SEEING FEAR AND BEAUTY IN EMPTY SKIES

Steve Kriss

Five years later: On the road toward who we might become under a bright but empty sky.

I still remember the smell, not the acrid smell that everyone talks about in New York City but of clear, still September in western Pennsylvania—the smell of advanced summer in the Allegheny Mountains. It’s the smell of my favorite time of the year; with locusts buzzing, flowers in full last bloom, hot days, and cool nights.

I was on the way to a breakfast meeting, driving my Honda CRV in Somerset County on the morning of September 11 when I heard a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

As a former New Yorker, I called a NYC cop friend immediately to find out what was happening. With no real news, I went into a breakfast meeting that was interrupted by incomprehensible reports. I returned late that night to my brick rowhome in Mt. Washington, a Pittsburgh neighborhood overlooking the city’s newly vulnerable skyline. A neighbor two houses away had hung a sheet out that said, "Nuke the towel-headed bastards." I began to wonder what sort of crazy people I lived among on Sycamore Street.

The next morning waking up in a bright room, my first thoughts were that maybe all that had happened the day before was somehow not real. However, my first assignment in this new day was to help teach a class of young and confused students at Duquesne University with my Indian co-teacher, who seemed rather nervous about leading this group of mostly white students. He would later tell me that soon after 9-11 someone had called him Osama.

We knew the world had changed, we said. In all logic, we might know that 9-11 wasn’t an isolated event or day. The Twin Towers had been bombed before; they just hadn’t collapsed that time. While 9-11 wasn’t really so discontinuous with everything around us globally, our awareness of what was going on around us suddenly had an epicenter in lower Manhattan.

I spoke with a Kansan friend soon after 9-11. I said that the folks waving flags and ready to wage war in the nation’s heartland needed to simmer down, that those of us on the East Coast were still afraid and stunned, too close to the action to feel patriotic, too close to the real death and fear to demand more of it. We got over that reticence fairly quickly.

At church we sang "Lord, make us instruments of your peace" Sunday after Sunday. It was the right song to sing in Somerset County in those days. We weren’t sure what it meant sometimes or what it called for—or from us. We collected money to send to Mennonite Disaster Service’s New York initiative. We remembered a son of the congregation who had been dispatched to Afghanistan. We prayed.

My memory fades, though, and what I did or didn’t know related to the 9-11 events has become unclear. My day-to-day existence hasn’t changed that much. There are intrusions on my life, and every once in a while we are reminded—whether from Bali, Madrid, London, or Mumbai—but mostly I have taken to heart President Bush’s advice to go on with my life as usual.

So I have moved on with my life, though I know New York isn’t the same without the towers. And it’s strange that Shanksville has become a tourist destination. (The last time I was there, there was a travel coach from Conestoga Tours.) My NYC cop friend Carl reminded me that New York is always vulnerable, always will be. He says that what he’s learned from 9-11 is that if it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go. Taking cues from his stoic, slightly Calvinistic words, I have gone on.

Sometimes I gaze at the list of those who died at the World Trade Center. I remember that many, like me at the time, hadn’t turned 30 yet. Five years later, I wonder what I have done with the years I have been granted past their own, to emerge into my early 30s and find my way in this post-9-11 world.

My friend Christine, a United Methodist pastor in New Jersey, suggests that things have changed. She believes 9-11 has made us more fearful, more insular, pulled us with a vengeance into the comfort of our homes. She thinks 9-11 is intensifying today’s immigration debates. I think she’s right, but it must be something deep inside of us that’s different, because on a day-to-day basis I don’t notice it that much. I still go to Starbucks, drive my Honda CRV, call my parents every chance I can, root for the Steelers, listen to nonsensical Top 40 music, and sing sometimes equally meaningless music at church.

However, it seems clear that our national willingness to go to war has increased. We don’t want war on our own shores again. We’d rather battle far away, on turf that isn’t lower Manhattan or an old mine in the Alleghenies. I won’t forget hearing while eating a late breakfast at Eat-N-Park on 9-11 that a state of war existed in the United States. I won’t forget being in the familiar hills of western Pennsylvania not knowing where to go; if planes could fall out of the sky in Shanksville, nowhere was safe.

My seminary professor, Dorothy Austin, suggests that what terrifies us is that 9-11 happened among us and could again. We were and are terrified of having nowhere to run from the whole emerging new reality. With the story permeating the media, there wasn’t anywhere to flee from it for months back then, and it’s still hard to find solace today.

With 9-11 pervading our corporate minds, our fear and confusion had the potential to move us toward compassion (and did to a degree). But we have also turned toward taking eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth.

Whatever our belief regarding whether war is wrong or not, it matters that our willingness to go to war has changed. Our willingness to make others live in the same fear that we have tasted and to experience the loss that we have known is a strange and unusual desire. Rather than conquering hate with love, we have attempted without much success so far to conquer hate with might and consumption.

At the end of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person convicted in the United States in relationship to the 9-11 attacks, he said something haunting amid his diatribes. He suggested that we (U.S. Americans) had an opportunity to learn why people like Mohammed Atta (considered the 9-11 mastermind who piloted one of the hijacked jets) hated us. He suggested that we had a moment of opportunity to learn, and we turned away from it.

Such a proclamation from someone seemingly at least half-mad or consumed by hate is hard to take as truth. Nevertheless, I suspect that in our willingness to rush to war we have missed an opportunity to learn.

As I have been contemplating this article for months, I have been obsessed with the question of whether 9-11 changed anything or nothing. In that question is a hope that we have learned something, I suppose. I have seen both the "World Trade Center" and "Flight 93" movies in preparation for writing. I returned to NYC twice to gauge what is happening and who the city and I have become. I went to Shanksville to look, to take pictures, to assess. And to wonder.

