When asked to recount a perfect night in New York, I'd have no reservations listing last Friday evening among their ranks, if only for the atypical camaraderie of God and the Heavens.
It started with a hasty reading of an e-mail, the invite from the Progressive Muslim Meet-up Group, whose events I've attended off and on for the last eight months. With typical absent-mindedness, I failed to note both the name of the venue and the significance of its location when I Googled the address, impressed only by the fact that I could walk there from my office on Wall Street. My cluelessness held me all across Lower Manhattan, and even to the entrance of the building in question, where a lone police officer stood with his hands on a barricade. It wasn't until I'd gone inside, shed my shoes at the rack, taken a seat on the rug of the prayer hall, and listened to the coordinator for the space introduce himself to the nine or ten people present that I realized I was sitting in the Ground Zero Mosque.
"Ground Zero Mosque," the derogatory label for the Park 51 Community Center, is a phrase I've never uttered with anything shy of the utmost sarcasm, but at no point had it incurred quite such disgust from me as it did right then.
There we were, a handful of people, most of us students, all of us exhausted from a hard week of work, sitting on a rug in an empty white room quietly discussing peace. A more unassuming focal point for a nation's hatred I can't possibly imagine.
The theme of the evening was intrafaith healing.
Sunnis and Shi'ites swapped stories of what it was like to watch popular rhetoric breathe violence into the very distinctions we pondered in harmony. Good-natured teasing ("you Shias are so obsessed with history") seemed a universe apart from the bloodbaths of Baghdad or Bahrain. Two young women, a Sunni Malaysian and a Shi'ite Pakistani, both impassioned, both graced with good humor, sat knee to knee, laughing at the commonality of their experience, while at the same time professing pride at their own distinct paths, and all this made possible by Park 51, a so-called factory of terror.
I stayed until 9PM, rounding out my experience with God and humanity, then took the C-train to Brooklyn Bridge Park for an accompanying dash of the Universe.
In conjunction with the World Science Festival, amateur and professional astronomers had gathered by the dozens in the cool grasses of the East River embankment, telescopes of all dimensions aimed at the sky. While the lights of Manhattan glowed in the distance, and the tug-boats and barges slid past in eerie proximity, three world-class astronomers addressed a rapt audience on the wonders of the cosmos.
Charles Liu, a professor of astrophysics; Carter Emmart, a visual artisan for New York's Hayden Planetarium, and Timothy Ferris, a prolific author and producer of no less a phonograph than the one contained in the Voyager spacecraft . . . all of the panelists were equally guilty at exacerbating my life-long vulnerability to awe and wonder - of the Earth, of the firmament, of the view from outside.
"Number two question I always get," said Ferris. "Is there a God? Sure: why not."
At the end of the talk, the crowd dispersed to the awaiting telescope array.
I pressed my eye to a weathered viewfinder and beheld in perfect alignment the planet Saturn, its rings a thin slice of light extending through the center of the orb.
Whether a thing of design or of glorious accident, she was a genuine sight to see.
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