Looking for God in the Details at Ground Zero: Does God have a place at ground zero?

A plan for the World Trade Center site by Think includes an esplanade running from the foot of St. Paul's Chapel. Within this park, it would relocate St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

This is not a metaphysical inquiry but a planning question, although the quick rejoinder to both might be: which god? Or, whose god? Or, what god?

As it happens, there is an answer. Among the program requirements laid out by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for the design studies of the World Trade Center site were the rebuilding of the nearby St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed Sept. 11, and the "recognition of the historic role of St. Paul's Chapel in the Fulton Street corridor."

To judge from the studies, however, the response of most architects to these requirements ranged from diffidence to indifference, though some attributed an innate overall spirituality to their projects. (The United Architects team likened the enclosure created by its five interconnected towers to the domed sanctuary of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.)

The guiding principles for a memorial, released yesterday by the development corporation, speak of respecting the "sacred quality of the space" and encouraging "reflection and contemplation." Yet some visitors will surely wish to do more, to worship or pray.

Perhaps the last major public work in New York that placed organized religion on a prominent architectural footing was Tri-Faith Plaza at Kennedy International Airport, which stood from 1966 to 1988, with individual Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic sanctuaries overlooking a lagoon. The synagogue was the most explicitly iconographic, its facade composed of a 40-foot-high evocation of the tablets of the Ten Commandments.

Today, you would need at least a Quad-Faith Plaza, if not a Faithplex, with room set aside for those alienated or troubled by the presence of religious sanctuaries in the first place.

But leaders of the two religious institutions with the biggest stake in the redevelopment of the trade center site, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Trinity Episcopal parish, insist that the churches' presence be acknowledged.

"We want to be part of the plan," said the Rev. Samuel Johnson Howard, vicar of Trinity, which includes St. Paul's Chapel. "Can St. Paul's and St. Nicholas continue to be good citizens and servants of the neighborhood? Make that possible for us."

"The designers and architects can make the memorial so bland, mundane and secular as to reduce its spiritual power," Father Howard said. "And they can certainly turn their backs on St. Paul's Chapel and any kind of restored St. Nicholas. They can isolate the site from the church and in so doing attempt to keep God out. But God is always going to be there."

Father Howard said Trinity appreciated those designs that provided open space around St. Paul's, in some cases reaching all the way to West Street.

Just such a greensward was proposed by a team including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whose overall plan has a dense cluster of towers. This would serve the transportation goal of extending Fulton Street river to river, said Roger Duffy, a partner at Skidmore.

"It so happens that St. Paul's is there and has become, de facto, the memorial piece," he said. "It had its own sacred quality and it has acquired new sacred qualities." Mr. Duffy said the greensward would offer a memorial site that could be used almost immediately.

IN the Sky Park proposal by a design collaborative known as Think, an inclined, elevated esplanade would run west from the foot of St. Paul's. Within this park, at Vesey and Church Streets, Think proposed relocating St. Nicholas.

"We thought it should be given a more prominent location," said Frederic Schwartz, one of the architects. "We do think the church is going to take on a new life and new meaning."

Under the Memorial Square proposal — notable for five fingerlike towers, one with a chapel on top, interlaced by horizontal crossbars — St. Nicholas would be relocated to a triangular parcel on Vesey Street, between West Broadway and Greenwich Street.

"It becomes part of the portal into the site," said Richard Meier, one of the architects behind Memorial Square. With St. Paul's only two blocks away, Mr. Meier said, the effect would be akin to the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, an entrance to which is framed by two 17th-century churches.

But Archbishop Demetrios, the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians in America, said his church's strong preference, buttressed by commitments from Gov. George E. Pataki, was to rebuild on its historical location at 155 Cedar Street, even though the new St. Nicholas would be more of an ecumenical pastoral center than a parish church.

"It is good," the archbishop said, "to have a symbol of the beyond and the unspoken."

Innocent, decent, moral religious people die every day. Some perhaps were on the plane that crashed in Charlotte yesterday morning. What about John the Baptist? Or the apostle Paul? or the Apostle Peter? or Stephen? Or even God's own Son Jesus Christ?

What about the brave Todd Beamer on Flight 93--an upright Christ believing, moral, decent , religious man by all accounts? Did he not die that day, leaving a wife, two children, and one unborn child?

I knew two other people, a couple, on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania. The man was on the board of directors of a Christian crisis pregnancy center. He was on the board of directors of America's Keswick, world renown for its work in the rehabilitation of alcoholics. He himself was a counselor to many alcoholic men. She was a nurse, active in many charitable endeavors.Because they got to the airport early, they were put on Flight 93. Retired,they looked forward to seeing their children and grandchildren in California. They were decent, moral, religious people. But they died that day too. And you know what they found in that field in Pa.? His Bible, that he always had with him.

