My Yearly 9-11 Practice
The answering machine messages left by those in the Twin Towers chanted as Psalms
Each year on 9-11 I commemorate the sorrow of that day by listening to this recording of Rabbi Irwin Kula chanting the messages left for loved ones by those who were in the Twin Towers.
I’ve rarely encountered anything as raw, devastating, and beautiful. I usually don’t make it through the whole thing.
The Grief Monster
The death of a loved one can cause us to sideline all the shit we usually focus on that doesn’t really matter in any spiritually meaningful way - things like petty resentments, snotty opinions, making sure our preferences are always met, vanity, grudges etc.
I sometimes wonder if Mary the mother of our Lord and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” had any resentment between them. And I wonder if, in the moment of Jesus’ death, those resentments melted away in the heat of their shared grief and then disappeared forever when Jesus said, “here is your mother, here is your son”.
Grief is a monster. But it is a monster that gives us to one another.
As always, be gentle with yourselves and hold your loved ones close. - Nadia
Thank you for sharing this.
Every year I go back to this passage from the late Brian Doyle's essay "Leap":
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, naked love. It's the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It's everything we're capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It's what makes me believe that we're not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe, against evil evidence hourly, that love is why we are here.
I love this poem by Joey Garcia, former advice columnist for our weekly free newspaper which sadly has gone online now. She also was a theology teacher at a local Catholic high school that one of my daughters attended for a while.
https://www.capradio.org/news/insight/2016/09/09/insight-090916b/
This is intensely meaningful for me; in late July 2015, we distributing the ashes of my dear mother off the central coast of California early one morning; the stiff onshore breeze blew those ashes right back at us and we couldn't help but breathe them in.
"Call it communion"....I'll take my holy communion in any way it is offered...