It’s hard for me to believe its been fourteen years.
Over the years I’ve written on that day and those that have followed. I find I return to certain themes. And today I find those themes, those images returning…
I had just been with a family visited by serious illness. I was in the car and turned on my radio. That’s when I heard the news. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers, there were reports of other planes gone missing. Reporters were confused, and the odor of fear hung in the air. I was heading back to the church I was serving at the time, fortunately not a mile from where I heard this. Still, I did drive a little faster than wise. Once inside the building, I rolled a television out from the closet we kept it, and the staff and I watched as another plane struck and the towers fell.
I felt a hollowness. I don’t know how else to call it. And then within that space poured worry and confusion.
Over the next days we learned what happened. Ultimately, nearly three thousand people dead. The most Americans killed on our soil since the horrors of the civil war. And we began to hear the stories, stories of such sadness that I still choke when I hear them. And we began to hear stories of heroism, stories of such bravery that I find it hard not to weep when I recall them. A small band of passengers on one of the hijacked planes, learning what was happening fought with the terrorists. They died sparing the intended target, we’re not precisely certain but we’re pretty sure it was the Capitol.
And we reacted. Some of what we did I think necessary, some misdirected for other reasons, without a shred of genuine justification. The wake of our vengeance has been terrible. The mastermind of this horror is now dead, as are most who were directly involved in this plot. But fighting continues. Fourteen years of conflict, wars raging across the globe, small and vast fires consuming so much.
So, what to think?
Just before the first tower fell, trapped on the 105th floor where he worked for the investment bank Cantor-Fitzgerald, 32 year old Stuart Meltzer just had time to make one phone call. He called his wife. She wasn’t at home, so he left a message on their answering machine. “Honey, something terrible is happening. I don’t think I am going to make it. I love you. Take care of the children.”
The wisest words are almost always small words. But they can summarize it all. Stuart Meltzer sets the stage for all of us, sets the conditions for our finding of perspective, for our coming to wisdom. Five days after these terrible events I found myself in the pulpit of that church I was serving, forced by circumstances to speak. There was context of course. There was anger and a visceral desire for vengeance. There was also our communal part in this. Foolish and stupid things our country was involved in that helped to set the stage. Many choices for those words that I had to speak.
But I found my inspiration in reports of firemen and policemen racing into the towers when anyone in their right mind was racing away. Fourteen years later and I find my mind filled with stories of people calling out, many, most perhaps, finding their last words going to answering machines. And it was Stuart’s words that most inspired me, gave me courage to speak, then, and again, now.
“Honey, something terrible is happening. I don’t think I’m going to make it.” He confesses a real, if hard truth. We all will die. There is no doubt, even though we can cloud our awareness of this fact for a time, we, each and every blessed one of us will die. But, when we allow ourselves to truly understand our passingness, that we only occupy this life for a brief time, then we find things can click into place, we can find harmony and balance and most important of all, we can find that precious perspective. Within this experience of perspective, of how we are beautiful and temporary, we can distill out of our ordinary passing experience, enough.
And what is that “enough?” Stuart said it in the face of his dying: “I love you.” So powerful, so simple, so truthful of everything that makes us human. Love is the most mysterious force on this planet. No wonder we use it as the fundamental synonym for God. Love is the longing of the human heart; it is the knowing that even in our temporariness, we are also connected. As the hymn tells us, as we open our hearts, love will guide us.
But, even those words, “I love you,” if left alone, don’t fully take us where we must go. I remember the experience of a dear friend of mine so many years ago, going before the ministerial fellowship committee, the group of lay leaders and clergy who decide whether an individual is ready for ministry. My friend preached his sample homily for them on the nature of love. At the end of the homily, during the time when the committee is asking the hard questions, delving, probing, to see if this individual really is ready to step out into service, helping people in the rawest of times, they asked the hardest question. “What do you say when you run out of sermons on love?”
Well, we’ve seen that time and we’ve been given an answer. Stuart tells us. “Take care of the children.” Not kill our enemies. Not seek a terrible vengeance. Not create rivers of blood. Take care of the children.
Of course we need to seek justice. And, sadly, we’ve seen how that can turn on a heartbeat into something else. Hard times have followed these past fourteen years. So many dead, Americans, Iraqis, Afghanis, others. So, many. Too many. Of course, the karma is complex and fault can be found everywhere.
We rarely can control what happens to us. But, we can control our responses. Here is the heart of the song, sung to us from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center, the lesson, the only lesson we can pull out of this horror that will ease hurt and heal wounds. Passing as we are, we are woven together into a great mystery. That mystery is love. When we know love, we go can forward to give our hands and our lives to care for the children and each other. Let us not miss it. It is the blessing that pours forth for all of us from that terrible moment at the World Trade Center, flowing like life-giving waters, like an ever flowing stream.
And so back to that take away.
W.H. Auden wrote in his poem September 1, 1939:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
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