Have you ever been to a concert in which the band invites someone up on the stage to play with them?  It is a pretty exciting experience; musicians jamming together in a new way, making pretty spectacular music.  Then the guy gets off of the stage and they go back to playing.  He leaves, even though the jam may be awesome, because it isn’t his gig.  People came to watch the headliner, not the headliner with a novelty vocalist for 14 of somebody else’s songs.

So some conservative Christians are upset about a supposed “clergy ban” for the 9/11 Memorials.  Sorry conservative Christians, but the 9/11 memorial isn’t your gig.  It isn’t my gig, either. New York is the host.  And we don’t need to be onstage, anyway.  We’d want different music, probably different lighting.  And certainly a different focus.

I understand the impulse.  I grew up in a small town.  We had a baccalaureate service in my high school.  But it wasn’t at graduation–it was a Christian service put on by Christians.  That was our gig.

And let’s be honest.  I don’t want to play second fiddle to Mayor Bloomberg or take liturgical advice from Rudy Giuliani.  And we would, because it is their gig.  It isn’t ours.  It isn’t Christian.  It isn’t religious (or “spiritual”).  It is about community.

But here is the biggest part for me.  It is about intimate impact and relationship.  I was in Lansing in 2011 and had no close relatives or friends anywhere near the sites, the planes, or the airports.  Nobody with whom I am in a close relationship was directly affected.  We had our own experience; a different experience.  The participants need to be people who were there or dealing with the people that were there.  For a public memorial, that needs to be the focus: the people, the experience, and the community.  For religious leaders to speak as religious leaders, because of their office, there can be only one focus: GOD.  Our traditions share that bit.  And this is why we should be happy not to participate directly and publicly.  Not everybody wants the 9/11 memorial to be about GOD.  And I dare say, very few of us actually do.  And if that isn’t our focus, we have no business speaking there at all.

Related articles

• Lawrence O’Donnell: Rudy Giuliani’s Decisions Leading Up To 9/11 ‘Cost Lives’ (mediaite.com)
• 9/11 Memorial to feature StoryCorps oral histories (seattletimes.nwsource.com)