This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 12, 2011 - My memories of Sept. 11, 2001, are blunted by circumstance. I had a doctor's appointment early that morning and went directly from the doctor's office to visit my mother, who was then living in a nursing home. It was there I found out something horrendous had happened. As that registered, the cell phone rang. The editor's secretary was on the line telling me to get into the office, without delay.
From that minute on, many reporters and I spent the day trying to sort through the details, the better to construct a sturdy picture of what had transpired. Our attention was directed not to a television set but on interviews and research. At the time I was architecture critic of the newspaper, and the question I wanted to answer for myself and the paper's readers was what happened to make the World Trade Center towers collapse vertically, as if a behemothic plunger had forced the floors together to fall in a massive, mangled, murderous heap.
There was that story to do, and then came news of another story we'd been following, the controversial design proposal to erect gates at some of the principal entrances to Forest Park. In the darkening aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the crash-landing of the fourth airplane in rural Pennsylvania, the rather heated discussions about the gates seemed a tempest in a teapot. Perspectives shifted all over the place that day, and what seemed momentous on Sunday night was rendered inconsequential on Monday, the day we have come to call simply nine eleven.
I helped to chase other stories and some of them were gatherings of string. A team of us was sent to check out what was going on in tall buildings downtown, and I began to put together information on parts of the World Trade Center that had been fabricated here. I quickly realized the architect of the towers was Minoru Yamasaki, who had been a principal designer of the terminal building at Lambert Field and of Pruitt-Igoe. Large towers of that public housing project were leveled, too, on purpose, by explosions.
The point of all this is that a sharp remembrance of where one was at the moment of cataclysm does not exist in the baggage car of my memory. Rather, I think that void -- the 9/11/2001 crash of emotional cymbals -- will be filled by the commemorative St. Louis Interfaith Memorial Concert performed Sunday at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The sponsor was the Interfaith Partnership organization, but credit for bringing off the concert is given to Batya Abramson-Goldstein, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, and to Timothy O'Leary, general director of Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
Abramson-Goldstein and O'Leary were also prime movers in organizing discussions conducted around Opera Theatre's performances of John Adams's "The Death of Klinghoffer." The opera is a wound-opening examination of the highjacking of the cruise ship "Achille Lauro" by terrorists. In several ways -- senselessness, the loss of innocent life, the deep and divisive cultural misunderstandings, explosive anger, the desire for revenge -- Klinghoffer's death was a prefiguring of 9/11.
Admission to the Sheldon concert on Sunday was free and the house was bursting not only with audience members but also a near-palpable atmosphere of emotion. Each person there, I imagine, had his and her own memories and impressions of the assault and the tragedies. Most came not so much for entertainment but in pursuit of some sense of order in a world that seems increasingly chaotic. Former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth -- who in addition to having been a senator is also and forever a priest of the Episcopal Church -- took note eloquently of our coming together as a people, of shedding differences and engaging in a common pursuit of equilibrium and of a measure of redemption.
In the hour or so that spread so gloriously before us at the Sheldon we heard music made by representatives of various governmental and religious and artistic organizations.
As the music spilled forth from the stage into the resonance of the Sheldon, I realized that my defining memory would be not the doomsday of 9/11/2001, but of the mitigating minutes passed at the Sheldon Concert Hall.
And specifically what was sculptured in my memory was neither the goose-bumpy occasions during the concert nor the emotional finale, where soprano Christine Brewer and St. Louis County Police detective and tenor Patrick Nigh led the audience and all the other ensembles and individuals in singing perhaps the most beautiful "America" anyone ever has heard. Rather it was a group of women and children representing the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis.
The women of the group chanted a poem-prayer, "Lab pe aati hai dua banke tamanna meri," written by the Pakistani philosopher poet Sir Mohammed Iqbar and set to music by the Indian composer Jagjit Singh.
Here is its English translation.
My longings come to my lips as my prayers,
O God, make my life like the light of candle.
May my efforts remove the darkness in this world
Everywhere my works may lead to radiance.
May my motherland attain magnificence due to my dedication
As the garden attains magnificence through flowers.
O, Lord make my life a devoted moth
O, Lord may I be committed toward candle of knowledge.
May being supportive of the poor be the aim of my life.
O God protect me from evil ways
Show me the path leading to the moral ways.
As the women sang, the stairsteps of children, holding lighted candles, formed a rank straight and still before the singers, giving visual life to the words of Iqbar's poetry.
Their faces seemed at once innocent and knowing, and registered in my mind as expressing that "peace which transcends all our powers of thought." For that suggestion alone, a message born in Islam is burned by light and sound into this Episcopalian-American psyche, and I feel confident it will rest there indelibly, as my etched-in-stone 9/11 memory.