September 11 in Missouri

It's now September 12 and I feel somewhat disoriented. September 11 passed quickly with little time for me to reflect upon it. I've been busy this week trying to get work done before my eye surgery tomorrow, just in case I'm out of commission for a while. So, yesterday was busy.

I'm half a continent away from where the events of September 11 took place and from the people most directly affected by it. Unlike the last five years, I did not spend the evening at a candlelight memorial service in a local park hearing the names of friends, neighbors, coaches, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters--all people who died on September 11, 2001--read aloud by their loved ones. I usually stood in a clergy robe with other ministers and rabbis in the town as we offered prayers and scripture. The high school choir would wait behind us ready to sing Amazing Grace and then God Bless America.

It was a very different environment on the North Shore of Long Island, where so many Wall Street bankers and traders live and so many of them died due to a terrorist attack. I led worship each week and usually looked out over two widows and their children whose husbands and fathers were killed on 9-11. I taught their kids in Sunday School and took them on youth retreats. 9-11 was never very far away.

In New York, there really was no escaping it. The media sometimes tastelessly other times heroically covered the various politics and griefs as they played out concerning the rebuilding at Ground Zero, the memorial for the victims, the ever present terror alert and the routine but always nerve-racking bomb threats--usually turning out to be some schoolkid's backpack mistakenly left on a train. 9-11 was never very far away.

I started work in Manhasset, NY two and a half weeks after 9-11. The church and the community were traumatized. I will never forget walking into Penn Station and seeing all the fliers up with pictures of the missing. It is like something out of a disaster film only real. National Guardsmen with assault rifles were everywhere. People displayed heroic determination and confused denial in equal measure.

This year all of that seemed very far away, and unlike in previous years I could focus upon other things--and by necessity did so. I recall family members telling me over the phone how unreal it seemed each year on the anniversary and how removed they felt from it. There was a real lack of understanding of why the big deal kept being made year after year--oh they got it intellectually but failed to get it emotionally. The bombing at Oklahoma City seemed more real to them, because it was practically a local story--never mind that it happened years earlier.

I think I have a glimpse of how they feel now. When Jen and I moved to New York, we constantly would see pictures of NY in film and on TV, and then we would poke each other in the ribs and say, "We live there." Not being from New York, it was a fantastical place that seemed unreal, because we only saw it in works of fiction or documentaries about the past. Now, I'm back in the Midwest and once again, New York seems like a far away unreal sort of place.

So does the tragedy of September 11. But, of course, it was and is real. Distance may allow me and so many others to erect emotional barriers between ourselves and the traumatic events of that day, but it still happened.

A toxic mix of fanatical religion and politics resulted in the deaths of over 3000 people. In response, our government took away civil liberties and resorted to torture. Our president told us to go shopping. War was begun with no sacrifices asked of ordinary Americans and certainly not of the politicians approving it. Ordinary people responded to terror with bravery and generosity, but aid agencies and government agencies repaid them with wasteful spending and a refusal to admit any wrongdoing or responsibility.

I may be in Missouri now, but September 11 still happened and is still happening.

Grace and Peace,

Chase

P.S. The only insightful thing I found to read yesterday was a piece by David Gushee, Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. His whole column is worth a read. Here's a taste:

Six years after 9/11, our nation is less secure, less powerful, less free, less respected, less democratic, less constitutional, and less fiscally sound than we were on that bright, clear, terrible morning. . .

And the church? In general, the American churches have lacked the political independence, the discernment, and the courage even to understand and name what has gone wrong, let alone to resist it. A domesticated church has been employable as a servant of the state, even to the point of defending torture.

It seems to me that 9/11 in a way unhinged our nation and sent us hurtling down the wrong path. But the American church bears considerable responsibility for its inability to stand fast on the solid rock of Jesus Christ in the midst of this unhinging -- yet one more reason to bow our heads in sorrow on 9/11.