My fireman friend was a decent, moral, religious man by the world's standards. God allowed Him to die that day. And he was innocent, as the blood of Christ, in whom he trusted,covered his sin. Yet he died. Yet, I believe, his lives today, in the very presence of His Lord.

Your reference to Lot( spelling it with two T's--obviously a throwback to oversaturation of media attention to the "Lott" we are familiar with!) shows the very patience of God in withholding His wrath. Only four made it out of those two cities, and only three lived to tell about it.
But the only ones who escaped were those that believed Him. Even the sons-in-law of Lot were not saved because of their unbelief.

We disagree on whether God removed His protective covering that day from our country. Could the death of 45 million innocent children due to abortion possibly be raising a stench to heaven similar to that of Sodom and Gomorrah in the days of old?

The fact is, it happened. And it was an event so huge and unusual in our personal experience that it shocked all of us to our core. Our country, unlike others, has been spared of such events in our lifetime. Yes, Falwell backtracked. I didn't agree with that--but the tremendous backlash in the hurt of the moment would make any person weak perhaps.
But time has shown that we lived a charmed existence here in the USA--and we have forgotten who the source of that plenty and abundance was.

Thank you for the kind thought about my fireman friend. He was a good man here on earth. And he is now with his Savior, Jesus Christ. I believe that, because of Christ, I will see him, and all the others who have gone before in the faith of God one glorious day.

My hope is that I'll see you there too if we don't meet on this earth.

Please bear with me--I am not good at italics in replies, so this reply will not be as clean as yours.

You can search previous threads here at FreeRepublic on the topic, or just 'google' for info on the collapse of the towers.

It didn't take that long to figure out how the towers fell. The weakest point was the two bolts that held each floor support beam at the columns. Two bolts. Once those bolts sheared,or failed in the heat, the structure became weaker and weaker. Floor beams were failing all over, and on different floors, due to the huge impact area.

The fireproofing was knocked off of the steel on impact. Jet fuel burning at up to 2000 degrees F for forty five minutes or more, on load bearing steel not designed to bear that heat unprotected(even when fireproofed steel can be protected for a time, normal building fires don't get anywhere near the heat of combustion of jet fuel--especially in the quantities experienced in the towers) Many floors were engulfed in total flame as you could see from the films, yet the weight of the floors above was transmitted down to smaller and smaller numbers of columns as the fire made floor beams fail one after the other.

The towers were designed to withstand the impact of a 707, the largest passenger aircraft around when the towers were designed over thirty five years ago. The towers were each hit by an accelerating 767/757 loaded with fuel--it was a miracle the towers didn't just collapse right away. The force was tremendous.

Floor beams were failing and distorting continually like a slow motion collapse of a house of cards, constantly distorting the structure in the impact area.

The strength of the towers was in its exterior skin, not in the interior columns, as in the case of almost every other tall building. Even with gaping holes a few floor high, structure loads were routed and rerouted continually through the exterior structure down to the ground. The exterior skin and the interior should not have held out so long in the face of such tremendous heat and the dynamically changing load conditions which put tremendous stress on the remaining structure. Watching the first tower to be hit,conventional wisdom would have said the top portion should have keeled over onto the street. But the building came straight down. That strong exterior skin acted to dierct the collapse downward instead of more outward than would be expected when a building almost a quarter of a mile high falls down.

The truth is, everyone below the impact floors did get out alive. Some may have killed by falling debris. Some may have been killed by falling bodies. But the statement isn't wrong--they got out alive.

You say secular fire drills were the reason so many got out. That couldn't be further from the truth. The width of the stairwells was narrow--barely enough to allow a single file of people to exit while allowing a single file of firemen to go up at the same time. There are pictures that were taken during the evacution that show that. Do you know how long it takes under those conditions to go down eighty flights?

And in the towers, one or more stairwells were blocked. Now that will just about destroy any ability for the evacuees to get out quickly. Time was critical.But enough time was allowed for those to get out. I've been responsible for high rise buildings--fire drills, bomb threats,emergency evacuations and the like. What happened here was nothing short of a miracle.

Last, God can do anything He wants to do. We don't always know His reasons for what occurs. But to me, watching that day, I thought 15,000 people died at least--because those buildings have about 100,000 people in them,including visitors, at mid-day. The earliness of the attacks, the traffic jams that caused many to be late that day, the first day of school where many came to work later so as not to miss that event with their children, all contirbuted to keeping the death toll lower than could be imagined at the time. Even Rudy Guiliani thought it would be more than we could bear. But perhaps God was there as well, in the saving of many, even while others were dying, like my fireman friend.

God doesn't owe us an explanation for what He does. But see my previous posts in this thread to others for some of His attributes. Was God really not there that day?

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