By John McKenna

I came to New York, Nov. 25, to represent the WCG at the National Church Advisory Council’s 2001 Conference of the American Bible Society. This year was different from all my other visits to Manhattan. Ground Zero demanded my attention. The world was one world before 9/11 and another world after 9/11. What did it mean for us?

I arrived from Los Angeles a day before the conference’s first evening session so I could spend a morning and an afternoon at Ground Zero. As I made my way down the elevator of the Mayflower Hotel, a couple told me they had returned to this hotel, where they had spent their honeymoon 42 years ago, to see Manhattan again and go to Ground Zero. They said I needed a mask. The air at Ground Zero had made them sick.

I rode the A-Train subway to Chambers Street, taking me as close to the site as I could get. I saw no one wearing masks, but I smelled an indescribable smell—the smell of burnt flesh and crushed bone.

One cannot get any closer than about a block to Ground Zero. It is fenced all around and tarped over. People come here to make prayers out of their tears and try to take pictures of it all. It is both sacred ground and a tourist attraction. It is something no one can quite put into words.

The New York Philharmonic had sent a Chamber Ensemble to One Liberty Plaza to play for the people of lower Manhattan some Mozart and Mendelssohn. There we gathered beside the site and listened to this music say that one day the smell would be gone. The music would go on.

The dust of the crashed buildings had affected 16 acres around them. Ten buildings are scheduled for demolition just as soon as the site can be cleared.

I did not want to miss lunch in the area, and I found the John Street Bar and Grill. The bartender told me business was off about 60 percent. It was a basement restaurant, and the smell was worse in the building than on the streets.

I learned that the dust penetrated into every nook and cranny of these buildings. A fresh wind, a change of temperature and a new scent of this carnage wafted through them.

It was easy to understand why people did not want to eat in them. I told my waitress and the bartender about the way Californians wished to sympathize with them. They appreciated my business very much, they said.

I then walked to the nearest fire station. A "God Bless America" banner hung over it. A big book lay open on a stand in front of the station. Thousands of people had come by to sign their condolences to the firefighters there. The doors were open, and a firefighter appeared, and soon I was in the station. They put a helmet on me and took my picture with them. When I said how Californians wished to sympathize with them and also grieved for their losses, I teared up. The lieutenant of the group had to comfort me. Heroes are like that, I suppose.

I felt proud to be a little part of the great democracy the Big Apple is in the midst of the tragedies. But it was two days before I could get the smell out of my nose. I thought I could smell that smell long after I had smelled it. I am told that our lungs do not assimilate the dust of crushed human bones and burnt human flesh. Police and firefighters who worked at Ground Zero have accumulations of dust in their lungs to prove it.

On the A-Train I thought about my past visits to Manhattan. During my student days at Princeton University, I visited the city. I also remember passing through this town after returning from Europe in the Army and how lonely it was in the harbor where so many had come to give the city a history unfathomable anywhere else in the world.

But on behalf of the Worldwide Church of God I have been coming to Manhattan for three years now. This year, it was, as they say, a different world. We met at the headquarters of the American Bible Society in downtown Manhattan, where thousands of people pass by each day to notice the light of their electric signs along Fifth Avenue flashing verses from the Bible.

The society spent more than two million dollars ministering to people around Ground Zero after 9/11. They worked tirelessly to comfort those who mourned. Yes, we met to discuss the improvements that could be made in our missions through the employment of the latest technological advances, but we were never far away from Ground Zero.

The suffering in the attack upon the Towers compelled all of us to attempt afresh to understand our world, the world as it is after 9/11. To find words for it, some new perspective needed to be found. The American Bible Society desired that we should find it. (For a full account of these talks see my memo at www.wcg.org/wn/01january/mckennamemo ).

In his presidential address, Eugene Habecker, while exhorting us to look afresh for the heart of Jesus Christ in our ministries and the personal relationships so vital for our visions, quoted Greg AIbrecht and his concern for new boundaries as well as J. Michael Feazell’s The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God and his concern for a fresh grasp of the grace of God with us now. The address can be found at www.americanbible.org

NEW YORK FIREFIGHTER—John McKenna (right) with fireman at Engine 7, Ladder 1, station near Ground Zero.

STREET SCENE—Near ground zero.

BOUNDARY FENCE—Signs and messages on fence surrounding Ground Zero. [Photos by John McKenna]