The steel girder cross can be found kitty-corner from the World Trade Center site in New York City. Though it did once sit on the site, it is no longer there. It has been moved away from the tourist centre which now surrounds what was once the heart of commerce, trade and, most importantly, human interaction.
According to its legend, this steel girder cross was found in the wreckage of the south tower a few weeks after the attack. Note the construction sheeting draped over it as if a shroud. There is a now well-known photograph of this crossed girder crowned with an American flag, with firemen and other heroes of the terrorist-carnage praying below.
I say legend because it has become something of a myth — a small permutation of the events of September 11, 2001. It apparently came from the wreckage exactly as now seen and was blessed immediately by a Franciscan upon request of the workers. The girder became a symbol of something in the aftermath of the trauma. The website Operation Save America puts it this way:
“Men prayed there. They looked for answers to the uncertainties and tragedies of life. They took account of their own lives. They looked to the One who hung on a cross so many years ago, and found refuge in the steadfast arms of Jesus. He was the One who made sense out of an Old Rugged Cross. Perhaps, He could make sense out of this one.”
The cross is a resilient image; easily reproduced and adapted. It is also a perfect metaphor that subsumes myriad interpretations: it is Good Friday, and it is Easter; it is death and it is salvation; in His death on the cross is our birth. In the United States, it has another dimension; more from Operation Save America:
“Yes, this cross, more than anything else, symbolizes both God's call and His love for America. He is calling us to repent (turn back to Him).”
Let me understand: God so loved America that he had 3,000 of its innocents murdered by a handful of fanatics, which led to further carnage and death? I don't think so; I find it un-Christ-like, but I recognize it as a persistent opinion that knows no end.
Peggy Noonan, the conservative commentator for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a month after the attack, in the week the steel girder cross was found, that both God and manly-men were returning to a city whose vanities till the attacks were marked by the over-educated and the effete, like lawyers, editors and orthodontists.
And, perhaps because of these enforced interpretations, the cross can no longer be found on the WTC grounds. It has been moved away from the official site, to the side of a non-descript church. The site itself is now adorned by photographs and slogans which would not be out of place at any social services office. The cross has no place in the now-secular environment.
Of course, I am only guessing that is why it was moved. A chain-link fence and a viewing deck surround the WTC site — a massive hole filled with rubble and trucks, where the bones of victims are still being found. I was there recently at one in the afternoon and again at one in the morning, and it was steady with locals and tourists, taking photographs as they would at any other tourist site; as they might well have when the towers were there.
But the cross is not there and its absence makes me think of Christmas. This is the one season every year when we conflate our secular lives with our religious ones. And a month from now, our religious existence will be moved, once more, to the side. But don't get me wrong: I'm not accusing you, or me, of hypocrisy. In the absence of Christendom — which only the institutional church seems to believe still exists — this is the way we must survive.
We are still Christians as we traverse the world, outside the care of the church, and sometimes we forget that. We wait for the sanctioned moment — trauma, tragedy or tradition — to express ourselves. We think we are alone in secularism. But we're not. On the two occasions I walked the WTC tourist site, I saw us — Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, others — praying.
Christendom is dead; long live Christ.
