Axis Mundi: The Meaning of Towers

Rev. Lilli Nye

Sept. 11, 2011

 

This is a day of commemoration for our country and our world, September 11th, and yet, for this congregational community, it's also a day of celebration and reunion as we gather again into each other's presence after the summer.

 

Every time we meet together and worship, this space, this hour, has to be able to hold a very large spectrum of experiences, and that may be even more the case this morning. There are many feelings, many thoughts and reflections, that are present with us this morning, many of which will never be spoken. Let's just be aware of the enormity of all that we're holding today.

 

Over the preceding days and preceding weeks, the news media have offered many, many ways to remember September 11th, 2001, many opportunities to reflect on what took place and to get perspective on how much has changed since that catastrophic morning.  

 

I've been struck in particular with the awareness that the events of September 11th and the consequences for our country and for our world cannot be captured in a single narrative. Certainly they have no single meaning, except perhaps the fact of having catalyzed widespread and radical change.  So broad and grand statements might be made, but they sound somehow hollow beside the sharp intensity of the personal narratives of that day and of all that has happened since.

 

It is like a galaxy comprising billions of stars.  Seen from a distance, a galaxy appears to have a general shape, but as you get closer to it, as you move into it, it cannot be comprehended as a single thing, but it diffuses into billions of individual bodies of light. And none of those stars, nor the galaxy as a whole, are ever for a moment still, but they are always continuously in process, never static, always changing, always evolving.

 

September 11th was a singular turning point for the world, and yet its meaning resides in these personal stories, in the billions of personal stories and constellations of stories all interacting, all those stories and interconnections still unfolding, the meaning still evolving.  There can be no single meaning that arises out of the rubble.

 

As we heard in one of the readings today, Mircea Eliade says that powerful life events often carry a great deal of contradiction. They carry paradox and multiple meanings.  Our minds embrace symbols because symbols help us to hold all of those contradictions and those layers of meaning in some kind of a unity.  

 

Symbols speak directly to our imaginations.  Symbols draw forth our intuition, our intuitive knowing. Symbols appeal to our non-rational capabilities, they allow us to intuitively grasp things that linear thought cannot make any sense of.  So, as Eliade says, it is the image or symbol itself that becomes true, the image as a whole bundle of meanings, and not any single one of its many possible meanings or frames of reference.  The symbol itself speaks to the wholeness of truth.  

 

Symbols, art, poetry, music, ritual, myths, and stories—all these forms of human creativity allow for this communion of opposites and the synthesizing of meanings.  That is why we turn to them in the search for wholeness. That is why they are central to the religious and spiritual quest.    

 

So this morning I'd like to explore a symbol that holds a great many things for us: the image of the tower.    

 

Before going there, though, I do want to acknowledge that there were, of course, three crash sites on September 11th, actually four—the Pentagon, the field in Stonycreek, Pennsylvania, as well as each of the Twin Towers.  Catastrophe and heroism occurred at all of those points and beyond.  But the towers of the World Trade Center for many reasons have become the central iconic image of September 11th and its many complex meanings.    

 

We also have the coincidence of our own tower being in the finishing stages of restoration just at the same time as we're remembering the destruction of the Twin Towers.  This odd juxtaposition of celebration and commemoration of tragedy led me to try to search for some way to hold all this together, and I found myself reflecting on the meaning of towers at a symbolic level.  

 

The tower is at its base, its foundation, in the clay, and its spire is in the heavens.  It expresses the distinctly human paradox of our transcendent longings held within inescapable limitations.  Like the fantastic, mythic tower of Babel, the great tower is an audacious assertion of human capability.  It penetrates into the sky and reaches upward.    

 

At the time of their construction during the 1960s, the World Trade Center towers in New York were beyond anything previously attempted.  They represented new breakthroughs in engineering and, as the tallest buildings in the world, they declared America's power and dominion.  They maintained the record for having the greatest number of floors for four decades.  

 

But it seems to be a need and a drive of human beings to constantly push against previous limitations, and to compete against one another for ascendancy.  Even before the World Trade Center towers were attacked and destroyed, their height was surpassed by the spires of other structures.    

 

The Willis Tower, a.k.a the Sears Tower in Chicago, took the lead, followed then by the Petronas Tower in Malaysia, then the Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan, and then in 2004 the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, which is intended not only to be the tallest building in the world but actually to express the world's highest aspirations, that was part of its mission in being created.  More outrageous structures are in the works.  Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Illinois Sky City, pictured on the leaflet, would surpass all of these by an ample margin if it were ever built. And it may be one day.  

 

But a great tower is also vulnerable.  By virtue of its height and its hubris, it is inevitably precarious; it's always exposed—to instability, to attack, to forces greater than itself, such as the downward pull of gravity.  

 

Do you recall the lines from the poem that we heard earlier about what it's like to be human?  

 

it's being held prisoner in your skin

while reaching for infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time

while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain

but helplessly hopeful

 

These words could be describing the tower, as an architectural representation of our own paradoxical suspension between clay and sky, between earth and the infinite.  

 

Those who study myth often refer to the tower as an expression of the motif of the Axis Mundi,Latin for the Axis of the World or the Center of the World.    

