In The Details

My Grandfather, whom the family affectionately refers to as “Poppa Joe”, is a storyteller.  And indeed, he’s lived a varied and colorful life full of stories worth telling:  tales from his time working for the New York Parks Department, anecdotes about “Tina”, the Asian elephant he cared for at the Central Park Zoo, and the classic story of how he picked my Grandmother up at the beach by asking her to watch his wallet while he went for a swim.  I cherish these family stories, and love being transported to a different time and place through Poppa Joe’s memories. 

But recently Poppa Joe told me a story that I had never heard before, and it was not a happy one: what he experienced on September 11th, 2001. 

Working at that time as a park ranger at Owl’s Head Park in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Poppa Joe said he was on his way to work when he noticed cars stopping on the road, and people getting out and screaming.  He pulled over and someone told him that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and the city was under attack.  He described people crying and panicking in the streets, gathering at the pier near the park to look out across the river at the tragedy unfolding in Manhattan.  The air was thick with smoke and ash, and Poppa Joe said he remembered thousands of sheets of singed printer paper—the old-fashioned kind, with perforated strips on the sides—falling from the sky and landing all over the park; printer paper that had been blown across the river as the offices in the twin towers burst into flame, and collapsed. 

My family had already moved to Oregon by 2001, but I, like most Americans, have heard many stories of September 11th.  I’ve seen documentaries, watched news footage, and read magazine articles.  Yet in all the reports of that terrible day, I had never heard of the burning printer paper that rained down in Brooklyn.  And for some reason, that detail in Poppa Joe’s story made September 11th more real to me than anything I’d ever read or seen before.  It was so specific, a poignant image that could only be described by someone who was actually there, someone who saw the wreckage of those annihilated offices floating through the sky, someone whose job it was to clean up thousands of pieces of burnt and blackened printer paper from the grounds of Owl’s Head Park. 

Poppa Joe’s unique recollection of September 11th highlights the value of first-person accounts, reflecting the richness of what can be shared only by someone who has personally experienced a particular event in time.  And because of this, I have found myself wondering more deeply about those in history who actually co-existed alongside Jesus of Nazareth.  What worthy stories there must be from people who met Jesus face-to-face, who heard him speak and teach, or were healed by his hands, or who watched him carry his cross to Golgotha; stories we will never hear, not because they were unimportant or insignificant, but simply because those details, impressions, and memories were unrecorded and lost in time.  The disciple John alludes to this at the end of his Gospel, where he concedes that the books of the Bible could not possibly impart to us all that is worth knowing about Jesus: 

But there are also many other things which Jesus did, which, if they were written in detail, I expect that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25.)

The scriptures reveal much to us about who Jesus was through the things he said and did, but they don’t tell us everything; how could they?  There are inevitably details missing in the Gospel accounts, just as the detail of the singed printer paper that Poppa Joe saw was missing from all the reports I’d read of September 11th.  The burnt paper was not an “important” detail, not one that changes the historic impact of that day, but it was vivid in the horror of what it symbolized, and I wonder what details were left out of the Gospels that could have offered a similar vividness to our understanding of Jesus.      

The “gaps” in the Gospel narrative suggest to me that we are invited to bring a well-trained imagination to our reading of the holy scriptures.  What I mean by a “well-trained” imagination is one that has first done the hard work of friendship by diligently getting to know who Jesus was; then can we apply what we know to be true of him to our imagining of what might be true, bringer greater richness and intimacy to the accounts of his life.  We might try to imagine what he smelled like, or how his face looked when he healed someone, or what made him laugh.  Our creative imagining of such details is not with the intent to make things up, or skew a story according to our preference, but so that we ourselves become more deeply invested in bringing the story to life.  In other words, our imagination has the capacity to make the Gospels more real to us, not less. 

The Gospel writers were storytellers, just like my grandfather.  And perhaps someday in another realm I’ll have the chance to sit down with them for a delicious Italian meal (my favorite way to listen to Poppa Joe’s stories) and they’ll tell me all the details they can remember about their friend, Jesus. 

Until then, I’ll just have to imagine it.