Rev. Danny Fisher

Thanks to the wonders of Netflix, I finally got around to seeing the episode of P.B.S.’s Frontline entitled “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero”.

While it is another excellent episode of a great television program, the title is a bit of a misnomer: “God and Evil at Ground Zero” might be a more precise title. “Faith” here really refers to the Abrahamic traditions (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review‘s founding editor Helen Tworkov appears at one point, but the Buddhist religions are not addressed in the film at all), and “doubt,” for the most part, to the existence of God (although there is also some discussion of doubts about the basic goodness of human beings). While it may not offer the most robust portrait of America’s religious pluralism, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” nonetheless stands with Frontline‘s “Muslims” as an extremely powerful and edifying two hours. I would recommend it, especially to those interested in and doing chaplaincy.

There were a number of interviewees whose presences and stories I was greatly moved by. There is Conservative Rabbi Irwin Kula, who every morning sings transcripts of calls between those killed on 9/11 and their loved ones. There is Rev. Joseph Griesedieck, an Episcopalian, whose complete vulnerability breaks your heart as he talks about the feelings of cynicism and loneliness that he would like to have less of. There is Rev. David Benke, a Lutheran, who tells about his experience of intolerance after preaching at the interfaith Memorial Service at Yankee Stadium that occurred not long after the attacks: a group of angry Lutherans, some of them fellow clergypersons, petitioned to have him removed from his station as a minister after he shared the same pulpit as those from other faith traditions. There is Orthodox Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, who talks about understanding how it is easy to “get drunk on God…and a messianic vision of how the world could be” because “[he] did it” as a young man living in Hebron. And then there are all those who lost family members on that horrible day…

The film ends with a reading from a devasting and breathtakingly beautiful poem by Brian Doyle entitled “Leap”. A few pieces of the poem in particular will stay with me for a long time, I think:

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

[...]

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe…against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn’t even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon…

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Stuart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold onto that.