*2.5. How*

Here is the order of the service. An asterisk means when people stand together, with reasons for standing not clearly specified.


The whole service ran for roughly forty-eight minutes. The Pope, the main speaker of the service, greeted every faith tradition's representative as he made his procession to the stage. Even though a Catholic cardinal presided over the service, he seemed to well recognizes the interfaith nature of the service and constantly used "we" language. Not once did he use the "I" language in his greetings and introduction of the service. Each faith tradition representative took turns in conducting a different segment of the service. Invocational prayer was done together by the Rabbi and the Imam. All chanted prayers, including the Orthodox priest's prayer, were offered in their mother tongues, with English translations following. Yet, the Jewish chanting was not translated. American Sign Language was offered throughout the service from the left side of the floor. At the very

end of the service, there was time for the physical exchange of the sign of peace among all participants, which concluded the service with people moving around.

At the beginning, the invocational prayer co-led by the Rabbi and the Imam was striking, which hardly, if not never, happens in any typical ritual setting in their own religious communities. It presented a remarkable sign of religious solidarity toward the common good of humanity. The most frequently used single word in almost all prayers was "peace", including the Youth Choir's singing, "Let there be peace on earth." Faith representatives prayed for the peace of the world over and over again, which literally demonstrated that the world is not in peace but in chaos and in face of violence. Bell ringing was wisely used to signal the beginning and ending of each chanted prayer. As most faith traditions have their own historical use of bell ringing, belling ringing seemed to create a natural (or well-intended) feeling of universal solidarity of all humanity and all religions.

#### **3. Four End Goals of the Service Interwoven**

Inductively abstracted (that is, abstracted from the critical observation of the prayerful words and kinetic performances), the service seemed to endeavor to achieve at least four interreligious humanitarian goals.

#### *3.1. Renewed Awareness of the All-Encompassing Transcendent and Its Peace*

One of the most noticeable lessons that various prayers reminded the audience of is that the all-encompassing Transcendent is around, in, and for all humanity for their ultimate goodness. However, they call It—God, Allah, the Almighty, the Spirit, the One, etc., all we need is to recognize It, rely on It, and live up to Its moral, spiritual, and ethical expectations. The ultimate expectation of the One for humanity, the prayers recognized, is peace of all creatures, especially that of various human tribes that easily tend to be in conflicts with one another. The prayers also urged that the One is a highly reliable and trustable source of this peace, through and with which humanity can move a step toward the ultimate peace of the world gradually, however slow or painful it could be. Prayers encouraged the audience to enthusiastically and humbly participate in this common ethical journey of all humanity in their own *renewed awareness of the all-encompassing Transcendent and Its peace.*

#### *3.2. Interreligious Dialogue and Collaboration*

It was taken for granted in the service that each different faith tradition is a fine pathway to the renewed awareness of the all-encompassing Transcendent and Its peace. Further, each tradition is unique in so doing on its own full rights. The service certainly recognized each tradition's uniqueness (e.g., having them use their own original languages), and it seems that that is the reason why different traditions came together to create the service. Each unique tradition will help people of other traditions to see more clearly the various (hidden) dimensions of the One that will greatly enrich human life and eventually lead to human flourishing. Thus, compassionate collaboration among different faith traditions is not a burden nor an additional assignment, but a necessity for the thriving of each tradition. There should be, the whole service seemed to indicate, only merits in *interreligious dialogue and collaboration*, in particular toward the greater peace of the world.

#### *3.3. Raised Consciousness and Practice of Radical Hospitality for "Strangers"*

One of critical reasons why interreligious dialogue and collaboration is hard is that humans tend to see people of differences as "strangers" or even worse, potential enemies. This easily happens, especially when people come to confront those of different faith traditions. People are prone to label those of different faiths as strangers, apostates, heretics, and, worse, representations of hostile spiritual forces. As prayers during the 9/11 service realized, in that degraded consciousness of "intolerance and ignorance", religious conflicts, if not religious terrorism, are inevitable and actually have happened. Various prayers

in the service encouraged the audience of different faiths to accept and love each other as beloved brothers and sisters, not as strangers. As not a single brother or sister in the family is the same with another brother or sister genetically or psychologically (they are all different apparently), people of different faiths, the service taught, should be able to see the differences and diversities as natural and as the One-given gifts for a colorful human life.

