Remembering 9/11 at the Pentagon

In the wee hours of this morning, after all the panels and the meetings and the receptions and the dinners were over, I went with two of my friends here at the Religion Newswriters Association convention -- Jason DeRose of National Public Radio and Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times -- to check out the nation's latest site of public mourning -- the Pentagon Memorial, which was dedicated in a ceremony nine days ago, on Sept. 11.

The site is open 24 hours a day, and I was eager to see it at night, because I had a sense that it might be more affecting with the glow and without the crowds. Washington gets a bad rap for safety, but many of its monuments are safely visited at night, and some of them, like the FDR Memorial, are spectacularly lit, and I've always found night visits strangely compelling.

At 1 a.m, the area surrounding the Pentagon was desolate. The building is surrounded by parking lots, empty at that hour, and the security booths have darkened glass, so there was no way of seeing if anyone was inside. The building itself was dark, although I could see an American flag hanging in one office along the side where terrorists flew Flight 77 into the building the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, killing all 59 passengers on the plane and 125 people who were inside the Pentagon. This morning, the only sign of life was an occasional police cruiser going by.

The memorial park is haunting. There was almost no one there at that hour -- and the main source of light were bulbs underneath each bench, so that, from afar, the field was a sea of glowing spots. As we got closer, we could see the benches themselves, each one representing someone who died. There is a strong sense of arrested motion -- the benches look like fins, they appear to be positioned on rails, and underneath each one is a pool of flowing water. Those who died in the plane are represented by benches facing the Pentagon; those who died in the Pentagon are represented by benches facing out.

It was interesting to visit the memorial before any particular public rituals -- like the rubbing of the stone at the Vietnam Memorial -- have emerged, because it left me uncertain how to interact with the park. On some benches, there were flowers. In the dirt around a seedling tree, someone had stuck a tiny American flag. But in the dimly illuminated night, the experience was almost entirely sensory. It was dark enough that it was hard to see the paths or read the victims' names, so we wandered along the gravel, hearing the sound of stones crunching underfoot, and we crouched at the benches, letting our fingers feel the names carved into stone, and listening to the flowing water. The benches are arranged in rows by the year of birth of the victims; as soon as you enter the park, you are reminded of the human loss at the core of this tragedy: the first bench, unavoidable as you enter, bears the name of a three-year-old, Dana Falkenberg.

I asked Cathleen, who writes a religion column for the Sun-Times and who is the author of the new book, "Sin Boldly," what she made of the memorial, and here's what she said:

"I thought the memorial was quite moving and beautiful. From a distance and even as I walked among them, the underlit 'benches' looked like the dorsal fin of a diving dolphin — a pod of dolphins moving together. Dolphins historically symbolize safe travel and were also used on ancient tombs — the Roman catacombs, for instance — to signify a love that remains even into the depths (of death, despair, etc.) Perhaps the most effective and emotionally evocative part of the memorial wasn't a visual, but a sound: water flowing. Beneath each of the 'benches' is an underlit pool of water that seems to flow from one marker to the next. I took it to mean that the souls of those lost at the Pentagon on 9/11 continue on in the hereafter, and that we are still connected to them, just as they were connected to one another on that September morning 7 years ago. It also evoked for me Archbishop Tutu's life motto, 'ubuntu', a Bantu word that means 'I am because we are.' We're all connected, in life and even in death."

Jason is an editor of NPR's "Day to Day.'' Here's how he reflected on our visit to the Pentagon Memorial.

"It's beautiful. Rather than some sort of monument, what's at the Pentagon is a memorial in the truest sense. It reminds me of the scar of the Vietnam memorial. The hope of John F. Kennedy's eternal flame. And the living trees along the Avenues of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. The Pentagon 9-11 memorial forces visitors to walk among the rows of benches, to read the names of the killed, to hear the crunch of pebble under feet and the rush of water and to smell the nearby maple trees. It is intimate, inviting you sit alone on one of those cantilevered benches and ask yourself what September 11th means. It's a work of art open to interpretation. It doesn't say 'Feel this. Think this. Believe this.' And that's what is should be -- a memorial to a memory still taking place and the meaning of which we still don't know."

(Photo by AP.)