Virginia Tech

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My colleague Bob Watson at Brainstorms reports that it’s not the worst school mass murder in U.S. History as has been claimed in the early news reports. But it’s so terrible that I can’t take it in. The Washinton Post reports 32 dead and more than two dozen injured. I pray for the dead and injured, and I pray for the community at Virginia Tech, those who have been terrorized and those who have had the task of dealing directly with the violence and for their families and friends. And I pray for the killer, whoever that was. Some are reporting that students have been critical of police for failing to stop the shootings sooner. There are stories of two separate shooting sprees, two hours apart.

I pray for all who have been directly involved in this terrible thing and for the rest of us as well.

all night vigil

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Here’s a poster for the Bach Society’s upcoming performance of the Rachmaninoff Vespers. I’m looking forward to this performance very much, since I have never had the privilege of singing this wonderful music before in my life. and that reminds me that this morning’s New York Times carried a piece about a lost Boris Godunov which has been rediscovered and mounted by Princeton’s Berlind Theater.

I wish it were possible to be more sanguine about Russia these days. His fulsome praise for Mstislav Rostropovich makes Vladimir Putin sound almost like an American. But associating himself with Rostropovich’s heroism willl not make Putin a good man or a decent head of state. Nor have Rostropovich and his wife had a smooth time of it since they returned to their native country to live.

“Many of his compatriots openly detest them and are jealous of their successes, riches and talent. Many can’t forgive them their civil courage,” the cinematographer Alexander Sokurov, who is making a documentary on Rostropovich, told AFP recently.

“Many can’t forgive them their civil courage” is a telling sentence.      

more about fry street, etc.

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I am grinding my teeth as I write this. It looks as though the Tomato is out on Fry Street. I’ve passed an hour or two there over the years, when lunch was a slice of pizza and a small draft (well, when I was younger than I am now). We never called it The Flying Tomato that I recall; it was always just The Tomato. I’m not ready for this; I still miss the Green Derby that was, at the corner of Avenue A and Mulberry. The English Department used to gather there on Friday afternoons for beer and free food. The Derby has been gone at least fifteen years, it seems to me, and Jim’s Diner almost that long.

Jim’s went the way that many establishments have gone on Fry Street–somebody got tired of keeping it going. What’s happening now is that a predatory developer is working in the area to drive out small business establishments. In going after The Tomato, United Equities is going after one of the anchors of the street as it has been.

Apropos of things as they used to be, Dale Cannon has sent me a link to some pages about St. Louis neighborhood history. Looks like fun! At the end of a nostalgic ramble through the neighborhood of his childhood, Dale philosophizes:

Progress changes all things, I guess. To travel through that neighborhood now, one has a hard time even visualizing an ethnically diverse neighborhood where stores thrived, let alone a rural area. On the northwest corner of nineteenth and Salisbury, across from Hyde Park, Paul Antle once ran a pharmacy–which today is a vacant lot. A Dairy Queen now stands where once I saw the movies Return of the Fly and the Alligator People at the Tower Theater. Further north, fully half of many of the blocks–maybe more–are vacant lots. In the City–in the County–farms are replaced by homes–homes are levelled–hotels and parking lots and garages rise where homes once stood–what is built deteriorates–the winds of change blow various directions–and we are generally powerless to stop them–we are just observers.

Check out Dale’s page. I don’t know whether he is still maintaining it, but it looks to have been fun and interesting and topical just a little while ago. The vignettes are rich and good to read. You’ll find them under Dale Cannon’s St. Louis.

town

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Here’s a story. It begins in the parking lot of the Denton (TX) Islamic Society, a tiny congregation named so as to claim standing in the world outside the traditional Islamic realm. It was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. Three hundred or so local citizens, Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others gathered in the back parking lot of the society’s tiny mosque in order to express our solidarity after someone had fire bombed the place. I didn’t visit the interior of the building because I didn’t know whether I should take off my shoes, and I don’t know today whether the Sabbath has any standing in Islam.

Tuesday the week before–I won’t put the date down–a thing occurred that I never dreamed I would live to see when terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the main towers of the World Trade Center in New York and destroyed them, together with other buildings nearby and the lives of several thousand souls. I should set it down that other terrorists also hijacked airplanes that were crashed into the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. These terrorists were almost immediately identified with Islamic fundamentalism by government and press–hence the bombing of our little mosque in Denton.
 