#### *3.4. Appreciation of the (Religiously) Marginalized*

The appreciation of the (religiously) marginalized was achieved in two ways in the service. First, it was done by the sheer representational presence of minor world religions, the racially marginalized, and women on the stage with equal weight. This achievement cannot be truer in the North American context, where the Euro-centric white male clergydominant Christianity still prevails across the continent; recall that this interfaith service was held in New York City. Throughout the service, Christianity was only present as a part of the diverse religious groups represented by racial minorities and women. Second, various prayers, especially that of the Pope, lifted up the lingering pains and suffering of those who have been heavily inflicted by the significant loss of their loved ones. Their pains are psychological, financial, relational, and even spiritual, which could make their lives highly vulnerable and potentially marginalized in their communities. The prayers remembered their ongoing suffering and motivated the audience to do the same and further take care of the needs of the suffering ones.

These four goals functioned collectively as the driving force of the interfaith service or as the fourfold teleological foundation. It was not, however, that all four appeared in each and every liturgical segment of the service. Only one or two of them were likely to appear in each. But still, the service as a whole embodied all these four integrated goals, further enhancing one another. In the next section, we see how these four goals were implemented throughout the service in a more liturgical–technical sense.

#### **4. Three Humanitarian Liturgical Principles**

Liturgical principles mean design or structural principles of interfaith service utilized to achieve the aforementioned four religious humanitarian goals. This is a technical side of services, but it functions much beyond simple mechanical techniques. The principles, with significant weight, contribute to the meaning making of a service. In a metaphorical sense, these principles are the solid foundation, internal columns, or external frames of a house that firmly sustain the whole entity, while the four goals are the internal furnishings of the house. These internal and external dimensions should not be exclusive to each other and are indeed essential in the generation of a meaningful interfaith service. The 9/11 service seemed to demonstrate the application of the two dimensions very well, and it adopted the following three liturgical principles: story-sharing, agreed symbols, and de-centering.

#### *4.1. Story-Sharing*

Stephen Crites proposes the fundamental narrative structure of human experience. For him, story or narrative is of vital importance in both individual and communal lives. In particular, when a story is truly meaningful to life's situation, we humans experience it as the ontological or fundamental ground of existence. Thus, it would be safe to say that every individual or community needs a truthful and meaningful narrative that establishes that individual's or community's ontological ground, moral foundation, communal virtues, social relations, and, in particular, for religious folks, their spiritual journey in faith.

The 9/11 memorial service made a good case of Crites' proposal. *There was* one central narrative shared by all participants for their relationship building and moral imagination, namely the sacrifices and courageous services of the 9/11 victims. For this service, it was relatively painless to "find" one story sharable by people of different faiths, as the service gathering's main purpose was the commemoration of the 9/11 attack, which impacted (killed) people of many different faiths. Yet, still, the service showed its effortful consideration in telling the story in the way that the story led to robust relationship building

and communal moral imagination among the people of different faiths gathered in one place. The service interpreted the 9/11 story not only as one of ultimate tragedies and human failures, but also, more importantly, as *the sacrifice of the innocent and the triumph of courageous human spirt* exemplified, among others, by the first responders and many kind volunteers who on the tragic day offered their own lives to save those of other people—even when the served were "strangers" or people of other faiths. The 9/11 story, the service recognized, beyond its utter darkness, sheds a hopeful light on humanity's continued endeavor to live peacefully and in harmony. This one story was unmistakably shared by all the participants of the service.

#### *4.2. Agreed Symbol (Metaphor)*

In their study of metaphor *par excellence*, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson showed how metaphors or symbols function in people's ordinary lives, as well as in language and text.<sup>6</sup> Basically, they realized that without metaphors, human communication would be very limited in its meaning making and conveyance. More importantly, metaphors in communication create large space for different interpretations of the same situation, still with a certain agreed ethos underneath. This may sound quite devastating, as if "genuine" communication is impossible. At the same time, however, metaphoric or symbolic language provides a wide-open room for creative and radical perceptions and interpretations of the same situation.

