William Gipson | An incredible response

Anyone who has eaten a meal at 1920 Commons in the past four years cannot have missed the colorful display of hands in various gestures of expression.

They wave upwards from the lower level to the top, on either side of the elevator shaft in the lobby of that dining hall. "The Hands of Hope" represent the participation of over 600 members of the Penn community one year after the national horrors of Sept. 11, 2001.

Gathered on College Green, students, faculty, staff and members of West Philadelphia neighborhoods cast their hands in postures of peace, welcome and invitation. It was a communal tribute to the honorable way we at Penn had reached out to each other the year before, in the immediate moments and then long weeks and months after the morning of the terrors from the sky.

In a distinctive and singular way, however, the Hands project affirmed the caring and empathic, thoughtful and wise way student religious leaders and members of their various groups reached out across boundaries and joined hands with each other in the aftermath of Sept. 11. At the same time, they began to map out opportunities to bring greater understanding and solidarity to the entire campus by planning vigils, dialogues, panels and symposia, as well as services of remembrance for the September 11 dead.

They partnered not only with each other but with cultural student groups and academic departments. They sought out faculty with particular expertise on the many aspects of the causes and impacts of terrorism and promoted the events with zeal. I was not surprised at the swiftness and thoroughness of their responses. Nor was I surprised at how these students supported each other.

Among many Penn religious groups there is a well established attitude of mutual regard and respect for each other. This kind of attitude does not typically blossom overnight; it requires personal and organizational commitment over time. It demands a committed creativity and an intensive intentionality. Sept. 11 was a day when Penn student religious leaders rose to the challenge with extraordinary compassion and competence.

Members of the entire Penn community demonstrated over and over again after the attacks that they could step into the experiences of others and share with them in their sorrow and in their fear. There was a palpable sense that the world had been wounded by the attacks. Thus, that commonality of experience surfaced remarkable acts of empathy throughout the Penn community. Religious groups - in text study, prayer and service - held up this capacity as absolutely crucial to the quality of our campus life after 9/11. To see the hurt, pain, alienation and fear in another was to recognize something true about one's own human condition.

In addition, in the days immediately after the attacks, I observed a profound practice of the ninth commandment - "thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" - that was powerful and beautiful. The ninth commandment is what I refer to as a "good citizenship commandment"; it gives instructions in how to be a good neighbor. There were examples of this responsible citizenship practice in which non-Muslim students quickly came to the defense of their Muslim friends, hall mates and classmates whenever uninformed statements and suggestions were made that Muslims as a group were culpable for the actions of a few. Unfortunately, in widely reported first accounts of the attacks, some members of the various news media and administration spokesman repeatedly attributed the attacks to "Islamic terrorists." Terrorism and Islam were linked in ways that created extreme distress in Muslim communities and suspicion of Muslims in other communities. Muslims were cast as the "other" in this tragedy.

This was a particularly insidious false witness. For example, historically, one would be hard pressed to find a similar conflation in the American public imagination of atrocious actions as linked inextricably with a perpetrator's religious identity.

Consider the sad and murderous rampage of the Ku Klux Klan. During Reconstruction and extending well into the 1960's, some white Christians would dress in drag, and, under the cover of darkness, they would terrorize African-American communities, employing the most recognizable symbol of Christianity as their calling card for hatred. The Klan literally and figuratively established circles to exclude and deny full citizenship and humanity to the people they most hated with an irrational enmity. But for all of the murders, maimings, and destruction of property wrought by the domestic terror cells known as conclaves of the KKK, there was no blanket mischaracterization of Christians - or drag queens, for that matter - in the wake of the Klan's decades-long campaigns of terror.

The scale of the mass murders on 9/11 overwhelmed many in our country to such an extent that misinformation circulated as authoritative fact that flagrantly maligned one segment of our society. A false witness was set loose in the land. I believe that if we had been more literate about Islam and more familiar with our Muslim brothers and sisters as neighbors who, together with the rest of us, were horrified by the attacks, it would have been less likely that the false witness could have found legs.

On the morning of the attacks, I had attended a meeting of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which had begun at 7:45 a.m. Our meeting had run long, but as we completed our review of the last case on the agenda, I left with a sense of satisfaction that we had judiciously considered the concerns of each aggrieved party and exercised fairness toward alleged violators of the city's non-discrimination statutes. Since there was no television or radio in our meeting area, and because I elected to walk to Penn from downtown, I had no idea what had happened until I received a few phone calls in quick succession, beginning about 10 a.m.

When I reached campus shortly after 10 a.m., leaders from the Muslim Students Association, Hillel, Hindu Student Council, Christian Association, Newman, Campus Crusade for Christ, Intervarsity Fellowship and Sikh students were converging at the Office of the Chaplain. The sight of them - students from different religious traditions coming together - was the first significant image of that day for me. I held that image in my mind and heart for days and weeks. In fact, this image was the seed of the Hands of Hope Project.

By reaching out to each other and the rest of the Penn campus, religious groups at Penn began the hard and necessary work in the small, narrow places of human commonality that lie between each distinctive community. These spaces between our various tribes and ethnicities are the richest sites for the human possibility to create the beloved community. These interstitial spaces are the sites, I believe, of the divine mystery I ascribe to God's grace. It is also the place where mere human beings can partner with God and join hands with each other to envision and build the world that African-American poet Margaret Walker described in her poem, For My People: "a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations."

The terrors rained down from the skies over New York, Washington, D.C., and a field in western Pennsylvania. Ultimately, with outstretched and upward-reaching hands, we will build out of the midst of destruction strong, life-affirming communities of empathy, responsible citizenship and hope. Awful acts of hatred will not prevail against awesome acts of love.

William Gipson is the chaplain of the University. "A lasting impact" is a weeklong series featuring faculty and student reflections on the impact of Sept. 11

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