The banners weren’t enough. The photographs only told part of the story. And the video not only had been seen so often that it had lost its shock value, it only documented the beginning of the story.

Artist Jessica Stammen yearned for a way to depict how she had seen God work hand in hand with volunteers and rescue workers in the long months of cleanup that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The 22-year-old senior at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City served as artist-in-residence at St. Paul’s Episcopal Chapel. An active member at her home parish in Camden, Stammen attended services there while attending college.

With the help of Maine’s well-known wildlife sculptor Forest Hart, Stammen has designed a Communion chalice to honor “a diverse community’s coming together to create an amazingly new way of serving each other completely by responding in love.”

Hart has been at a Colorado foundry this week, overseeing the casting in bronze of seven copies of the chalice.

When the twin towers collapsed, only a sycamore tree in the churchyard behind the chapel prevented a huge steel beam from smashing the 235-year-old church to dust. The tree did not survive, but a new ministry grew in place of its upturned roots, as St. Paul’s became an oasis that provided physical comfort and spiritual solace for the men and women who sifted through the rubble just a few hundreds yards away.

For eight months, hundreds of volunteers worked 12-hour shifts around the clock, serving meals, making beds, counseling and praying with firefighters, construction workers, police and others. Massage therapists, chiropractors, podiatrists and musicians also tended to their needs.

“I had been the student representative on a leadership team working to incorporate the arts into worship,” she said in a recent phone interview from her college dorm. “We had talked about having an artist-in-residence at the chapel, but hadn’t finalized anything. Less than a week after 9-11, the rector at the chapel called to say that it was important for an artist to be down there.”

Her first project was to encircle the church with a message of hope. Stammen designed a series of 6-by-6-foot banners with positive visual messages of hope to hang on the wrought iron fence that encircled the chapel and churchyard. Historically, banners have served as a way for groups to identify themselves and, in war, to claim victory, sometimes before it was even declared.

On the fence at St. Paul’s, each banner waved a word before the eyes of the world. Pride. Support. Hope. Courage. CNN correspondents used that one for a backdrop as they updated viewers on the progress of the rescue, and later, recovery efforts.

“The idea was to surround the church with positive speech,” said Stammen. “When people saw the banners, they could look out at this disaster and deny its negativity; overcome it. That message became very important for people working there.”

At the end of the cleanup at Ground Zero, the chapel was closed for cleaning and the idea for the chalice surfaced. Stammen said that the design emerged slowly through prayer and inspiration from Isaiah 61. As the concept turned into a project, it came to fruition through a series of “weird coincidences and work that wasn’t really very directed that, in the end, took it out of my hands” and placed it in Hart’s, she explained.

The chalices will be about 7 inches tall and 7 inches across at its widest point, said Hart in March as he worked on the model from which the mold was made. He estimated each would weigh about 12 pounds. The steep-sided bowl will be supported by two separate stems that descend into the sturdy trunk of a tree. Its roots will be bent to embrace a square piece of steel, rescued from the rubble.

Stammen placed a unique signature upon the piece – her own hands clutch the chalice bowl. It was the one element on which she was unwilling to compromise and it proved to be the most challenging design concept to execute. Hart, however, was able to help her by suggesting the piece be separated into two sections.

Finally, late last summer, Hart poured a thick, cold, pink substance over her cupped hands and she knew the idea for the chalice would become a reality. Trying to figure out how to get it made had been a frustrating process for Stammen, but the “chalice was a magnet for getting people involved.”

At first, she had intended to cast it out of steel and requested 12 pounds – enough for one chalice – from New York City officials. They gave her 300 pounds recovered from the North Tower, but she switched to bronze because casting it from steel appeared to be impossible. Recently, she’s been contacted by an Ohio foundry that is interested is making three chalices from steel.

Massimo Ferragamo, the 45-year-old head of U.S. operations for Salvatore Ferragamo’s, the leading Italian luxury fashion house, is the patron of the project. Stammen said that he has been “incredibly supportive through the changes” and agreed to fund the cost of the entire project when it grew from one to seven chalices.

So far, chalices are to be given to St. Paul’s Chapel and its mother church St. John the Divine, Ferragamo’s parish in Florence, the New York Historical Society and the Smithsonian Institution. Stammen does not plan to keep one.

“It would do me no good,” she said. “It’s meant to be out there, seen, used and among the people. There is someplace else it could go and be more productive and fruitful. I can always borrow one if I need it for an exhibit or show.”

Today, St. Paul’s is open, holding services, weekday concerts, occasional lectures, and providing a shelter for the homeless. The banners, photographs and videos are part of a permanent exhibit documenting the church’s ministry in the aftermath of 9-11.

Stammen, who will be the senior class speaker at her graduation Wednesday, has received many accolades. Her work at St. Paul’s was featured on a New York television news segment called “Hometown Heroes” in December and she was named one of American’s top 10 college women by Glamour magazine.

She also gained attention as the only woman, and in her senior year co-captain, of the Cooper Union basketball team. She started playing in the third grade on the Whirling Windjammers in Camden, then played for coach Jay Carlsen at what was then Camden-Rockport High School.

Stammen is taking a year off before beginning classes at Union Theological Seminary, New York, in fall 2004. She plans to spend some time in Italy with the Ferragamo family this summer, then return to Camden to see the chalice through its next phase while she discerns how she can continue to weave spirituality and art into a tapestry in that illuminates God’s love.

Isaiah 61:1, 3 – 5

This quote from Isaiah served as inspiration for Jessica Stammen?s communion chalice project:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; …

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; …

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.