RESURRECTION AT GROUND ZERO
by Robert N. Going
We are, scripture tells us, the Children of Light, and it is hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to the victims of the World Trade Center Massacre than those twin towers of blue light now rising from the rubble, far, far past the old 110 floor earthly limit, rising higher, ever higher, seemingly to the ends of the universe itself.
This memorial is scheduled to last for thirty days. It should never be extinguished.
Nor should that other great symbol be removed, the Cross at Ground Zero.
I have written about the cross previously, back in November when I was working as a Red Cross volunteer at Respite Center One, how the rescue workers had found these crossed steel beams and raised it up over the site.
After I wrote that story, I actually met the man who found it. He was introduced to me by the Fire Department Chaplain, Father Brian Jordan, who celebrates Mass every Sunday at 10:30 in the shadow of the cross. Frank Silecchia is a huge, gentle man with hands three times the size of mine. Born in Brooklyn of a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father, he is a simple man with native eloquence and Faith to move mountains. We stood in the muck and mire midst the spirits of shattered dreams between the cross and the then-standing remains of the North Tower as he told me his tale.
Many of the buildings surrounding the World Trade Center had been crushed by the falling debris. In the hours and days following the massacre, rescue workers risked their own lives in the desperate hunt for survivors. This brought Frankie into one of those tottering shells, the Customs House, Building 6. Eventually he reached the basement, and there, in the center of the building, was a crater, and rising up out of the crater a steel cross, fully erect.
It was the morning of the third day. For twenty minutes he stood there, and wept.
It had been part of the North Tower, and as that structure came down, this cross had passed through the roof of the building, plummeted through floor after floor after floor, down, down, down until finally coming to rest where he found it.
"This is holy ground we are walking on," he told me. "All those people that died here, they're still here in a way. Don't you see?" and here he looked up to where the tower once stood. "Don't you see? Jesus was raised up on the cross, He died, and He descended to the dead. Then He gathered them up, and then," and now he turned to where his Cross stood witness, high over the widening pit, "then, Resurrection! And He rises and takes everyone with Him to the Father!"
Father Jordan, who was still with us, nodded, and it is hard to imagine a thousand volumes of theology and philosophy that could have explained things any better.
Understandably, if the Cross remains, some will object to such a prominent display of religion in a public place.
But if, on a crisp autumn day when the pipes play Amazing Grace and the drum sounds the Dead March, some widow or child or mom or dad glances up at that cross and thinks for but a moment, "I am the Resurrection and the Life," who among us should say them nay?
On Sundays in the midst of the muck and devastation, Catholic Mass is celebrated at Ground Zero, beneath an unusual icon. Discovered in the rubble, standing erect, rescue workers found a perfectly formed steel cross, and immediately rallied to it as a symbol of Hope. It stands at the front of the site in solemn defiance of all that is surrounding it. Many look upon it as a miracle.
That is ridiculous, of course. This can be no more an act of God than the '69 Mets. Both towers and the other destroyed structures had steel frames and doubtless thousands of such right-angle joints as might form what looks to us to be a cross.
But symbols, which are all man-made, can nonetheless be powerful. What is the Liberty Bell other than an old decrepit piece of junk, or the tattered flag of Fort McHenry that we spend millions to preserve, or that Lady in the Harbor? But does not each in turn stir something in the soul to awaken a patriot's heart?
For the Christian, the Cross is the ultimate symbol of triumph over Evil and Death. Secularly, when used by the Red Cross it becomes a symbol of Hope and Healing. Our long tradition of burying the dead under crosses goes beyond the principles of the Christian religion. True, there have been times when the cross has been usurped for ignoble causes, but here at the Gates of Hell there can be no doubt of its purpose.