By Bill Leonard
In the days ahead, we revisit graphic images that no doubt haunt survivors and families of the dead continually: A commercial airliner crashes into the World Trade Center in what seemed at first a horrible accident. A second plane strikes the other tower, confirmation that this was no unintended event. A third plane hits the Pentagon and another falls on a Pennsylvania farm, its calculated devastation thwarted by heroic passengers. The unimaginable collapse of the two towers ended almost 3,000 lives and ignited a national ordeal that remains at once painful and implausible in our collective memory.
Reflecting on those events and the victims, I am struck by the ways 9/11 impacted one small segment of the American landscape at Wake Forest University, evident in the sustaining power of ritual and the wisdom of a resident poet.
Sept. 11, 2001, came on a Tuesday, the day the school of divinity conducts its weekly 11:00 chapel service. On 9/11, the chapel speaker was Linda Weaver Williams, Virginia Commonwealth professor and Baptist preacher, who arrived to “breaking news” of the Twin Towers.
Dispensing with prescribed plans, Weaver Williams enlisted the help of her longtime friend Nancy Hastings Sehested, another Baptist preacher, and the two led a stunned community in prayers, hymns and scriptures with fear and trembling, grace and dignity, offering the enduring words of texts from other troubled times.
About 10 minutes into the service, something amazing happened. Undergraduates galore came streaming through the doors, packing pews, leaning against the walls and sitting cross-legged on the floor of the sparse Davis Chapel. Staggered by the news, they grasped for sacred space to help them comprehend the moment. Even then the towers were still standing; the worst was yet to come.
As worship ended, and without official permission, we invited students to an afternoon communion service to be held in Wait Chapel, the largest gathering place on campus. An interfaith service was quickly scheduled for Wait Chapel in the evening. At communion, the preacher was Jill Crainshaw, divinity school professor and Presbyterian minister.
While I remember few of her words, I cannot forget the visual power of her ritual actions. Standing at the communion table, she took large sheets of matzo bread, crushing them in her hands, and repeating the word “broken” as the fragments flew across altar and floor. It is an image etched forever on my memory. At the distribution of the elements, professors joined campus clergy to serve the approximately 800 people — mostly students — in attendance.
Doctrinal differences faded ever so briefly as Catholics and Protestants, Pentecostals and Anglicans crowded to the chancel to dip bread into wine in that ageless ritual. Ancient words of life and death — “The body and blood of Christ keep you unto everlasting life” — offered a sign of hope in an overwhelmingly hopeless moment. The evening’s interfaith service provided similar sustenance with prayers and readings from multiple faith traditions represented in faculty, staff, student body and world.
Others kept singular vigils. Throughout that horrific day, Phyllis Trible, New Yorker, Hebrew Bible scholar, and author of the classic work, Texts of Terror, spent hours in my office watching television reports from the city that is her home. On her lap was a Bible opened to the book of Jeremiah and this terrible text:
“Summon the wailing women to come, send for the women skilled in keening to come quickly and raise a lament for us, that our eyes may stream with tears and our eyelids be wet with weeping….Teach your daughters the lament; teach your neighbors this dirge: ‘Death has climbed in through our windows and entered our palaces, cutting off the children in the street and the young men in the thoroughfare'” (Jeremiah 9:17-21).
The words seemed too contemporary. Had nothing changed in 3,000 years? Ten years later, I remain grateful that on 9/11/2001 Wake Forest University had some women — Weaver Williams, Hastings Sehested, Crainshaw, Trible — “skilled in keening” who “raised a lament” that helped us confront the darkness.
On the Tuesday after 9/11, Wake Forest poet/professor Maya Angelou addressed the divinity school community. She was in New York that fateful day, she told us, and she made a pot of soup to serve the small army of friends who sought sanctuary in her apartment, clinging to one another as the world around them literally collapsed.
She spoke of terrorism’s long history in the Holocaust, the Middle Passage and the massacres of innocents in assorted wars, citing novelist and friend James Baldwin who searched for hope amid the abiding reality of human evil.
With characteristic insight, Angelou concluded by asserting that the terrible events of 9/11 require “unanticipated courage” of human beings, a courage that lurks deep within us, often unleashed in times of unforeseen tragedy.
I hope she was right. A decade later, perhaps memory and ritual will renew such unanticipated courage in us all. Before the next attack.