Was 9/11 Ever A Thing?

I’ve said it several times already today. It is so odd that September 11th is an ordinary work day. In fact, for me, more than usual a work day as it is also the first day of school for my four youngest children. I don’t like to feel old, and yet, as each anniversary of 9/11 flies by, I feel unduly aged, not because of the regular passage of time, but because I am so out of step with the prevailing culture. It is racing forward–or in some direction, ‘forward’ might not be an apt descriptor–and I am not exactly standing still, but am at least fixed in some other kind of spiritual assumption about how things are and where we are going.

Twenty-two years ago today I woke up ridiculously happy. I had been married for a whole month and was basking in the glow of making up our small apartment the way I wanted, of looking out over the quiet, staid, embryo autumn bower of our tree-lined street. It was, as everyone remembers, a clear, blue-skyed day. I drank my morning tea, all the more delicious because I had already trained my new husband to make it correctly and deliver it to my bedside just as my eyes fluttered open, like he was Jeeves, or Jesus. I easily fit into clothes I liked because I hadn’t had six babies yet. And then we two got in our car and started driving in DC to a class on how to read the Bible aloud without boring everyone into total somnambulance. Instead of that, however, as after explosions rent the noise of traffic, we were pushed off the freeway and had to circle back via many unknown backroads, trying to get back to school and home. Like everyone else we sat in front of the television and watched the towers fall and fall and fall, over and over, unable to drag our eyes away.

In the days that followed the student body of our seminary launched into its own, tiny conflict over one inch of ecclesiastical soil. Should the presider of the chapel service on 9/11 have worn a white surplice over his black cassock? Some said yes because Jesus is always risen from the dead. Others said no because the black of mourning was necessary for such a trial. Neither side particularly cared about the real, historical existence of Jesus, or whether he might have made any real claim over his own church. And yet the debate was fierce.

What really fell, that day, wasn’t America’s innocence, or even imperial America, or whatever it is really called. What fell into the rubble on that horrifying and, tragically, so easily forgettable day was the social and spiritual imperative of seeking and establishing any manner of common life. Before that moment, only radicals and intellectuals had the right to fracture social mores and bonds. After 9/11 not only did it become a right, it became an obligation.

In my own denomination, what had been once an uneasy and yet gracious peace between ideological poles turned into outright war. As American troops deployed against America’s enemies abroad, at home the full-grown moral view that now bears the name of “wokeness” stepped forth into the autumn air, ready to do down every enemy.