While watching "World Trade Center" I cried as the men were rescued from beneath the pile. But I had also cried while watching Michael Pena’s portrayal in his previous movie, "Crash," as well. I felt like I could vomit the whole way through the "Flight 93" movie, wondering if in the film somehow the actors would pull off efforts nonviolently to save the plane.

I am writing now in Soho, noticing on my walk over here the brightness of Lower Manhattan. I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s "The Rising" on the way to NYC to get my head back into the emotion of it all. The words to his song, "I woke up this morning to an empty sky," lingered as I looked up.

The sky is still empty, and at the same time, however painful it might be, it is brighter in lower Manhattan. A few friends who recently visited NYC remarked how friendly the city is—and kind to them as visitors with small children. Could it be that New Yorkers are more aware of their shared vulnerability underneath a big empty sky? What would that experience have been if they weren’t white Canadians but Pakistani or Saudi?

Earlier this year, I took a group of international visitors to Ground Zero, to walk around the fence. Most of them (20-somethings serving with Mennonite Central Committee’s International Visitor Exchange Program) didn’t know the full story, couldn’t figure out what happened and why.

While we were at the overlook, we saw a group of conservatively dressed folks whom we all immediately recognized as Mennonites. A young woman from Indonesia asked if we could talk with them and I thought how interesting it would be to connect here—this disparate array of young Mennonites (French, Tanzanian, Indonesian and Thai) with this group of traditionally dressed Mennonites.

We initiated a conversation and made our global connections, talking to the Sensenig family at Ground Zero. We made connections that spanned the globe—New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Indonesia—in our quick conversation. Smiling, we walked away from the pit, on the sidewalks of New York with a realization of worldwide interlinkages at this site of tragedy and horror.

So I have been searching all over for what has changed, but maybe I can boil it down to this: in many ways nothing has changed, yet nevertheless everything has changed.

We realize our vulnerability more as U.S. Americans—a realization we don’t bear alone but one that runs also through Toronto, London, Mumbai, Madrid, Mumbasa, and Bali to Beiruit, Baghdad, and Chechnya. In an increasingly interconnected world, fear amid vulnerability is not unsurprising or illegitimate. The same forces that bring us together can pull us apart, drive us toward hate or suspicion in ways we rarely imagined before 9-11.

Yet amid it all, there seems such great possibility. We’re experiencing a sort of pregnancy that invites us toward action, toward embracing the moment in all its fullness, with all of our fears, holding on to hope that is simultaneously practical and overwhelming.

The triumph in "Flight 93" and in the retelling of the "World Trade Center" is that people become someone they never thought that they might be. The disparate passengers become a community with a cause and a hope somewhere in the skies over Pennsylvania. At the World Trade Center, city workers become stunningly heroic in their commitment to the tasks of rescue and help.

When I look at the names and listings of those who died at the World Trade Center, at Cantor Fitzgerald or Windows on the World, I have twinges of survivor’s guilt, considering my own post-9-11 life and the privilege to continue to have it. I feel charged to live my life as fully as I can bear, whatever that might mean. That, I suspect, is the sweetest and most meaningful response any of us who live in the face of fear can offer.

Since 9-11, I have become someone else. I have finished coursework, taken a new job, moved to a new Pennsylvania city, switched my pastoral credentials to a new conference, gained and lost and gained weight, gotten new glasses, and grown some facial hair. I have traveled out of the country more than in the previous portions of my life combined. I’ve learned a bit of Italian, Arabic, and Indonesian.

Yet I am not all that different on this bright late summer day. Much like five years ago, I am fascinated and energized by New York, deeply connected to my family and an array of friends who span the globe, in pursuit of a vocation that contributes meaningfully to others and offers opportunities to see the world.

And yet, I wonder what made me suspicious of a woman with a hijab (traditional Muslim headcovering) who was at the "World Trade Center" film? Why have post 9-11 realities challenged my belief in pacifism? Why do I find myself believing that the United States has entered an age of empire?

I wonder where my church, my people, my nation of citizenship may be going. And sometimes I am pretty nervous. I can’t forget the sign that went up on Sycamore Street in Pittsburgh. I know the craziness of it all has changed not only the neighbors but me as well.

Still within the changes there is hope, in those moments like the conversation with the Sensenigs at the World Trade site. While we were amid something that could call out fears and push us to disengage, there remained the possibility of acting, trusting, and living with hope. We were embedded in a desire to reach out in this age of global connectivity even in the shadows of the scions of global economics, terror, and hate. We approached the Sensenigs expecting to find connection rooted in love.

Inshallah, we might find a way to notice more than the empty sky but to peer into our hearts, to look out into human faces—whether they wear a lacy prayer covering or a silky hijab—and find not only ourselves but our situatedness within the global community.

These beautiful days of autumn are here again. Amid the memories of what once happened on this kind of amazing day comes the revived possibility of attacks with jetliners. We can be drawn into an all-consuming fear (and CNN-watching) that attempts to deny the wonder and possibilities of having been created by God to live in a time such as this.

But the clearness of the early autumn can also remind us of our humanity. We gather within the shadows of pain, surrounded by reasons for nervousness and fear. Still we find the building blocks of hope and gaze into the beauty of a bright sky.

—Steve Kriss, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University who works with Franconia Mennonite Conference. He’s still infatuated with New York City, in love with the Allegheny Mountains, and trying to learn Bahasa Indonesian on Rosetta Stone software while practicing speaking with Indonesian immigrants in Philadelphia.