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Remembering 'The Ground Zero Bible'

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'But whoever smite thee on thy right cheek, you turn the other to him also.'

A Bible was discovered at Ground Zero in New York City after the fateful 9/11 attacks.

Highlights

By Kenya Sinclair (CALIFORNIA NETWORK)
Catholic Online (https://www.catholic.org)
9/13/2016 (1 decade ago)

Published in Living Faith

Keywords: 9/11, Bible, forgiveness, ground zero, Joel Meyerowitz

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - In a video posted to History, photographer Joel Meyerowitz described the Bible dubbed "The Ground Zero Bible."

The charred remains still smell like the debris and smoke from the fallen towers and, miraculously, has been fused open to a readable passage about forgiveness.


Meyerowitz describes walking around ground zero taking photographs, when a fireman discovered the Bible melted into a piece of metal.

The fireman approached the photographer and handed him the Bible.

When Meyerowitz realized how delicate the paper was, he used a scarf to carefully wrap it and kept it safely in his home while awaiting the day he could deliver it to the"right institution."


In 2010, he was working with the people at the 9/11 Memorial Museum when he thought: "They should really have this, it shouldn't be sitting in my studio when it could be there as some kind of iconic image for the millions of visitors who're gonna come to the museum.

"I don't know what people are gonna feel when they see this Bible but I hope they have a sense of wonder and awe. It's like a story of survival. This thing has survived and it seemed to me that its destiny, then, is to go back into the public so that the public can see how something as fragile as a bunch of pieces of paper in a book could be saved and have survived this incredible tragedy.

"And it's going to carry some message about the way the Word of the Bible has survived through centuries, through millennia of history."


The Ground Zero Bible was miraculously open to a section on "Retaliation."

Revenge is for God to give, not us. The Bible is arguably one of the most beautiful and touching pieces of debris recovered from the fallen towers and serves as a reminder God is always present and will always speak to us.

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