch and Dinkins the Yankee Stadium prayer service which got my friend David Benke in trouble for his participation. I preached at an interfaith memorial service at Abyssinian Baptist in Harlem, remembering that Dietrich Bonhoefer had taught catechism there for his friend Adam Clayton Powell. Five years later my memory of that time merges into the anger and witness about life and community, war and peace, today in the changed world after September 11.

And of course, September 11th is about a real ground zero, an obscene pile in which people were buried. How often I bristled at the commodification of that horrible time, about 9-11 as a way to talk about politics, or make a point. I felt, for a time, the anger of disenfranchised grief. It was a place I would spend time. And the first time will never leave me. It was days after the attacks. President Benke and I were going there with our national leaders, President Kieschneck and Bishop Anderson, accompanied by chaplains who spent every waking hour there. I was afraid we would be beside the point. But our collars were an invitation. The lamentations, prayers and tears flowed. I breathed through my mouth under the mask I wore. Stopping and staring into the pile I pictured faces of those I loved, or knew, or imagined the faces of the many names given to me for prayer and remembrance. And this thought came, unbidden. We are all already buried. "Do you not that you have been buried with Christ by baptism unto death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, you too may walk in newness of life."

There were three attacks that day and there will be many and similar memories in Washington and Pennsylvania. And there have been other ground zeros five years later. And, of course, we experienced in America five years ago the violence, fear, helplessness and vulnerability many in the world experience every day. As I write this earthquakes rip Indonesia. The South Asian Tsunami, Darfur and Hurricane Katrina, bombings in Madrid and London, terrorist attacks in which school children perished is Deslan, Russia are only a few of the ground zeroes over these past five years. Every one of them has jolted me back to that beautiful September day, and every one of them stirs up in my heart the great longing people felt five years ago to be near us, to stand with us, to do something tangible. In my longing to make a difference in Darfur, to be present in New Orleans in some way, I have been in touch with my own gratitude for the many ways love and grace closed the distance between us.

Five years later my memories are a part of a long love story with New York City. I have lived in the New York metropolis my entire ministry. My first call in 1973 was to two congregations in Woodside, Queens, where I learned a little Spanish and directed youth ministry. In 1974 I was called to a congregation in Jackson Heights, Queens where I served for eight years. This is the neighborhood depicted in the movie "Maria Full of Grace,"? the story of a person carrying drugs into Queens.  I recognized every building beneath the rumbling Roosevelt Avenue elevated line as I watched the movie. During my years in Jackson Heights we grew a church of many different ethnic groups, in many ways a typical New York story. In the eighties I served in Bergen County, New Jersey while also serving as a consultant to anti poverty community groups throughout New York City. For ten years, I have been the bishop of a synod with two hundred and thirty congregations throughout Long Island, the city, and the Hudson Valley which worships in twenty five languages. We have lived in Queens, in Manhattan apartments in the upper east side, Union Square downtown, and now uptown in Harlem. I have always loved the city, but since September 11 that love has possessed me in ways I can hardly bring to words. In Scripture God's promises are made real in turf, God's faithfulness is expressed on the ground, in places of hurt and hope. The passion emanating from Ground Zero in New York has become, for me, a kind of Holy Land.

One of my favorite books is Diary of a Country Priest,? by Georges Bernanos. It records the thoughts of an ordinary parish priest, his struggles with the mundane, with his relevance to the rhythm of life in the country, his attempts to pray, his wrestling with faith and doubt. In it he faces his own death even as he has helped others face their own living and dying. The priest loves his turf even while seeing clearly its folly and faults. He loves the people he encounters, even those who vex and irritate him. I am working on a book as a kind of "diary of an urban bishop"? looking at September 11, 2001 and its wave effects through the eyes of a pastor called to be a bishop and the struggle between doubt and faith, the effort to pray in the shadow of Ground Zero. It is a journal of awe and respect for the many people whose faith and compassion has left its mark on me. These reflections and the book to follow are offered in the spirit of the last words of Bernanos' novel. A parishioner is describing the last words of the dying priest: "He said, 'does it matter? Grace is all around us.'"

   

   

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Flood Assistance Available in Upstate NY

Individuals and businesses in Broome, Chenango, Delaware, Herkimer, Montgomery, Oneida, Orange, Otsego, Schoharie, Sullivan, Tioga, and Ulster counties in upstate New York can apply for federal disaster aid by calling the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) toll-free registration number. Phone lines are open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Flood victims may also register for disaster assistance online at www.fema.gov.