N.Y. Journal: Moments of community

I was one of the lucky ones who made it into the auditorium at Harlem's Schomburg Center to watch the presidential inauguration. The New York Times said one set of sisters who arrived too late to get a seat went to the plaza outside a nearby state office building to watch the ceremony on a big screen set up there. One of the sisters, Aurora Burke, said, "Even with the cold, it's too important to do alone."

Some of the people I talked to in the Schomburg Center had stood in line for a couple of hours to get into the auditorium. One woman came all the way from New Jersey because it was important to watch it in Harlem with her family. I didn't want to watch it alone, so I took a one-hour subway ride from Brooklyn to Harlem. Why is it so important to experience moments like this-for the black community, one of the most important moments in their history-together instead of alone?

As I wrote before, community in New York is hard to build. You make a brief connection with a stranger: Sometimes you share just a moment of kinship before moving on, but sometimes your "transient connections" become lasting ones. But in New York, there are moments of big community-when you feel a brief connection with many strangers and it seems that the entire city shares and experiences things as one. This happened on 9/11 on a sweeping scale. It happened in the Schomburg Center on Inauguration Day, too.

Of course, the audience cheered and booed and rose to their feet as one; but for me, the most moving moment came when we prayed as one. I sat between a waif-thin older black woman in a lavender turban and a long lavender tunic, and a woman named Henrietta. Before the ceremony began, Henrietta told me that in the next four years she hoped for unity-"that people would get together and do the right thing for every human being-work together as one. No color, just people, loving each other and doing the right thing, helping."

These words echoed for me during Rick Warren's prayer. When he began the Lord's Prayer and both Henrietta and I spoke the words out loud, my tears made it hard to say the words. Praying as "Yeshua, Isa, Jesús, Jesus" taught us to pray united me with the women on either side of me. It created the strongest community bond, and for a moment Henrietta's wish came true: There was "no color, just people, loving each other and doing the right thing."