“We remember…”

Part of my homily for the ten year anniversary, on September 11, 2011:

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I think perhaps that forgiveness – like conversion – is a journey.  The human heart isn’t necessarily converted over night.  We don’t all have that electrifying moment on the road to Damascus.  For many of us, it grows out of what Flannery O’Connor called “a habit of being.”  It happens over a lifetime.

Conversion is a daily choice.  So, is love.

And so, I believe, is forgiveness.

Like all of the challenges of our faith, it is something we need to pray for – to pray to able to do what we are called to do.

To love our neighbor.

To love our enemies.

To forgive our neighbor’s injustice.

C.S. Lewis put it beautifully.  “To be a Christian,” he wrote, “is to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven it in us.”

A couple weeks ago, we heard Christ tells his disciples: “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Well, one of the heaviest crosses is the call to forgive.   Even when something seems unforgivable. Especially then.  But by God’s grace – and by Christ’s example – somehow, we pick up that cross.  We bear it on our backs.  And we begin the long walk.

We may carry it on our backs, but what is more important is what we hold in our hearts, and it is this: that love is greater than hate; that hope is stronger than despair; that vengeance is no match for forgiveness.

This Sunday, we pray to remember that.  And we pray, very simply, in remembrance.

We remember: all the lives that were lost, the martyrs who were born, the heroes who did what no one thought possible.  We remember.

We remember sacrifice.

We remember courage.

We remember greatness.

At the Super Bowl [in 2002], the song that Bono performed was “Where the Streets Have No Name.”  Bono has said that he wrote the song about growing up in Dublin, where everyone could tell who was rich, and who wasn’t, by the street they lived on.  And the place he was singing about was a city where that wouldn’t matter anymore.

It was his vision of heaven:

I’ll show you a place

Where there is no sorrow or pain…

And the streets have no names…

Our prayer is that we may one day know that place and walk those streets, in gratitude and in joy, with those we remember this day.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

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Below, Bono and U2, from the 2002 Super Bowl. More than a performance, it was a kind of prayer: Bono can be heard saying at the outset, “Lord open my lips that my mouth may proclaim your praise…”