I’d been stunned since the destruction of the World Trade Center. Our very young President (he seemed so at the time) had told us we were at war. I had acknowledged that in my own heart since I watched the first news reports and believed them to be true. I couldn’t find any anger in myself, though perhaps it was there and I didn’t recognize it. What I remember now is that as the Imam began to chant the prayer with which we began the little service that afternoon, I wept.

Bishop James Stanton was here, having come to town for a confirmation service at my church. His preaching had urged the proposition that we all needed to touch one another in the aftermath of our communal loss. Those of us who remained alive needed to touch, I think he meant. I thanked him for his sermon and his presence at the mosque, felt close to him for a moment and was surprised because I disagree with him more often than not. I was struck too by a dear old friend’s comment as we walked around the parking lot together, exchanging greetings after the service, when he said to me that he didn’t want to go to war without God (without something he could pose to himself in his own mind as God–those were his words). I can go along with Bishop Stanton that we seek to touch what grounds us in times of great crisis. I’m not sure I understand my friend’s anxiety about going to war without God.

The Imam chanted and then translated. His prayer expressed gratitude to God for his beautiful creation. “This is my Father’s world,” as we sang in the Methodist Sunday School of my childhood, I thought–I will take the memory of that prayer, which I didn’t initially understand, as a symbol of our struggle to find community with inadequate language and an inadequate minds as we stood there in the hot sun on that concrete parking lot, greeting one another with words expressing our knowledge that we are not one people. I believe we stood in grace there, however much God may have turned his attention from his beautiful creation as the World Trade Center exploded. The next evening I opened my class at the university with the statement that I’d be glad to hear thoughts and expressions in regard to our country–we’d been asked to do this by the president–and I let my students talk for an hour and a half. There was a variety of expression, including that of one student who left the room because the discussion disturbed him. Later I put my arm around him, and the other students welcomed him back for the remainder of the evening.

I can now report that my eldest child, who is 45 years old, is as likely to have another birthday as I am. He worked in the World Trade Center–when there was a World Trade Center. Fortunately for him and his coworkers and their families and friends including yours truly, his office didn’t open until 10:00. St. Paul says “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” I’ve always loved that sentiment; somehow, it suggests to me the kindness of strangers. Maybe that’s why I felt at church the next week that our processions and triumphal evocations of God were not just pretentious but wrong headed. I thought of a Quaker meeting house I know and wondered if real piety waits upon grace without asking any questions.

I tend to think the moral universe is a human creation, more like a town than like the vast reaches of interstellar space. What I believe in outside that is grace and the human struggle for community, a version perhaps of what we used to call in my church ‘the summary of the law.’ I remembered my son’s words as he looked from his apartment in midtown Manhattan and described the smoke and the smell of the great explosions at the World Trade Center. That awful thing caused many New Yorkers to remember their town and to become citizens behaving like citizens in countless ways that filled the news reports in the aftermath. Perhaps something similar happened to us in Denton; perhaps we remembered our town, and remembering, perhaps we transcended our differences for a while.

And I’m remembering now a notion of Karl Jaspers’s, in a little book entitled Die Schuldfrage, that in the aftermath of the Nazi terror perhaps all who remained alive felt a sense of what he termed metaphysical guilt, a sense of estrangement from the body of humanity. I have felt and talked with others who have also felt, in the aftermath of the terror of what we now call nine-eleven, a sense of alienation from the body of humanity and the world, not guilt but something that makes us reach out for one another. Was God in those terrible explosions that destroyed so many innocent? Was God absent? I don’t know. I can’t believe God caused them in the sense that some religious zealots have claimed. To my mind the question is something like asking if God was in the Tsunami of 2004. All fear and trembling is not hierophany. Some of it is the ordinary terror of the world, even the unthinkable. This makes us feel uneasy in our skins sometimes, to experience ourselves as painfully other. Jesus, we like to say, undid our alienation just as he healed the eyes of the man born blind; and perhaps it is significant that the mud Jesus placed on the blind man’s eyes is mixed with spittle, earth and human stuff.

The blind man’s answer when he is asked what occurred is enigmatic: “I only know that before I was blind and now I can see.” The wind of God blows where it will. But in the interstices of the world, where we are who mostly lead ordinary lives, it often seems good that we touch each other, that we love as much as we can and do what we can to make the world better than it often manifestly is. We’d like to think that the world as God made it is as fresh as we’d like to find it on Easter morning. We’d like to think that the one who taught us to love his father’s world was right and that it is indeed a good and joyful thing to give thanks for it, even on a hot Texas parking lot in the aftermath of a fire bombing.