“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote: ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.’

There is a spirit arising from Ground Zero; it is an untethered ghost of American certainties and illusions and it seeks grounding in a solid but safe human understanding, touched with just a little affirmation of its goodness. If it cannot find it within the game-playing rhetoric of political opportunism and elite hectoring, it will gather into its sorrow all of our national lunacy, and will whirl and rise, and whirl and rise, shadowing the mosque that arises nearby.

De Chardin also wrote: ‘Everything that rises, must converge.’

Our wrecked psyche is peering, wide-eyed and with hands a-tremble, over the edges of an abyss, and the abyss is peering back.

Which is precisely why this mosque needs to be built in New York, but not at the periphery of an unhealed Ground Zero.”