From the Freedom Tower to the Temple of Dendur: 9/11 to Eternity—
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WTC One  
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As it happened, Brothers Christopher, Peter, and I had the opportunity to drive down to Manhattan Monday morning, June 2, with two objectives: to see the just-opened 9/11 Museum and Memorial and to hear Arvo Pärt’s sacred work Kanon Pokajanen performed at the Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the two events were connected by serendipity, for me the link had an almost prophetic poignance.
It was a perfect day, mimicking the sunny clarity of that September morning in 2001. We walked from the Fulton Street Subway stop through the press of traffic and pedestrians, past construction detours to the siren calls of police whistles, catching sight of the tower, WTC One, from different angles. Then abruptly we were in the memorial plaza in the forest of young trees, thronged with people and drawn by the sound of water falling along the four edges of the two squares that trace the ground zero footprint. The tower gleams, and thanks to the twist effect of its beveled vertical lines, the sun always shimmers from the uppermost surfaces. It is hard to appreciate that at 1,776 feet it stands a mere 36 feet higher than our mountain. At New Skete among the Taconic and Green Mountains, our peaks seem modest. But here in the Battery, close to sea level, the building soars into the blue sky.
The museum is entirely underground. The descent is dramatic, especially in the central space, where the slurry wall that seals off the Hudson River forms a cavernous chamber. The exhibits are a contrast, ranging from the very large—a section of the radio tower, resembling a rocket with its guts exposed, some structural beams, a petrified escalator, various vehicles, a pretzeled NYFD hook-and-ladder truck—to the very small: keys, badges, security ID’s, pocket items, singed books and papers. The cumulative effect for me was to feel overwhelmed...too many images. There are several pocket auditoriums where sound exhibits in darkened chambers play phone messages of farewell as a screen pinpoints on an architectural schema where each caller was in the tower when the call was made. That choked me up, as did a special hall with photographs of every victim, especially when two women next to me in the crowd found a loved one. Video screens played everywhere. At the entry hall they record reactions from all sorts of people around lower Manhattan that morning: a full gamut of shock, anguish, and disbelief. Within the museum they depict most of the sights embedded on the nation’s retina over those September days, with other more nuanced, intimate scenes, such as the view from a fire or police command post. I was aware of sections dealing with the Pentagon hit, the Pennsylvania crash (another gut-wrenching audio of the passenger revolt), Osama bin Laden, and finally documentation of the cleanup and construction of the new tower. One notable depiction showed a time-lapse sequence over weeks and months, like some nature film showing the growth of a flower or emergence of a butterfly, only here it was the tower’s ascent.
It was a relief to emerge back into the sunshine, reactions put on pause in order to navigate the rush hour congestion, and meet our friend William Hood (art historian, professor, and keynote speaker at last year’s pilgrimage) for dinner. The four of us walked from the restaurant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which presides on the East side of Central Park. The second event was the perfect antidote to the storm und drang at the tip of the island.
The concert began at seven, by which time the venders at the foot of the great entrance stairway had packed up and the crowds had been replaced by a few guards giving directions to the entry point for the performance. The Sackler Wing, a fairly new addition on the north side, features an entire glass wall looking onto the trees of the park. The Temple of Dendur was built to honor Isis in 15 B.C. and was moved in 1965 to New York City in advance of the Aswan Dam project, which would have submerged it. It is small but elegant, with a tall entry gate to its east, all mounted above a reflection pool on a waist-high terrace. The hall is smaller than the subterranean chamber of the 9/11, but it radiates the serenity of a two-thousand-year-old shrine amplified by the outside trees washed golden by the evening sun.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir filed in and formed a circle between the portal and the pool. Tönu Kaljuste is its conductor. The sound was heart-rending, at times choking me up with the pain of beauty —the flip side, as it were, of the weight of loss and suffering at ground zero. The text consists of a set, or canon, of eight canticles of repentance: Kanon Pokajanen. Arvo Pärt chose this 8th-century hymn by St. Andrew of Crete not long after he came into the Orthodox Church, and he used his gift to express all the textures of the deep yearning of the soul for communion with God. There are many levels of imagery throughout the canon: the infinite mercy of Christ, his care as imaged in the Good Shepherd, his nourishment by his Body and Blood. But, I venture, for 21st-century Americans, the awareness of what repentance means was something astonishing and alien. It is a not a concept squeezable into sound bites; nor likely featured in ads, games, or soaps; nor found in the index of any school book; nor likely, in all honesty, to be heard from church pulpits. However, nothing spoke more vividly to me of this void than having just walked through the 9/11 museum. The final prayer of the canon put me in mind of a prayer we composed for the feast of the Holy Cross three days after 9/11:
The cross before us now recalls your own passion and life-giving death, an image of your limitless and unfathomable love. Let us cling to this love as the only certain thing in our lives. Let mindfulness of this mystery, mingled with the terrible images of death and destruction we all have seen, move us to new efforts to uproot all trace of hatred, arrogance, lust for power, and fanatical absolutes, beginning with those that lurk even in the un-faced corners of our own minds and hearts. May our demand for justice be tempered by humility and honesty, and grant the world the peace that only you can give.
Pärt’s music conveyed this as only the human voice can. Tönu Kaljuste molded his twenty-six singers in a seamless paean, now soft and smooth as a mink’s pelt, now strident as an angelic trumpet. With dissonance he stressed the struggle of self-knowledge, of admitting a trace of hatred, arrogance, lust for power, and fanatical absolutes in each of us— for this we need repentance.
It was a joy to watch Kaljuste command absolute dynamic tonality, his face alive and intense, and at moments radiant. We had seats near the South wall of the temple and fortunately faced the conductor. Only for the “Ikos,” a poetic piece near the middle of the canon, did any soloists stand up, here a bass and a tenor, and the effect was so prayerful, so electric that it made my skin prickle. Woven through the entire work is the refrain Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, which becomes a familiar punctuation in a haunting melodic phrase with bell-like impulses for which Pärt is known. The canon concludes with a long prayer of yearning vulnerability, seeking repentance as the path to renew in us the divine image. Oratorio in style, each part declaims a section giving the prayer a true sense of summation for the whole work. The sopranos sang the concluding Amen at such a pitch that it made me flinch; it quickly resolves in a resonance of peace and surrender, and like blowing out a candle, the brief after-glow is consumed by silence. The audience respected the power of the moment, an inkling of eternity, and withheld applause for a few moments until the conductor lifted his head.
The program included a reflection on his opus by the composer, remarking that the particular character of Church Slavonic was a meaningful immersion for him. I was very grateful for the rudiments of the language I picked up in my youth, enough of which is embedded in my gray cells to give me access to it.
Our departure from the city at dusk along the Hudson, with the George Washington Bridge alight, a twinkling necklace across the leaden river, and the faint rose glow of the cliffs along the Palisades, made for an aesthetic nightcap to an extraordinary day.
Photos, except the aerial view, by Br Stavros
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