Our Lady of the Lights

 He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick. (Matthew 12:20a)

Sobering memories dampen the spirit today, September 11, memories and faces.

There was the mother I met on her deck in Brooklyn a few days after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Looking at the ash on the deck rail, she refused to disturb the dust, wondering aloud if it was her daughter.

I remember a parochial school teacher, her voice breaking as she described standing for hours at the school door, holding her student, waiting for a father who never showed up.

But more than these is the indelible image of a young woman at Union Square in lower Manhattan. She kept watch over thousands of candles as hundreds sat around her in stunned silence, staying long into the wee hours.

The memorial grew larger every night, and every night she was there when I sat among the silent and watched, transfixed by the beauty of her soul and the grieving love of those who held each other in the darkness.  

Night breezes would extinguish a few candles from time to time, and she would crawl among them, gently stretching and twisting lest she topple one of the fragile flames as she relit a smoldering wick.

She never lifted her eyes, not once that I could see. She kept watch over the lights as though they were her children, tenderly caring for each one through the night.

I never learned her name. She spoke to no one, and I didn’t dare interrupt her vigil. It would have been sacrilege to distract her from a work so holy.

When I wrote my story I called her Our Lady of the Lights, the Madonna of Manhattan.

Sitting there, we were all her children, the light of her love holding us all together, warming us in the night.

I wonder where she is today. I wonder if she ever really knew the beauty of what she did ... or how grateful at least one of us is 20 years later.

But I doubt I’m the only one.

David L. Miller