Blog on the Lillypad
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
 | When our world changed forever Part 5 I went in to work on Wednesday. It was impossible to get to CNN or Foxnews from the computers at work. They were jammed. A few people had radios discreetly playing on news stations. Nobody was working, and nobody expected us to be working. The company was international and had closed all work sites halfway through the previous morning. Wednesday morning found the company administration still tracking down all people scheduled to travel on September 11. Later in the morning, after painstakingly confirming every traveling employee's safety, they verified over e-mail that all Glaxo employees and contractors were safe. |
James Ward, a brilliant man who created applications to correlate DNA data (and for whom I documented software and created training manuals), explained to me the physics of what had happened when the towers collapsed. I was still thinking of and praying for any survivors down in the rubble. James conveyed to me a more accurate idea of the tremendous weight and force of those concrete floors and girders coming straight down on top of each other. There could be no survivors, not even in the stairwell areas. Indeed, there would not be so much as a splash of blood left of many of those poor people. They had disappeared forever.
I still hoped that somehow, people had gotten into the very foundation areas of the building, perhaps down into the subway tunnels. We kept trying to calculate how many people had died, and based on our own office space and building occupancy, we supposed that the death toll must be around 10,000.
 | Steve Henry came in, and I told him I thought the dream from August 28th had been about this. He was startled at my assessment, and he didn't think so. But in spite of his skepticism, he remained kind, as he always did.
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I realized that the people I worked with were all smarter and better educated than I am, yet they were gracious. They never made fun of me or slighted my efforts to grasp the complex ideas about DNA, the correlation of data, or the metabolic pathways of disease that they batted around all the time. Quite the contrary: Steve had explained many concepts to me with painstaking care, for no other reason than that I had asked him to help me understand. And James had found it necessary to explain the way his latest software application worked to me, twice, end to end, before I comprehended how it worked so that I could document the software commands effectively.
That's how the people at Glaxo were. To find the mockery, boasting, and belittling of others, you have to log in at the Fighting Fundamentalist Forums, and I did. But on September 12th it was not endurable, and I loathed myself for having been a part of it, a part of them. Yet they were just as much a part of me. There was no point in pretending I'm not just like the self righteousness, hypocrisy, and arrogance on the FFF. I'm just like that. That was why I had to log out again. I couldn't stand to see myself and what I was in the day of God's judgment.
And yet, oddly, my despair of myself did not depress me as it has at other times when I have despaired of myself. Rather, I felt like a patient stricken with cancer who, accepting the worst, now listens intently to the full diagnosis from a doctor whose wisdom can mend things. I understood that He will fix me, but it would be catastrophically stupid to ever suppose myself intrinsically healthy. And, of course, there have always been people who post on the FFF who have this understanding of their dependence on the Great Physician in abundance. Regrettably, there are many who---like me----view themselves as having overcome what they are and so become their own reference points as the surgeons, nurses, and experts on curing others. And the worst part of that is, they tend to be the pastors, elders, deacons, evangelists, and they hand out railing and reviling as though it were their duty to do so.
The flags at Glaxo were at half staff. I had come in before six, so I left at two. The day, in an almost shocking disregard for the horrors of the previous morning, was clear and sunny, the sky so blue it seemed very near and yet also far away. As I pulled in at home, I wondered how in a creation so lovely and sweet, overflowing with abundant evidence of joy in heaven, such horrible events had ever taken place. But in the heart of all that shock and grief, more surprises about the abundant grace of God awaited me.
I got home and did what most other Americans did--switched on the news. Three firefighters at the rubble of the WTC, only hours after the great and catclysmic loss, had raised an American flag among the rubble and ruin. The newsclip about their deed had been running throughout the morning. That first gesture, pure in heart and unassuming, opened a door to my new understanding of my own country. The next thing I saw was that the New York City Police had to turn away people who were bringing water and bandages to Ground Zero.
On the FFF, virtual talk had been loud about who had done this, and what we would do to them. Some type of Middle Eastern terrorist group was obviously behind it. And in spite of condemnation of the attacks by the Taliban of Afghanistan, evidence that they'd had a hand in the attacks was growing. A great deal of scorn had been expressed by many of the preachers on the FFF, and there was the usual sabre rattling by men who have never so much as put up their fists to defend a helpless victim, or spoken a word on behalf of those like Brent Stevens who had suffered such a short and cruel life.
