Lessons Learned at ‘Ground Zero’
By David Massengill

My name is David, and I am homeless, temporarily. But I will be home soon. Home is on Broadway, one block east of what was the World Trade Center. The last time my family and I slept at home was Monday, September 10. The next morning my daughter, Louisa, and I left home early for midtown Manhattan. But at 8:25 a.m. my wife, Anita, and our 11-year-old son, Eric, were standing in front of 5 World Trade Center, hailing a cab to take him to his school in Greenwich Village.

She dropped him off and walked to the nearest subway station. She was going to take the Number 1 train back home to the subway station in the basement of the World Trade Center – a stop that no longer exists. But when Anita got to the subway entrance, people were standing and staring at the gaping hole in one of the World Trade Center towers and the smoke pouring from it.

Pondering God’s Mercies

While she watched, she saw the second plane hit and an orange fireball burst from the other tower. She turned north and walked to our church, Metro Baptist. Since then I have pondered God’s mercies, and what a difference a mere 20 minutes on either side of her schedule could have made in our lives.

We spent that night at our pastor’s house, but the next day I headed back downtown. Our dog and two cats had been left without food or water, since my wife was only going to be away for a half-hour or so. I didn’t know what I could do, so I just started walking south from 14th street.

The wind was blowing from the south, and it was bitter with smoke. By the time I reached Canal Street, most people were wearing masks. There were police checkpoints every block. Because I had photo identification showing that I lived there, and because police have a fond spot for dogs, they let me through. The last four blocks I had a National Guardsman by my side as an escort.

Those last few blocks were hard. It was late afternoon on a sunny day, but there it was twilight. Everything was covered with an inch or more of gray ash. Everything, that is, except for a carpet of papers on the ground. I had to walk on them, and as I did I saw letters, memos, bills – all of the paper that makes up an office. But there was no office anymore, and every third or fourth page was partly burned.

When I went into our apartment I was shocked. It was untouched; the lights were on and there was running water. It was as if time had stopped on Tuesday morning at 8:25 a.m. I took care of the animals and then went, reluctantly, back into the world after September 11.

I walked into a war zone. But I knew this war zone. It was where I had spent most of the last 20 years of my life. When you are a Wall Street lawyer, you get to know the area around Wall Street very well. But that afternoon, everything was different. I really didn’t know this place. As I walked away from there, the radios went off around me with an emergency warning. The remaining buildings in the World Trade Center were collapsing behind me.

It has now been three weeks. The debris has stopped burning, and we are going home this week. But it will be a very different place. It is a different world.

I’ve done a lot of thinking, and two things are clear to me. The first is the importance of the separation of church and state. And the second is the importance of the invisible city.

“Toxic Combination”

We saw on September 11 just what a toxic combination religious zeal and physical power can be. In the past, my motivation in this area was my concern about the damage we do to our own religious faith when we combine it with easy access to secular power.

Faith means we have doubts, times when we start to wonder if what we believe is right, if we can finish what we have begun. When those doubts grow, there is an extraordinary temptation to solve them the easy way, by decree, if we know the guys with the guns, or if we are the guys with the guns. When that happens, God becomes unnecessary, and faith ceases to be faith.

But even more deadly is when faith is transformed from a limit on power – the defender of the powerless – into a justification for the use of power. The men who flew those planes into the buildings were not cowards. They trained for years with the goal of causing their own swift and violent death. They were zealots, true believers, who had been freed from all moral limits by that zeal. If that zeal came from what they believed was a religious mandate, it would not be surprising.

It certainly shouldn’t surprise us. Islam has a long way to go before it matches the carnage committed in the name of the Lamb of God and the Prince of Peace. The history of the church includes too many examples of what happens when religious faith and secular power merge.

When that happens we remove the last and greatest limit on our capacity to destroy: our reliance on God’s power. Zealots of all faiths have been praying for the destruction of the “godless heathen” in New York City for decades, yet God has been curiously unmoved. This isn’t the first time in history that zealots have used secular power to make their prayers a reality, when it appeared that God did not intend to do so any time soon.

“Moral Boundary” and “Invisible Treasure”

Our country learned this lesson long ago, and the revolutionaries insisted on a First Amendment that protects both the church and the state from the corrupting influence of too close a bond. We owe it to those who died, and to those who survived, to work to keep religious faith a moral boundary for the government, and never a moral license to commit inhuman acts in God’s name.

But I learned something else as well: the importance of the invisible city. We have heard sermons about building up treasure in heaven. But we can build up treasure on earth, a treasure that is harder to destroy than any building.

In New York City that treasure has been obscured by the giant buildings, but you saw it on September 11. You saw it when world-class chefs served gourmet food under makeshift tents to rescue workers, when steel workers came from every construction site in the city without a call, when fire fighters charged into burning buildings that were raining flaming debris. You saw it in the following days, as plays went back on and our churches filled. You saw a city that no terrorist could destroy, a city built of creativity and freedom, a city based on an overwhelming belief in the value of human talent.

Already I am hearing people say that they will not let fear and anger destroy that part of our city. We will not finish the terrorists’ work for them. That same fierce drive should be part of our national will, as well. We cannot let fear and anger turn us into accomplices after the fact, destroying the freedoms that so angered our enemies.

God’s House – a Home for All

One more story. Metro Baptist Church is across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. When disaster struck, the staff put up signs offering a place to come and pray, or talk, or just sit.

In the early afternoon a man came in, shaking. He asked if he could stay.

David Waugh, the pastor, said, “Of course.”

But the man said, “You don’t understand. I am a Muslim.”

And David said, “This is God’s house and you are welcome here.”

That night about 35 people slept on the floor of Metro’s sanctuary: Muslim, German Lutheran, Baptists and others. They were the family of God, and they were home.

Our new associate minister, Marti Williams, said later that although everyone is calling for a return to normalcy, she’s hoping for continued “abnormalcy” – like the abnormal amount of caring and decency and community she saw that night.

That’s not a bad lesson for anyone these days.

October 2001