Remembering Those Lost, 'Walking in the Light of God'

Twelve years ago, the members of the choir were just little kids, unlikely to remember much about that terrible day when the crippled Twin Towers burned and crumbled, devastating so many lives.

Those kids now have grown into young men and women. Now they were singing to people who do remember the horrendous losses of Sept. 11, 2001. In a week filled with the spirit of forgiveness, the Plainview JFK choir offered a kind of absolution Wednesday.

"We are walking, we are walking," they sang to a harmonic counterpoint, chanted in Swahili. "We are walking in the light of God."

Those gathered at the interfaith service at Plainview's Good Shepherd Lutheran Church brushed away tears. The voices and the messages in the music made something clear: It was left up to us not merely to remember, but be inspired by them to go forward with our own lives.

"This is a very solemn day," the Rev. Eric Olsen told the congregation, which included Plainview firefighters, area clergy members and more than 100 community members. "Some of us had to bury our friends."

Good Shepherd's pastor was one of them. Olsen, a Nassau County fire chaplain, had spent the morning Wedneday at a memorial service in Staten Island. He lost a dear friend who was a member of the F.D.N.Y.'s Rescue 5. Eleven members of that elite crew are among the 343 New York City firefighters who died following the terrorist attacks.

Plainview Fire Captain Greg Kies read the firefighter's version of the 23rd Psalm:

"The Lord is my chief...He leads me to still the fires raging around me...He anoints my soul with courage in the presence of my enemy fire."

Kies followed by reading the names of of Nassau County's volunteer firefighters who answered their final alarm that day. After each name was read, a Plainview firefighter sounded a single toll of a bell.

At the end, Capt. Kies added the name of Danny Levy, the former Plainview captain who volunteered to work for weeks at Ground Zero. Levy died of 9/11 related illness earlier this year.

Brad Hyman rose with his guitar. Temple Chaverim's cantor performed a song called "The Goalie," composer Chuck E. Costa's ballad about a fireman he grew up with on Staten Island.

"Indian summer, two-thousand one; he been fighting fires on Staten Island like his dad had done," the cantor sang. "...He knew how to defend, right up to the end..."

Candles were lit, one congregant passing the light to another, then another. A litany of prayers were said. Among them, this: "...We light a candle, in penitence, recognizing that we have not done enough to address the sources of anger, hate, dehumanization, rage and indignation that lead to acts of violence."

It was a plea for absolution: The young people had sung about it. The congregation, with those candles, held the light in their hands.