Holy and Hallowed:
Life After New York, After September 11

Steve Kriss

If I forget thee
Let my tongue forget the songs
it sang in this strange land
and my heart forget the secrets
only a stranger can learn. . . .
Let my blood forget
the map of its travels. . . .
if I do not remember,
if I do now always consider thee
my Babylon, my Jerusalem.
— “On Leaving Brooklyn,” from Julia Kasdorf,
Eve’s Striptease (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1998)

I am a native of Somerset County, Pennsylvania. For the past two years I had lived in New York, returning to Pennsylvania this summer. For me it was hard not to take the events of September 11 personally. I teetered on tears for days. For hours I searched the Internet for information, nervously, hopefully, wonderingly. I read newspapers from New York, Pittsburgh, Johnstown, Sydney, and Tehran daily. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep myself from information.

I had returned to New York the week before September 11. It was a wonderful leisurely visit through the city. I bought books at the Strand at South Street Seaport. I ate a dinner of rice and beans and flan in Central Park with friends. We were reprimanded that night for parking too close to a hotel where N’Sync or some other boy band was staying, with a crowd swarming outside hoping for possible glimpses. I bought a New York City skyline panoramic photo to hang at my new residence in Pittsburgh.

It was a beautiful and idyllic day. It was a day in the city that had become my home, a place of energy, possibility, diversity, oddity, sin, salvation, hope, and dreams. It was a day to say goodbye to two years of a good life in a city I loved.

Returning to the city in October was a painful pilgrimage. In my last sermon at the church I pastored in New York, I confessed that New York was my Jerusalem. New York was a holy place. It was the place where I felt God in a bizarre but wonderful mix of people, in human struggle and striving, in creativity and mundane routine, in the way the soaring architecture intermingled with water and sky.

Driving toward New York on Route 78, I craned my neck, strained my eyes to see the twin towers. These were the beacons of my regular trek across Pennsylvania and New Jersey back to the city. I looked and persevered, hoping with all of my being that somehow the buildings would remain. Maybe it was all some sort of strange hoax. I squinted. I saw nothing. As I drove over the Goethals Bridge onto Staten Island, I decided I couldn’t look anymore.

My first credible view of the skyline, minus the towers, was from Brooklyn. I had nervously crossed the Verrazano Bridge, feeling its structural vulnerability as I passed over the narrows at hundreds of feet above the water. The city was still magnificent, larger than life, crowding along the water of the harbor and the East River.

I called my parents on my cell phone to let them know that I was seeing the skyline. And yes, it was true, the World Trade Center was no longer there.

That night a friend and I had dinner at a Filipino restaurant in Queens. Asian vendors on the streets of the neighborhood were hawking all sorts of patriotic gear. We tried not to talk about September 11.

She was finally sleeping again. September 11 hd been her second day as a hospital chaplain intern in Manhattan. The hospital prepared for the worst, for thousands of injured. My friend’s weeping came in the realization that the hospital had prepared for wounded who would never arrive. A day after our visit she called me to let me know that she had been unknowingly providing pastoral care for a person diagnosed with anthrax.

In the days of revisiting Manhattan, I noticed a solemnity in my own steps. New York was not what it used to be. The streets were not packed. I pondered the possibilities of anthrax while I shopped at the Virgin Mega-store in Times Square. At Penn Station, dozens of posters crying out for lost loved ones hung at the entrance. While hundreds of people walked around me, I read the names of the sought ones. I looked at happy smiling pictures and lurid details of life that described these missing people. I read them out of respect the way one reads names on gravestones.

Inside Penn Station, an empty storefront become an impromptu message board. I read it as well, caught in the stories between the lines. Scrawled in large letters above the top were the words, “New York: You are still beautiful.”

The words reminded me that those who are wounded often need encouragement. I thought of women who have mastectomies, about the deep need to know that they remain a woman, that they remain beautiful despite the loss of part of their own body, a part which gives significant identity.

It took me several days to muster the courage to walk through Lower Manhattan. Thousands of people must trudge to work every day in that area, but I felt nervous and voyeuristic. I began to define my visit as article research. I would make my visit on the premise that I was writing something for DreamSeeker. Without the sense of purpose of article-writing, I might not have been able to legitimate, or compel myself into, the excursion. Yet within my soul I knew I needed to go, I needed to see, I needed to smell.

