Just a Word… Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time...September 11, 2021

One evening when I was a graduate student at Fordham University’s School of Religion, I was sitting in a class entitled “Partners in Healing,” on the third floor of Keating Hall at the Rose Hill campus. The professor was Dr. Beverly Musgrave, and she was, in addition to being a college professor, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Manhattan.

Our class was an amalgam of students...Catholics, Christians of every stripe, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims...and others who perhaps did not profess any particular creed. We represented a wide variety of ages, but what we had in common was a call to serve, in some capacity, members of our respective communities...as chaplains, nurses, doctors, pastoral ministers, clergy, religious educators. As Dr. Musgrave began the class that evening, she asked us to come forward and stand in a circle in the front of the room. She asked us to take off our shoes, a request that was met with a few incredulous stares, but she was the professor! Then she asked us to take a step to the right, thereby standing in front of another person’s shoes...a person we did not know at all. As we did so, she asked us to look at our neighbor’s shoes and to imagine that we were going to continue to live our lives in those shoes...a powerfully meditative way to initiate the class in our semester long journey together.

As Dr. Musgrave continued, she asked us to ponder the ground beneath our feet...some feet were bare, some wore socks or stockings...and to consider the ground on which we were standing. She spoke of how the ground was holy, sacred, and necessary for us to feel, in order to recognize how we were connected, grounded as it were, to the earth, to one another. Then she said, feel this connection, this anchoring...this ground will never be the same as it is this evening. Revere it...treasure it...it will change. The date was September 10, 2001. Professor Musgrave was right on that September evening in the Bronx...the ground beneath our feet would never be the same.

In his book, “Searching for God at Ground Zero,” Fr. James Martin remembers what it was like being at the site in the days that followed the attack. Among the workers and volunteers, “everyone I met was so other-directed. Other centered. My experience of Ground Zero was one where the Holy Spirit was present, despite the tragedy and the horror; it was a place of generosity and love, community and union. Charity, concord and service.”

That sensibility of being united, of caring for others, permeated the country, for awhile. But, here we are twenty years later, and where are we? What have we learned? How have we honored those who perished? We are no longer united, in any sense. We are divided in terms of race, religion, politics, neighborhoods...you name it. We don’t regard the ground as sacred, and yet it is. We don’t regard other people as holy. And yet, they are. My sense is that the victims would not speak to us of revenge, but rather would ask us to seek out communities that might help us come to terms with our troubled history; they might advise us to attend to the poets and artists among us who can be adept at discerning the movements of the heart; they might ask us to see the love of God in human love...and respond accordingly. “A world without mercy is not a human world,” says Cardinal Walter Kasper. Our God asks that we be who we are...human...with all the strength and the weakness that encompasses. We are called to be God’s hands, and feet, and presence in this world. We are called to embody the mercy of God. What greater calling can there be? The love and joy, and sometimes sorrow, that accompanies such a calling, can overcome whatever evil or hatred might try to stand in its way. Is this what they would ask of us?

Our gospel today has Jesus saying to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!” Isn’t it time that we say, “Get behind me, Satan!” to those beliefs, frameworks and worldviews that tear us apart...be they racism, a sense of superiority, hatred, entitlement? Isn’t it time to strive to think as God does, and not as human beings do?

It remains to us, the living, to recognize that all ground is holy ground, and to honor that holiness, and the memory of those who perished, in the living of our lives...by being the very best that we can be...by being truly human, made in the image and likeness of God...and thereby able to imagine that we can, in the spirit of Thomas Merton, be taken by the hand of God, of Love, and have the doors of another life, another day, opened to us all, a day in which mercy and love triumph over hate, over vengeance, and lead us to a place where the promised kingdom of God can flourish.