Re-membering 9/11
During World War II, our every morning at Cove School began with a devotional. Bible reading, prayer, volunteers recite memory verses, Pledge of Allegiance, and a stirring patriotic song, often “God Bless America” or “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor.”
Every Sunday morning in those years, our choir at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church sang a very moving closing hymn, I can still hear John Pennel’s tenor --
O God of love, O King of Peace,
Make wars throughout the world to cease,
The wrath of nations now restrain,
Give peace O God, give peace again.
Thirty one years ago, our orientation week at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, we were assigned much reading and had extensive small group discussions about the Holocaust. Thinking this could not have come out-of-the-blue, I wondered if the topic choice was related to the fact that faculty included former members of the German Wehrmacht, lingering guilt, working out repentance. A theological question that week was whether God can, will, does bring redemption out of sin as happened with Joseph in Egypt. Sitting atop Seminary Ridge looking out across a battlefield where a hundred seventeen years earlier some fifty-thousand had died in Civil War, and only blocks from the Gettysburg Address, it was challenging to ponder how even God could redeem the Holocaust. The question was not answered in the week’s discussions, even among faculty. A lesson of that week was that questions are more important than answers.
Sunday’s 9/11 memories, images, photos, videos and coverage were emotionally searing, ripping, tearing, stirring up, bringing back and returning with a vengeance. Hardly anything else on TV, in newspapers, on radio.
For all of us, 9/11/2001 is personal. For me, the day started on a high note. The previous evening we had shopped at TTChevrolet for a car and selected a new red Tahoe. It was to be ready for me to pick up Tuesday morning early, and I was there before they opened. Driving it home, I rolled into the driveway happily only to see Linda rush out of the house and motion me inside. Television was blaring instant replay images of a burning skyscraper. A plane had hit. Oh my God, I said, what a terrible accident, not again, in a fog years ago a bomber had crashed into the Empire State Building. “Wait,” Linda said, “watch, it’s no accident.” As we watched, another plane hurtled into the next building and fire exploded from the other side. Airliners. Both towers in flames. After watching a few minutes, I had to leave for my office at Grace Episcopal Church, Panama City Beach.
Two or three people were in the church office. They had not heard, were not aware. In a closet we found a tiny old black and white TV with rabbit ears, and Weldon Faull rigged it up with tinfoil so we had some reception. We watched as the first tower fell. I phoned Linda only to hear her say, “The second one is falling now.”
It was a day of realization and horror beyond forgetting. On television that evening we saw TV replays from the morning as the towers stood in blazing inferno, coverage from the ground, hearing grotesque, sickening thuds as jumpers, living human beings hit pavement.
It’s been ten years. Sunday was not memorial but remembrance, re-membering, literally putting back together. Shock returns quickly, gripping horror. Anger, impotent rage, fury stirs instantly, re-membrance of a grim wish to see nuclear-armed bombers rising into the sky to reduce the enemy’s land to radioactive rubble uninhabitable for ten thousand years. Anger is human and not ungodly. But it is good that real presidents must be more reserved and sensible.
That morning, President Putin phoned the White House to offer help and to say that his Russian military forces were standing down, preventing any confrontation between our two countries. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice later said Putin’s call marked the end of the Cold War. Redemption for 9/11 in some way.
On an anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day years ago, my church had a service of remembrance and forgiveness. Leaving after the service, a parishioner confronted me seething with anger. A beloved friend was entombed in USS ARIZONA. His grief freshened and his fury rekindled, my parishioner was of no mind to countenance talk of forgiving much less forgetting.
We are human, not divine. Anger, grief, murderous, vengeful rage does not subside in a decade, nor even in the lifetime of survivor victims, and we are all of us victims, even those of us who only stood and watched. According to one source, 19,629 killed in Afghanistan since 9/11. In Iraq, 900,338 killed, including 864,531 civilians. Vengeance has been wreaked and we are not done.
Pearl Harbor is history enshrined at the Arizona Memorial, and American driveways and highways are jammed with Japanese cars: forgiving and not forgetting. Some have forgotten the Holocaust, fools insist it never happened, forgiveness is not for us to ponder.
All have forgiven our self-destruction at Gettysburg, but a visit to the town and battlefield proves that we will never forget, for memorial markers are literally everywhere. Memorials in Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon, and at Ground Zero ensure that even history will never forget 9/11.
A classical, biblical theological cycle is seen to be creation, sin, judgement, repentance, forgiveness and redemption. The ongoing war proves there is no repentance. Let forgiveness be a task for some future generation ages hence. Forget? 9/11 is as indelible as my baptism.
TW