I took the Staten Island Ferry into Lower Manhattan. There were national guard patrols in the ferry terminal and on the ferry itself. Coast Guard cutters were in New York Harbor. Helicopter gunships were in the air. This was not the New York I remembered. I walked off the ferry and up Broadway. I realized I had walked this path more often than I have walked on North Main Street in Davidsville, Somerset County, where I grew up.

People were milling around. I have never before seen definitive milling around, but that was happening as tourists took pictures and pressed against barricades.

I noticed a smell in the air that reminded me of days when the steel mills were working in western Pennsylvania. Religious opportunists were passing out brochures and tracts. Window washers on scaffolds were cleaning the soot and dust from tall buildings with lots of windows.

I could only get within about two blocks of the actual site. A friend who is a New York cop told me I could probably get closer with my press and preacher credentials. I decided this was close enough.

I noticed the dust on window sills. I wanted to run my fingers through it. It would be a tangible connection to what had happened on September 11. I watched another man carry out my thoughts. I watched him run his finger along the ledge of a window of a closed shop. I watched him then look at his finger, covered with dust. I thought to myself, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I decided I wanted to leave the dust alone.

A sign on a storefront read, “This is a hallowed place. Please treat it and each other with the respect that it deserves.” I noticed that Trinity Church was closed. A sign proclaimed that its doors would open again, soon. I looked for the domes of the Orthodox church that I knew had been destroyed by the falling towers. I was amazed at the number of portable toilets in the neighborhood. I remained silent as I took pictures.

I was not stunned by the sight, as I expected, but I felt as if I was staring at a open grate into hell, a place where the reign of evil came to dwell on earth. The smoldering debris helped lend credibility to my thoughts as smoke arose from the acres of rubble. I felt the grittiness of the air in my mouth and in my nose. I would later wipe my forehead with a Kleenex and look for long moments at the dust. I kept the sooted tissue for weeks, feeling it was somehow too sacred to throw away.

I ran to catch the ferry again at dusk. I stood in the cargo bay where vehicles are usually transported. I watched the skyline get smaller behind me and an expansive sunset rest vibrantly beyond the Statue of Liberty and the sprawl of New Jersey. I felt like each of us on that ferry leaving Manhattan that night breathed some sort of prayer. I felt like somehow in that dusky light we were both thankful and realizing something about vulnerability. I know at least I was.

The storefront sign told me what I always knew. This place was holy, hallowed. It was made holy not only by the death of thousands but also by the lives of millions. I began to think that the realizations that followed in the wake of September 11 were rooted in coming to terms with the obvious but to which we are often oblivious.

On September 11, I was in Somerset County. I was among people who in the early morning of that day were thanking God they lived in the rural respite of the mountains. While mourning the acts in New York, many were silently grateful for their relative safety in the Allegheny hills, until a plane fell out of the sky and into an abandoned strip mine next to Lambertsville, outside of Shanksville.

On September 11, we discovered that we are all connected. The actions that may have been instigated by one man, hidden in the hills of a country half a world away, connected with the lives of an odd assortment of people across the globe. We cannot hide in our hills or in our cities. We are connected to the life of Wall Street and Main Street, to the life of the nation, to the life of the global community; to faith, politics, and policies both similar to and different from our own.

On the night of September 11, I returned nervously from Somerset County to Pittsburgh, where thousands of people had been evacuated from the downtown skyscrapers earlier in the day as Flight 93 passed near the city. The night seemed particularly dark. With no planes in the sky and no traffic on the three rivers, Pittsburgh was silent. Cities should never be that quiet.

I stopped to gaze from an overlook at Pittsburgh’s downtown. I scanned the skyline intensely; suddenly it seemed so vulnerable in my mind. I knew that somehow we were all vulnerable. I prayed for God to keep us safe.

Somehow, in confessing our vulnerability, we live in grace and peace. Somehow in knowing our vulnerability, we are able to come face-to-face with acts of evil, and to know that we are all transported day by day by hope, contained in the love that is God. That makes every place somehow holy, all of us somehow hallowed.

For this reason, I must remember. For this reason, I must have bold, compassionate faith. For this reason, I still love New York and Somerset County and am learning to love Pittsburgh. For this reason, I must learn to love those who have committed these acts, jarred me from my happy life and into the real struggle of figuring out what it honestly means to love those who might call themselves my enemies, and to love the places they love and to know the places they call holy. And I must learn to forgive those who would hold me captive to my own dreams and fears.

Kyrie eleison
Assalamu alaykum

—Steve Kriss is a student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, a legal resident of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and someone who will always be in love with New York.