The 9/11 service effectively utilized at least two symbolic metaphors in maximizing the implementation of the above four goals; the two are water and bell ringing. Water in almost every religion symbolizes (the sacredness of) life, new beginnings, and healing. With this water symbolism, the service participants gathered around one of the reflection pools in the Memorial Museum. Further, here and there during the service, prayers made references to the water image for the purpose of proclaiming healing, new beginnings, and renewed life. Bell ringing, which is also a symbolic action practiced by many religions for meditation, the invocation of a divine presence, and the making of communal spirit, had heightened presence in the service. Bell ringing happened five times interspersed among prayers of different faiths. This five-fold activity seemed to symbolize the gathered community's meditation on human suffering and hopes for better future, yearning for the divine presence that may heal brokenness, and the community's pursuit for peaceful world.

As Lakoff and Mark Johnson articulated, these symbolic actions seem to create large (spiritual or mental) space and time where and when people think of the confronted (violent) situation deeply and generate new hopes for the better future in their own wideopen imagination. What is highly plausible is the good use of these *ordinary* metaphoric symbols. Through the symbols that people can find easily and in a friendly manner in their own lives, people could realize painlessly that the renewed future—the future with no violence yet peace and harmony—is and must be really possible in this world we live in every day.

#### *4.3. De-Centering*

Along with story-sharing and agreed symbols (metaphors), de-centering should be a real key to the design of any proper interfaith service. This last, but by no means the least, principle is so important since in many cases of interfaith service, a particular faith tradition still tends to take on a superior status in terms of liturgical leadership and dictates the rest of the service. As a matter of fact, without this third principle integrated adroitly, the good intentions of the previous two could easily collapse; story-sharing and agreed symbol might be dominated by a certain tradition's ideology or bias.

Multicenteredness, specifically a liturgical space of multicenteredness, should be the phenomenological result of the practice of de-centering. In other words, each different participant faith tradition should create its own liturgical center that is paralleled in harmony with those of others. This is easily observable in the 9/11 service in terms of its basic liturgical constructive elements of when, why, where, who, what, and how, as described earlier. In particular, the use of indigenous languages for prayers by various faith traditions (along with English translations) achieved the de-centering very wisely and in a very natural way. By this simple yet significant practice, the potential western religious hegemony, which has happened historically, culturally, and linguistically at least in the North American context, lost its grip—thus became de-centered—while the multicenteredness of different faiths was generated. The antiphonal invocation co-led by the Rabbi and the Imam at the beginning was also remarkable in this de-centering regard.

It should be noted that de-centering must be executed beyond mere right proportionality among different faith traditions; that is, beyond each tradition taking a turn to do something in order to simply fill up the service space in the sense of representational tokenism. The service space should function as that of "liminality" (Victor Turner) or that of "the Third Space" in Homi Bhabha's terminology. The liminal space, Turner contends, is created by those who have arrived at a place where they find themselves *being recognized as others*, if not as strangers, yet still where they can begin to see a new possibility for life for all—themselves and all others around them (Turner 1969). The postcolonial Third Space functions almost in an identical way. In the Third Space, the dominant colonial entity loses its power yet becomes humble while the marginalized–colonized restore its indigenous identity and voice toward potential reconciliation between two previous opposing parties.<sup>7</sup> The 9/11 interfaith service seemed to provide exactly this space of liminality or the liturgical Third Space, where the new reality of the reconciled peace among (historically) contending religions was being born and also where the dominant western religious power lost its hegemony while uplifting the marginalized voices of other faiths. This phenomenological de-centering of the interfaith service is certainly beyond representational religious tokenism.

It should be noted that there can be no set of liturgical principles that are applicable and adoptable for every interfaith service universally. By principles, we can only mean liturgical design fundamentals of *significant consideration*. Each different interfaith service for a different context and occasion would have to come up with its principles for liturgical design or structure that may serve its pursued goals well. That being said, the above three principles should be applicable with ease to any interfaith service with different specifics; that is, with different stories shared and different agreed symbols along with a variety of other de-centering strategies.

#### **5. Conclusions: Toward the Interfaith Pilgrim's Activism of Peace and Reconciliation**
