The New York street seller had already snookered one of my friends into buying a booklet of photos of the World Trade Center attack. So, when he accosted us again after we’d toured the exhibit at St. Paul’s Chapel and another across the street, I wasn’t too hyped to listen to him.
There was something else he thought we should see. I followed my friends as they followed him around the corner to Church Street in Lower Manhattan. There off the sidewalk was a towering steel beam in the shape of a cross. That I didn’t expect. I’m used to seeing tiny versions of the cross – and other representations of our faith – on auction tables pretty often. But one this big? It proclaimed pretty forcefully our faith as a people.
It was the World Trade Center cross. This one stretched to the sky, rusted, with what looked like silver foil on the right arm. The beam had been found on Sept. 13, 2001, in the rubble of one of the trade-center buildings.
Found that day amid all the pain, rescue workers saw it as a symbol of hope, faith and healing. Inscribed on a metal plate on the front of the cross were the words: “A SIGN OF COMFORT FOR ALL” – a sentiment we all share through the crosses we wear.
That was then, this is now. And now is a debate going on about whether a group of Muslims should build a mosque and Islamic center two miles – two miles! – from the site of the World Trade Center. Muslims who probably don’t know Osama Bin Laden and his crazy terrorists any more than any of us who call ourselves Christians. Some in our country have a tendency to plop everyone of a certain race, color, creed or religion into the same category. We are all not monolithic; Islamic adherents are not all terrorists.
There are claims and counterclaims, misrepresentations and more about the mosque and its imam. Interestingly, the mosque is already using a building on the site for spillover worshipers, according to an Associated Press story.
I understand the passion surrounding the WTC site. I remember sitting on my bed dumbfounded that morning of Sept. 11, 2001, my mind disbelieving as I watched over and over again on network TV the planes plowing into the two buildings. I hurt just like millions of people in this country and across the world. I could not understand this much hate.
Now, I can’t understand this much intolerance. How can we in a country built on religious freedom deny the same to others? We have a Constitution that grants all Americans – not just the ones who believe what we believe – certain inalienable rights.
Some 61 percent of Americans don’t think the mosque should be built there, according to a Time magazine poll released this week. So what? Each of us has an opinion, but that does not give us the right to throw out the Constitution when it doesn’t suit our idea of right and wrong.
I’m sure many of the people who are against the mosque consider themselves spiritual and religious – or maybe not. Overall, we are a very religious people: We go to church on Sunday with our Bibles in our hands and our crucifixes around our necks, and sing heartily from our hymn books, looking for the faith to sustain us and keep us in God’s grace.
We are both devout and tolerant, 35,000 of us told researchers in a 2008 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, although the opposition to the mosque doesn’t sound too tolerant to me. A study author noted that we are open to other faiths, much more than you’d think based on our national conversations on the issue of religion. How do we reconcile what we tell pollsters with how we live our faith?
I do know that many of us get our solace from our Bibles. Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, who writes the Soul Rhythms blog, quotes the Bible often and looks to it for answers. I’m sure no book is read or quoted as often. Millions are sold each year, and likely each of us has at least one in our homes – whether we read it or not.
The Bible is “the” one religious symbol of our belief in God. I need only to look to the tables at my favorite auction houses each week to know this; there is usually a Bible or two, along with crucifixes, which must be the second most-purchased items. (Before I went to Italy some years ago, a friend asked me to buy a cross and have it blessed with holy water. A priest outside the catacombs in Rome sprinkled the cross and those of others in my tour group. Crucifixes were abundant in the shops we visited.)
I’ve come across old heavy Bibles with the birthdates and names of family members, and wonder how someone could toss something so precious (I also found in researching that some old Bibles are very collectible). I see rosaries, representations of Mary, and many many crucifixes. I’ve written about a young soldier whose possessions I got at auction: a Bible distributed to him by the Army during World War II, along with several of his crucifixes. And a family’s collection of icons that found their way to the auction shelves.
One of my most interesting finds was an old poster, faded, with an illustrated version of the 23rd Psalms. It was from the 1890s, still in its handmade wooden frame. It likely had been hidden in an attic for years. It’s one of those antique pieces of ephemera that a family should have preserved, not thrown away.
Physical items are not the only manifestations of our faith. We all get those daily devotionals – verses or proverbs from the Bible or based on its teachings – from friends via email who want to share comforting messages. I rarely send them out but I understand the need for them.
People who say they believe in the Bible and the goodness it espouses should be a bit more tolerant of those who don’t sit next to them on Sunday mornings. Faith is not something we practice inside a church building but way beyond it, even past our own prejudices.
