Tuesday, August 10, 2010

To Build or Not to Build?

Is the proposed Ground Zero mosque something like the convent at Auschwitz?

This question occurred to us the other day, and has been rattling about in our heads despite the lack of any clear answer. (Foxman says yes, Zakaria says no.) Let us begin by mentioning that the subject is personal for us. Father Anonymous used to live quite near the Word Trade Center, so near that his morning jog took him past the towers. He knew people who were in the buildings when they were attacked in 1993 and 2001. Some of those people died. All were emotionally scarred.

So the site of the disaster holds a special emotional power in Fr. A.'s life. To this day, when out-of-towners announce their intention to visit the site, he gives them a cool response, and suggests a trip to Ellis Island instead. Or the Statue of Liberty. Or Staten Freaking Island. If they insist, he takes them to them to the Chambers Street subway stop, points them south, and then goes shopping at the Fountain Pen Hospital on Warren Street. Great little shop, if you like pens. Plus it wasn't the site of a mass murder.

That said, is the mosque like the convent? Our current thinking is "a little yes, a lot of no."

The Carmelite convent, which existed from 1984 to 1993, was always and explicitly about religion and national identity. Poles thought of Auschwitz as a site of Polish suffering, and wanted to cleanse it, with with Pope John Paul II's 1979 Mass, and then with a permanent community of prayer. Jews thought of it as a site of Jewish suffering, and wanted to keep it free of religious symbolism (especially symbols of the majority church which had been instrumental in that suffering). Between these two communities lay vast misunderstanding, some of it cultural, some bluntly ideological. For years, Jews seem not to have known that Polish Gentiles also died in the camp. More astonishingly, many Poles were never told that the vast majority of the dead were Jews.

The proposed Cordoba House is something quite different. Far from being a place set aside for perpetual prayer, it is conceived as a community center, modeled on the 92nd St Y, which will include a prayer room among its other facilities. You know: hit the pool, buy a book, catch a lecture. Then say your prayers. It isn't really a mosque at all, any more than a hospital with a chapel is therefore a church. And although the project's publicity is all about mutual understanding, there is no explicit notion of cleansing, nor -- explicitly -- any connection to 9/11.

On the other hand, if the story were all about what is explicit, there would be no controversy. In fact, the story is all about what is not said. It's about the subtext, the things that nobody would ever say because they are not quite rational, but which hide just beneath the surface of the rational remarks. This is the world of emotion and symbol, both more powerful than reason can ever hope to be. In the case of the convent, one side said "You -- Gentiles, Catholics, Poles -- did this to us. Leave us alone to grieve." The other side said, "We suffered too, and this is how we grieve."

In the case of the community center, the first statement is actually quite similar: " You did this to us. Go away." But the second statement, coming from American Muslims, is a little different. It is less "We suffered too," although of course there were plenty of Muslim victims, and rather more, "We have a place in this society. Your freedoms, including freedom of religion, belong to us as well." The problem, of course, is that although this final statement may be made at the level of emotion, it can only be accepted at the level of rationality. It requires a commitment to the rational Enlightenment ideals which underpin American laws, which immediately removes the non-Muslim supporters of the initiative from the realm of subtext to that of text, and (paradoxically) makes them less immediately intelligible to the other sides.

At the rational level, of course, virtually nobody thinks that the little old nuns were Nazi sympathizers, or that liberal Muslims in America are Al Qaeda sleeper agents. Thinking people know better, at least with the part of their brain that actually does think. But our brains have other parts as well.

A related fact is that Cordoba House, despite the publicity, will not be built at the site of the Word Trade Center. It will be two blocks away, on a side street called Park Place. (It might as well be called the City Hall Mosque, or the Fountain Pen Hospital Mosque.) At the rational level, then, this is not at all what it is at the symbolic level. Rationally, it is a community center a couple of blocks away; only symbolically is it a "mosque at Ground Zero."

So -- are they alike? There is, obviously, a structural parallel between two institutions with a religious perspective, both placed in near proximity to the sites of terrible crimes against humanity in which religion played a significant role. At the level of symbolism, there is another parallel, since in both cases one side seeks to respect the dead, and yet the other side feels disrespected if not actually threatened.

Yet in other ways they are not the same at all. A community center is not a convent; two blocks away is not the very site; Eastern Europe is not the United States. Call us nominalists if you like (since we are); we do say that the parallels are artificial constructs, and only the thing itself is real. Meaning that each case is inevitably distinct.

In any case, whether we are confident of a parallel or not, we have no doubt about the right course of action. The Foxman/Zakaria correspondence, linked above, pits "the feelings of the families" against "freedom of religion," and while we value both, we do not value them equally. Or, to put it in our own way, we are moved by symbolism and emotion, but we hope that when called to act, we will do so on the basis of reason.

4 comments:

LiturgyGeek said...

Well said.

Fr. James of the Tonsure said...

My reaction is lest tempered than yours. While the horror of the day is certainly still etched in my mind, the memory of the walls in Penn Station filled with pictures of the "missing" still move me. I have little patience for the objectors to the center. I would have the same feeling if it were a full-fledged mosque.

A memorial is being built a ground zero (a term I despise as a referent). To my mind it is more than sufficient to the purpose. There were of course those who held that the entire area should be made a memorial, and that the buildings not replaced. Cooler, though perhaps mammon inspired, heads ruled.

The designs for the memorial have merit and I am sure will be moving when completed. At the same time, they will be a bit morbid, the "footprints" of the buildings being preserved like some chalk outline of a slain body on the sidewalk.

One of the worst disaters in NY history was the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. You have to look hard to find the marker for it. Is there a marker for the dead of the civil war draft riots? I fear our fixation with memorials to the dead betokens an erosion in the hope of the resurrection, as if the only eternal life these will have will be their names cast in bronze.

In the end, the question needed to be asked of the objectors to the center is how far away is enough? How much of Manhattan do they claim as sacred space? Does it extend to the shores of New Jersey and Brooklyn? Could the center be build there?

Mourners weep for your dead. Remember them for who they were not how they died.


I often fear that the real purpose for some in the 9-11 memorials is not merely to remember the innocent and the injustice of it all, but to keep and even stoke the fires of vengance. Think of the anger and heat in the protests about the Islamic center and tell me I am wrong.

Few if any of those who did this will be brought to justice. Those who did this thing died in the act. Some who planned it have been caught, many killed. But given the enormity of the crime there is no punishment that would ever be sufficient.

We pray for the dead to rest in peace; this should be our prayer for the surviors and the living as well. A house of prayer near where all this took place is a good start.

Anonymous said...

FAR TOO MANY EQUATE FUNDAMENTALISTS WITH THE ORIGINAL BODY. PEOPLE SEE MORMONS AS WARREN JEFTS, MUSLIMS AS OSAMA BIN LADEN AND IT GOES ON AND ON. MANY SWEAR OBAMA WAS NOT BORN IN THE US, BUT PERHAPS THEY ARE JUST NOT AWARE THAT HAWAII IS A STATE. THERE IS NO END TO MISPLACING ALMOST EVERYTHING.

Father Anonymous said...

Fundamentalism has nothing to do with it. Mormon beliefs, including especially Mormon scriptures, are incompatible with traditional Christianity.

That's not meant as a dig, just a straightforward theological assessment. It doesn't make them bad, any more than Muslims or Jews are bad. The only problem is that, unlike Muslims or Jews, they think of themselves (and present themselves to the world) as Christians. I know it hurts Mormon feelings, but to say otherwise is simply dishonest.