I was back up in Tulsa, in fact clear up at Claremore for a Sunday celebration of my oldest daughter's 25th wedding anniversary. Our family plus her husband Tony's, really made a houseful at my youngest daughter Kathy's home there. Then on Memorial Day I attended the evening's opening worship of our state United Methodist Conference at Boston Ave UM church. But on the Turner Turnpike going up Sunday I told an attendant collecting the $3.50 fee that it had been a nice trip thus far. She said "Well it's good you were not on I-44", then described the disaster to me that morning near Webbers Falls where that barge had hit the Interstate's bridge. She said that deaths could run as many as twenty; and the report we get each day has been rising toward that number(thirteen as of Tues.). Because of the early hour traffic wasn't nearly up to the usual, thank the Lord. But the sudden tragedy was a shock to our whole state and even the nation. Right on the eve of our day to remember loved ones now laid in cemeteries across the land, even more of the living were taken "in a moment; in the twinkling of an eye." This column suggested last year that too much needed real estate was being taken away for burial purposes and admitted that this writer carries a donor's card for his corpse to be used in research instead of burial: though that would require approval by my wife and kids. Yet this year I must admit that trips to the grave yard do serve in reminding us how soon life can end. And remembering our dead is also a uniquely human venture. No other species, so far as I've learned, has this hunger for eternity. Some apes grieve over their deceased. But they don't put them in coffins for burial. In a tiny way, even the grave stones we put up are depicting an effort to defy mortality, just as the ancient pyramids still try to do for Egypt's mighty pharaohs of yore. We've learned on "Discovery" how those three greatest ones(of Geeza, on the east side of today's Cairo) were made to line up the same way as Orion's belt on that star constellation, "the hunter." And the small inside shafts stretching up from each pyramid's burial chamber, that Egyptian builders had cut through all those huge stones, are focused on Orion (known as "Isis" (god of the afterlife) thousands of years ago. Thus the royal spirit would be launched out from the upper end of the shaft atop the pyramid into the heavens to be with Orion forever; [proto-type of space launch perhaps? Just heard that a blue sea has been found at the south pole of Mars indicating life likely once there] Sad to say, the worship focus of those ancients was only some handiwork of creation's unknown true and living FATHER/GOD, Who spoke all things into existence with His vocabulary of event as the Bible shows; and then finally came down into this universe (earth in Scripture is the physical creation, not just this planet) as a human being, second Peson of the Godhead. He lived the divinely correct life that alone could straighten out our spiritually twisted and crooked hell bound humanity, then offered it up in behalf of all who will accept His glorious gift and thereby receive forgiveness of their sins. Such allows their spirits to go directly to Him at death and remain until He finally comes back bringing them all to earth again (along with His mighty host angels) for the final day of resurrection. That's what our cemeteries are telling us by having graves that face to the east in order to behold Him coming in clouds of glory. And Scripture teaches that some generation will be still alive: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." That change is our glorification, when this perishing flesh and blood becomes immortal to inhabit the New Jerusalem that is "coming down from GOD out of heaven" (Rev.21.1). This hope is based on real facts, not mere myth as in Egypt's "book of the dead" with it's myriad of magic rituals. Jesus Christ actually lived, died and was raised up to ascend into heaven. It's historically documented event instead of something made up in man's imagination. That's why we can be certain that He will also return to establish His kingdom on earth as it is in heaven (for a millennium), then turn everything over to His transcendent Father/GOD completing the transition from time to eternity [like infinity, our minds can't reach there; only our hearts can commune with the ONE inhabiting that region].
Wednesday's ceremony at Ground Zero in NYC was made more awesome by the absence of any talk. Not even the commentators were heard on TV coverage as those many workers silently withdrew from the scene of their labors for the past nine months. All I could hear was an occasional military sounding shout of the marching director who guided them slowly up that huge ramp. Finally, there was the simultaneous sounding of those bugles playing taps that gave a magnificent sense of regal splendor to the conclusion of that enormous clean up. It made me think of the words in Revelation: "And there was silence in heaven for the space of half an hour." Who would ever before have considered NYC as heaven? Yet the heroism, nobility and gallant accomplishment that was being marked as now complete made the comparison seem quite appropriate to me, even though that site failed to yield the remains of over a thousand presumed to be in the dust there. How graphically it displays the words after the fall of man in Genesis where the Creator informs Adam (mankind) of his mortality, "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return." Such was the curse laid upon our fallen race, that we alone of all living creatures must know of our limited destiny and therefore suffer from the fear of it. How much happier we could have lived had we never been told. It could have been said of Adam as it was of the distracted wedding guest in Coleridge's "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," that a sadder and a wiser man he rose the morrow morn. Now the question is being considered about how to use those prominent 16 acres so utterly flattened on Manhatten Island. I would suggest that since they've become sacred ground to all Americans, we just leave them empty. Man always wants to build some sort of monument which only covers up the actual scene of reality. Just visit the holy land and see how that's been done over and over. Well I say that "ground zero" is holy land and we should leave it that way. We can learn to take off our shoes when we go there just as the Muslims do to enter a mosque. We need not prostrate ourselves when we go there, but it would be a holy experience for any who are so inclined. Falling down on one's face is a quite Biblical way of seeking the LORD. Though we don't usually do so in public, Americans could have one spot were it would be appropriate for all faiths: Muslims, Christians, Jews, or whatever. Remembering 9/11 would thus be America's place of new beginning as the past nine months has led to a re-birth. Zero was the contribution Arabic numbering gave to the world, just at the WTC represented that failed fusion of science and religion that Jews and Christians had given called "modernisn." So to visibly and dramatically mark this post-modern era, let's just let GROUND ZERO stay that way.
joseph hazlitt "ANGELFIRE" at