Manhattan's St. Paul's Chapel a shrine to 9/11

  
By Lynette Wilson, September 11, 2009
   
 [Episcopal News Service] Rain, at times heavy, and winds gusting strong enough to turn an umbrella inside out didn't stop crowds of visitors and mourners from standing vigil at Ground Zero on September 11 while the names of the dead were read out loud during the now-traditional ceremony remembering those killed in the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.
   
Across the street at St. Paul's Chapel the Bell of Hope rang at 8:46 a.m. – the time eight years ago when the first of two hijacked planes struck the towers. A Mennonite youth choir assembled in front of the chapel and sang throughout the morning.
   
Immediately following the September 11, 2001 attack, St. Paul's, a chapel of Trinity Church Wall Street, became a staging ground for volunteers and relief workers. Today it is a shrine. Thousands of people pass through the chapel in lower Manhattan daily on their way to and from Ground Zero, where terrorists steered two planes into the Twin Towers, destroying them and killing more than 2,700 people.
   
The hijackers crashed a third airplane into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., A fourth plane crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania.
   
St. Paul's hosted a noontime ecumenical service on the eighth anniversary, followed by prayers for healing. Trinity, located at Wall Street and Broadway a few blocks south, hosted a noontime votive Eucharist for peace. At the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the noontime Holy Eucharist was devoted to 9/11 remembrance on Friday and similar services took place in Episcopal churches nationwide.
   
At the Episcopal Church Center in New York, the Rev. Brian Grieves celebrated the noon Eucharist. September 11, he said, is one of those events in American history, like President John F. Kennedy's assassination and Pearl Harbor, for which those alive remember where they were and what they were doing when the event took place.
   
"We all remember events like these personally or through the study of history because of the impacts they make," he said.
   
Eight years ago, Grieves said, the church center staff huddled in a conference room, watching the attacks unfold on television. After the first tower collapsed, the television was turned off and then-Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold led the staff in prayer. Moments later, when the television was turned back on, the second tower had collapsed.
   
The following day, Grieves volunteered at a triage site north of Ground Zero, and prepared for the wounded to arrive. "They never came. There were so few survivors amidst the rubble," he said.
   
The day's Gospel reading, John 17: 11-19, depicts the world as a dangerous, forbidding place, Grieves said, adding that he never much liked that description, but said it was "an accurate description of how it felt on 9/11." 
-- Lynette Wilson is staff writer, Episcopal Life Media.