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Pastor seeks peace despite 9/11 hurt

 
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11:00 A.M. EDT Sept. 6, 2011



The Rev. Myrna Bethke visits a memorial to New York City employees of Marsh & McLennan, which lost 295 people, including Bethke's brother, William Bethke, in the Sept. 11 attacks. A UMNS photo by John C. Goodwin.
The Rev. Myrna Bethke visits a memorial to New York City employees of Marsh & McLennan, which lost 295 people, including Bethke's brother, William Bethke, in the Sept. 11 attacks. A UMNS photo by John C. Goodwin. View in Photo Gallery

When the death of Osama bin Laden was announced in May, the Rev. Myrna Bethke was awakened by a late-night call from a New Zealand media outlet seeking her reaction.

That itself was not a surprise. Bethke, pastor of Red Bank United Methodist Church in New Jersey, has a drawer full of videotaped interviews — in Korean, Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, German and Chinese — that she’s received from TV stations around the world.

As the sister of one of the 2,977 victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and an advocate for reconciliation who traveled on a peace mission to Afghanistan the next year, her perspective often has been sought by the media.

Any reporter thinking Bethke would allow herself the satisfaction of revenge would be disappointed. Her family’s loss because of 9/11 has not changed a lifelong commitment to peace.

Bethke has visited a stadium in Afghanistan where the Taliban carried out its executions and she recognized the evil in bin Laden. But, as she told the New Zealand reporter that night, “I’m not going to celebrate anyone’s dying.”

From the beginning, she has chosen reconciliation over retribution.

The tribute at ground zero

On Sunday, Bethke, 54, and her husband, Drew Burrus, a church organist, will attend the 9/11 family observance at ground zero as she has every year except the first anniversary. The guest preacher to take her place in the pulpit at Red Bank was lined up several months ago.

This year, through a lottery system, she is one of the family members chosen to read aloud the names of those who died in the attacks. She will be permitted to mention the name of her youngest brother, William Bethke, who was among the dead, at the end of her list.

If the sun is reflecting brightly off the Hudson River, it will be hard to forget how blue the sky was that morning. Her brother, nearing his 37th birthday in October, was at work in the offices of the consulting firm Marsh & McLennan, on the 95th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

After American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower, between the 93rd and 99th floors, at 8:46 a.m., Myrna Bethke followed the breaking news on her computer. But, she momentarily forgot that her brother had transferred earlier that year from his company’s Princeton, N.J., office to lower Manhattan.

Then the realization came: “Billy works there now.” No one in her family could reach him. His body was never identified.



The Rev. Myrna Bethke holds baby Elizabeth Anne Binder on the day of her baptism. A UMNS photo by Gwen Kisker.
The Rev. Myrna Bethke holds baby Elizabeth Anne Binder on the day of her baptism. A UMNS photo by Gwen Kisker.
View in Photo Gallery

That evening, she opened the doors of First United Methodist Church in Freehold, N.J., where she then served as pastor, to the grieving congregation and community. They sang hymns and read psalms of anger and lament, like Psalm 137, written centuries ago by the oppressed Israelites living in exile in Babylon.

It felt right, Bethke recalled, to “let that rage happen” in a liturgical context, “knowing that God is big enough to handle all of our anger and all of our feelings.” The next night, during a more formal worship service, they talked instead about beginning the healing process.

Finding ways to heal

Her family, which includes a sister and two other brothers, found different ways to deal with the tragedy, but they eventually lost touch with Bill’s widow, Valerie. “I think her way of coping was just to disappear,” Bethke said.

Her mother, Marie, started leading workshops to help people learn to use the healing power of laughter and still does. Until his death from cancer two years ago, her father, Brud, tagged along with his wife.

For Bethke, the aftermath of 9/11 meant learning to express her concerns and convictions in a much more public fashion than she was used to, even as a pastor. “I’m actually a very shy and quiet person, so having to be that public about the death of my brother has been an interesting journey for me,” she admitted.

She knew she had to live out this truth: “The more we know about one another and the more we know our names and our stories, the harder it is when something happens to generalize or stereotype another group of people.”

The desire to keep making connections with other peoples and cultures also has touched her two children, Krista, 22, and Daniel, 20. “Both of them grew up in a kind of peace tradition,” she explained. “The jump to our response to 9/11 made sense to them.”

Bethke had a powerful reminder of the urgent need to work for peace and justice when she and United Methodist Bishop C. Joseph Sprague were part of an interfaith delegation to Afghanistan in 2002, sponsored by Global Exchange, an international human rights organization.

She had carried with her a memory that symbolized the tragedy of 9/11 for her: watching her father give a DNA sample in case authorities were ever able to identify her brother’s remains. Then, in Afghanistan, she listened as an 8-year-old girl spoke the names of family members who had died in a bombing, offering a sort of verbal DNA, and the connection was clear.

“Those two things came together for me,” she said. “This is why we do what we do.”

Promoting interfaith relationships

Since 9/11, Bethke has been active in September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization that promotes dialogue on alternatives to war; has committed herself to seeking out relationships with Muslims and other faith groups in communities where she has lived; and has worked with other New Jersey clergy to address a growing backlash against immigrants.

Two years ago, the Red Bank congregation was part of the Three Faiths Walks initiated by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., to promote understanding among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In 2010, church youth participated in the Three Faiths Quilt project, initiated by the Jewish Federation of Monmouth County in partnership with 14 houses of worship. Each square of the quilt, later displayed at the Statehouse in Trenton, depicted symbols of peace in those traditions.

These days, the personal significance of Sept. 11 has become more prevalent as the 10th anniversary draws near. On a bright summer afternoon, she visited, for the first time, Marsh & McLennan’s memorial to the 295 employees it lost at ground zero.



The Rev. Myrna Bethke (left) sits with Amira, an Afghan girl who lost most of her family during a U.S. bombing near Kabul, for a memorial service in 2002. A UMNS photo courtesy of Myrna Bethke.
The Rev. Myrna Bethke (left) sits with Amira, an Afghan girl
who lost most of her family during a U.S. bombing near Kabul,
for a memorial service in 2002. A UMNS photo courtesy of
Myrna Bethke. View in Photo Gallery

In a small plaza adjacent to the company’s offices at 1166 Avenue of the Americas, William Bethke’s name is etched in the stone above a facsimile of his signature.

“The most meaningful part of that was to see my brother’s signature,” she said later. “That was just really a very moving way to do that memorial.”

But, when she thinks of Bill, she doesn’t think of Manhattan at all.

She might remember the seasons of their childhood, when the siblings and four close Bethke cousins peppered the grades of the public school system in Hamilton, N.J., and vacationed together each August at the Jersey Shore.

Or she might recall Bill as an adult, the tech guru who “could reformat your whole computer over the phone;” the brother who would “always be the first to help somebody or make somebody laugh.

“A lot of times, it’s just remembering who he was.”

See complete coverage of the 9/11 anniversary.

*Bloom is a United Methodist News Service multimedia reporter based in New York. Follow her at http://twitter.com/umcscribe.

News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org.

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