A New York Story

This post was written on February 6, 2017.

There’s a New York story I like to tell. 

October, 2001. I was living in Manhattan, over a hundred blocks from Ground Zero, but the grief and fear following 9/11 were as potent in Morningside Heights as anywhere else in the city. On Sunday, October 7, I went early to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to get my ticket for the Earth Mass celebrating the Feast of St. Francis, a mass that would include the Blessing of the Animals. This is an incredible service--a breath-taking celebration with music and dance that concludes with a grand procession of animals down the center aisle of the cathedral. I went every year I lived in New York.

On that particular October day, the mass was as beautiful and moving and comical as always, with tiny pets barking and squirming and escaping from their owners throughout the service. But twined with the cuteness and beauty was a heavy sense of mourning and unease, the horror of 9/11 less than a month past, that New York fear of being pressed with a large crowd inside a city landmark. The search for bodies at the Word Trade Center site was still active. Still, there was the sense of city life carrying on, traditions continuing--daily life its own kind of resilience and resistance. 

Then, at the end of the mass, the celebrant came to the pulpit with an announcement: the U.S. had dropped bombs on Afghanistan. A war had begun. A president whom almost no one in that city crowd liked or trusted had turned the world upside down.

Then the enormous bronze doors of the cathedral opened, and the silent Procession of Animals began, each creature with a handler who was openly weeping as they walked. Birds of prey, ox, kangaroo, camel, llama, cow, sheep. Each paraded by, with an animal’s quiet dignity, calm amid the anguish of their handlers and the crowds.

At the end of the procession came the search-and-rescue dogs. They were wearing vests embellished with American flags and had wreaths around their necks. They’d spent weeks searching for bodies but were now in the church, walking calmly down the aisle, a symbol of bravery and peacefulness and love. 

This was over fifteen years ago, but--those animals. I’ll never forget it.

I have kids now, and when I look at them this February I feel a shadow of that familiar heartache. Like those proud creatures who had no hand in changing their world for the worse, my kids are innocent. They have to trust us to keep the world safe for them. Safe: as in open-hearted and kind and reasonable, with respect for intelligence, honesty, tradition, education, the rule of law, and basic human decency. I look at them skipping to the bus stop, snuggling their toys, and I’m grateful that they’re too little to fully grasp the shame of what’s happening.

So I’m keeping the news off, selectively skimming headlines, reading a lot of fiction (to myself, and to them), and writing. Fostering empathy by exploring and creating unfamiliar worlds and characters. Doing what we writers and readers do: try, each day, to walk in other people’s shoes.