 

The Axis Mundi might be a geologic place, such as a towering rock formation, or a great mountain, a place held sacred by those living in its vicinity.  Or it might be conceived of in the mythic imagination as a great vine or tree, the Tree of Life with its roots in the underworld, its trunk in the realm of common reality, and its branches in the transcendent or heavenly realm.    

 

Human constructions of the axis of the world take form, in a spiritual context, as totem poles or Maypoles, as crosses and steeples of cathedrals, as the spires of pagodas and minarets of mosques.  They can also take the secular forms of castle towers, or obelisks, or skyscrapers.    

 

The Axis Mundi represents and occupies the center of the world for a particular group of people, a point where the upper and lower realms can relate and interpenetrate and communicate, and from which the four corners of the world can be observed and considered and even dominated.  

 

But it is because the Axis Mundi, the Axis of the World, represents the center point and gives order to all things that its destruction is so utterly catastrophic. The destruction of the World Axis essentially means "the end of the world as we know it."    

 

Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, societally;all our points of reference are shattered, demolished, leveled, turned upside down.  This is why the image of the Twin Towers actually coming down, collapsing in a huge plume of gray dust, has become the central symbol of all the cataclysmic loss and change that September 11th meant for us.    

 

There is a card in the traditional tarot deck called The Tower.  The tarot image of The Tower expresses this very archetype of cataclysmic change, this devastation to the central tenets of one's world and one's life.  It pictures a great tower set against a menacing sky.  The crenelated top of the tower suggests a crown, what is held supreme, but the tower has been struck by a bolt of lightning, and the crown is busted off or busted open, and the whole structure is aflame.  From its high windows, small helpless figures fall, tumbling headfirst into empty space.    

 

The resonance between this very ancient archetypal symbol and what actually occurred on September 11th is horrifying and eerie: a mythic nightmare unfolding in our reality in the middle of downtown Manhattan.    

 

Being human is…  

 

being a needle of frost

and a handful of heat

breathing in the air

and choking wordlessly

it's being on fire

with a nest made of ashes

 

I am cautious to abstract what happened from its devastating reality for individuals, families, and communities, and to turn it into an intellectual Jungian speculation.  

 

But I do think that when real life events correspond in shape and story to the patterns of mythology, of that deep memory that we have, their emotional impact upon us is amplified and amplified.  

 

I also believe that we seize upon symbolic imagery when we cannot make sense of things rationally.  The symbol, the image itself, speaks to this impossible complex of truths; it becomes the truth itself, the many meanings all fused together.    

 

But, as we know, and as the poet says, being human is not only to be "hopelessly uncertain," but also to be "helplessly hopeful."  We are bound by the clay of our limitation and our mortality, but we are always reaching, reaching upward.  We are infinitely creative and resilient beings.  We continue to build towers, and always will.    

 

It is surely too grandiose to imagine our own bell tower as a kind of Axis Mundi for ourselves or our neighborhood.  I wouldn't suggest that we are the center of the world as we know it.  But it is a symbol that carries many meanings, mostly positive, but not without its contradictions.    

 

I want to take a moment to consider our bell tower, where it's located, how it's intended to function.  I'm going to ask you to think about this, to survey it in your mind, and then we're going to do a little collective brainstorming.  I want to hear from you the elements that you recognize in it and what you see in our bell tower as a symbol for us and for the community.  Just take a moment and picture it in your mind. What's in it? What's around it?  

 

Let's hear from a few brave souls. What are your thoughts?    

 

"A place of welcoming in"  …  "A locus for community in a bigger world"  …  "An excellent place for archers and crossbows"  …   "Hope in the face of unrealistic expectation or seemingly insurmountable obstacles"  … " It reaches upward but is not dominant"  …  "A place to explore now that it's safe"  …  "It contains the bell that rings out, the voice calling people to this community"  …  "Financial sacrifice: It represents our mission, but sucks in this cloud of money that may in some ways undermine our ability to fulfill our mission to the extent that money is necessary for that; it's hugely expensive to maintain" ...  "The recycling of treasure with the yard sale" ….

 

This is great. You can keep the thoughts going. It has a weathervane; it tells where the wind is blowing.  It's got those doors that open to the world around us, it's in this central location.  

 

To say the last lines of the poem that we've been reflecting on by Anna Kamienska: She concludes that being human is:  

 

eating bread

while filling up on hunger

it's dying without love

[and] loving through death…

 

We eat the bread of earthly life, we sometimes choke on it.  We share the bread of community, the bread of friendship, helpfulness, laughter and love– “give us this day our daily bread," says the prayer.    

 

And yet we remain always hungry, in some sense, for an ultimate completeness that eludes us, some restful wholeness that we need, some perfect understanding that we never reach.  And it's this hunger that causes us to seek, to go deeper, to keep striving, to keep growing, to keep asking, to keep reaching for the infinite that we intuit in ourselves and in our existence.    

 

We would die without love, and yet we stake our claim upon the conviction that love is stronger than death, that love is ultimately what allows us to continue after impossible loss and brokenness.  

 

These are some of the simplest but deepest aspirations of our life together in community. Those in our vicinity who are drawn here by the singing of the bell in the tower, and who are welcomed into our doors, if they find in our midst this bread, and this love, and this hunger for truth, I believe they might recognize a treasure right in the middle of their neighborhood, right at the center, that will give their lives meaning and purpose to their world. I pray that that may always be so for us and that it will be so for all who come exploring.  

 

Amen.