Meanwhile, Bishop Kenneth Angell, a Roman Catholic bishop (whose theology I oppose), had lost his brother, David Angell, and David's wife Lynne. A news reporter stopped him on his way to morning service and asked him for his reaction. In effect, he said, "I don't understand why they killed my brother and those people. But the Lord says we are to forgive our enemies, so I forgive them, and I pray for them." Stung by his words, I also prayed for our enemies, that they would not be hardened from remorse over what they had done to innocent people.
But most stunning, and certainly the most sobering and rending thing to see, was a story of a young woman whose live-in boyfriend was missing. He'd been in one of the towers. And all the previous night, she, her father and brother, and a group of friends, had been walking from hospital to hospital to find him. The news commentator told us that she was just a microcosm of this. The streets were filled with people looking, waiting, lined up to see if the ambulances would bring anybody out of the rubble.
Now, as a Christian Fundamentalist I had been told that people who lived together did not love each other as much as people who were married. And certainly, in my life I have seen many people use causal sex as a means to treat the lives of their partners as something cheap and meaningless. But this young woman's love for her fiance was anything but casual. Weeping and relentless, the camera showed her at yet another crammed hospital desk. And the weary woman who spoke to her, a short, heavyset African American woman, started to cry for her as the young woman asked if she had seen this man in the picture that she showed.
How many times had that overworked woman heard that question in the last 24 hours, I wondered. You'd think any human being would become snappish and angry just as a means of self defense to protect herself from going mad in the face of such overwhelming desperation and grief from so many people. But she came around the desk and gave the young lady directions to get around the rubble and road blocks to the next hospital. And, weeping and resolute, the young woman thanked the woman from the desk and went on her way to go and continue searching for him.
A medical doctor had gone with his video camera and medical bag into the ground zero area after the first tower came down, ready to go in with a team of rescuers to get wounded people stable and then get them ambulanced out. While he was in close proximity, the second tower came down. He dived under a truck for cover and jammed his head into his bag. And then, video camera still running, he walked through the thick gray cloud, looking for injured people. That eerie, horrible, compelling walk was the first documentary of the devastation. At that point, though he had made his tape available to news stations, he was too overwhelmed to speak in public about his experience. For, of course, there had been no survivors.
 | Another building at the World Trade Center block collapsed and there were fears that others would crumble as well. And yet still the firefighters and rescue workers were looking for survivors. But I remembered James' explanation of the force generated by the chute-type collapse of those towers, and though I hoped they would find people in the subway tunnel, I realized that nobody caught in those towers could have survived. I was sure that a lot of the rescuers knew it, too, but they had to try. That's grace, too---to not force hopelessness onto others even when you know it's hopeless, but rather to work and let time begin to tell them what you already know, so that they can accept it, too.
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The people who were searching began to take up more and more of the news casters' time on camera. It was too heart rending not to listen to them and not to look at the pictures of the missing that they held up. But I, like most other Americans, knew by the afternoon of September 12 that all of those people were dead.
But by Wednesday night there clearly was a change in the sensibility of the nation. An America that I had been told was long gone emerged: compassionate, generous, brave, and even optimistic. And she was willing to labor and give sweat and blood without anybody asking her to do so. By Wednesday night, flags were displayed as though in triumph from the wreckage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and people lined the streets from the WTC to cheer the weary firefighters. And the firehouses, turned into shrines in the front to remember the dead, had become repositories for all the generosity that the people of New York, and then the people of America, could give. Even in Raleigh, and in every other American city, people were quickly organizing to give blood, food, money, and expertise to help at the attack sites. Grace, I realized is much more vast and rich than what I had ever been told, and graciousness is the emblem of Grace. Somewhere, outside of Christian Fundamentalism, the fountain of Grace was pouring out to succor the grieving and the terrified.
I still believed (and believe now) that God in judgment brought down the towers and caused the Pentagon to suffer that humiliating and devastating strike. Yet it was clear that this was not the only part of the story. Even the wrath of God falls according to His grace to men, to show them that their ways subvert their hearts from Him:
Lamentations 3:31-40
For the Lord will not cast off for ever:
But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies.
For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.
To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth,
To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High,
To subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not.
Who [is] he [that] saith, and it cometh to pass, [when] the Lord commandeth [it] not?
Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?
Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?
Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD.
