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How long do we remember someone we have loved?
How long do we remember so many we didn’t
even know but whose lives we glimpsed as snapshots
posted and vignettes published during those leaden
days following the harrowing events of that day?
Many years ago, decades in fact, I lost someone
I loved to violence that was also massive in scale.
Shortly afterwards, a friend visited me in my apartment
in the East Village. As we sat over coffee, he looked
straight at me and told me what he thought about
it, this nasty business of losing someone you love.
“I don’t understand it,” he said.
“I don’t understand it at all. We used
to spend a lot of time together. We used to laugh
together and we argued too. We were close. I counted
on him being there forever. All I know now is that
I haven’t seen my friend since he died. I
don’t know where he went or what happened
in that instant of death. I just know I haven’t
seen him and I still miss him.”
I still miss my friend too, and I still miss those
women and men whose lives I barely glimpsed in the
photographed faces that stared back day after day
on the streets of this city, and at Ground Zero,
and at the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94 and
in those unforgettable Portraits of Grief offered
by the New York Times. We miss them, and we remember
them, the 3,016 women and men who were our daughters
and sons, our sisters and brothers, our fathers
and mothers, our husbands and wives, our lovers
and friends, and our neighbors. “In the rising
of the sun, and in its going down, we remember them.”
And “in the blueness of the sky”–oh,
in the blueness of that sky as it was today and
then—we remember them.
How long do we remember?
I don’t think there’s a timeline. I
don’t think there’s a timeline for memory
or for grief. Have we smiled since then? Yes, we
have. Have we laughed since then? Sure, we’ve
laughed since then. Have we gone to the movies and
dined at sidewalk cafes? Yes, and some of us take
the subways every day and even board planes for
business and pleasure. There are those among us
who have passed through entire days without thinking
about them, about it. But for many among us, for
so many, there’s a hole in our heart where
the winds still blow with longing. Memory and grief
just don’t come packaged with timelines.
It is that September time when we all remember
and are perhaps once again transported to the specters
of those “birds on fire”, to that fierce
cloud of dust and ash, to the shrieking silence
that followed, and to the knowledge that New York
City was not the only site visited by terror and
death that day. But the “hour of lead”
as we knew it then is hard to sustain. We’re
life breathing souls, so we walk that tightrope
of memory and of new life, of poignancy and of possibility,
of marking that time and embracing those lives while
moving on with our own, however halting our steps
might be.
The immediacy of the violence that visited us and
the magnitude of grief that rent our hearts just
cannot be sustained. I believe that at the core
of our souls and in the soul of this city and this
nation and this world, is the will to peace. It
is a will to peace that can be molded out of the
memory itself, and yes, out of the direct experience
of the violence of that day.
I take heart from the words of that evangelist
of early Christianity, Paul of Tarsus. Paul had
committed his own share of violence, relentlessly
tyrannizing all with whom he disagreed. Then something
happened to him that stopped him short. Something
happened that brought him face to face with the
lesser angels of his mortal self and the better
angels of his nature. He came face to face with
a personification of profound love.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of
angels, but have not love,” wrote Paul, “I
am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
They’re words that echo in a hymn long familiar
to me:
“Though I may speak with bravest fire, and
have the gift to all inspire,
and have not love, my words are vain, as sounding
brass, and hopeless gain.”
Now the word “conversion” doesn’t
often sound in the sanctuaries of liberal faith,
but I do believe that by our complete openness to
earthshaking events, we can be veritably converted
by the power of love and acts of compassion to the
promise of peace. I believe this is possible if
we take in what’s happening and yes, if we
return by memory’s highway to the events of
that day and the days that directly followed. Again
and again we saw the power of love in the deeds
of ordinary men and women. Again and again we witnessed
acts of compassion throughout this city and nation.
It was two weeks after September 11 that I spent
a night at Ground Zero as one of the many chaplains
there. Now there were several weeks that I frequented
the space of the Family Assistance Center at Pier
94 and heard story after story after story. But
there was something about standing, even if for
a night, on the edge of the pit with the firefighters
and the police and the crane operators and the sanitation
workers as they searched and waited and hoped against
hope, that brought home to me the will to do all
possible to work for peace. I stood there, and found
myself asking, “How could I, how could we,
possibly wreak the havoc on others that lay before
me?”
Now I’m not charting an agenda for global
peace, but I am suggesting that we return to those
moments when we were hard put to believe that what
had happened was real. We would wake up the morning
after convinced that it had been the worst of all
nightmares, shaking our heads, wiping our eyes,
knowing that yes, it had been a horrific nightmare,
but it was also real.
I believe that if we moved through that reality
fully and bared ourselves to the depths of that
grief, we would not, could not, visit like violence
on others. But events have unfolded since that day,
that tell us otherwise. The terrorism has continued
and the fear of terrorism has become such a part
of our psyches that if a blackout hits us for reasons
having nothing to do with what we might suspect,
we suspect nonetheless that it’s a terrorist
attack. Yet in the aftermath of the blackout as
in the aftermath of that autumn day two years ago,
we came together as friends and neighbors, and we
practiced peace. These were times when we learned
one another’s names and became part of one
another’s lives and didn’t have to talk
about how we’re all connected because we all
connected.
“War is terrorism, magnified a hundredfold,”
writes a contemporary historian. The terrorist attacks
on America are being duplicated as if in a global
hall of mirrors. Where is the will to peace that
enters us as we stand in memory on the edge of horror?
Where is the will to peace that we yearn for as
we remember him or her or them? How will we find
peace in our hearts without waging peace in our
larger world?
Life will never be the same, not just after September
11, 2001. It’s not been the same since Creation’s
first breath. So shall we convince ourselves that
everything has changed to make sense of the senseless,
to whip ourselves into a frenzy of violence begetting
violence? Or might we return to that day in our
memory’s heart and feel the grief once again,
know it deeply enough, stay with it long enough,
to hear the call that brings us to the surface.
It will come. The chill winds of grief and understandable
fury need not freeze our hearts. Rather the warm
tears shed by so many nations can bathe our wounds,
melt our hearts, and nourish the soil of our common
ground so that peace is possible. It begins with
deep grief and continues with honest remembering.
Doing unto others what we would have them do unto
us and not doing unto others what we would not have
them do to us is a tall order. But love makes it
possible, love for those we have lost and love for
one another whom we have yet to recognize as our
neighbors and friends.
Life is uncertain. It may be brutish. It may be
brief. But when I stand again at the edge of that
ground rendered sacred and profane, I can only say,
“Peace at all costs, peace at all costs.”
How better can we honor those whom we loved?
Adapted by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull from her
sermon at
The Unitarian Church of All Souls, New
York City,
delivered March 16, 2003, the Sunday before the
United States invaded Iraq.
Sources:
The Bible, Revised Standard Version.
“Though I May Speak With Bravest Fire,”
Words by Hal Hopson, Music: Traditional English
melody, adapted by Hal Hopson, from Singing the
Living Tradition, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993
Howard Zinn, Introduction to The Power of Nonviolence:
Writings by Advocates of Peace, Beacon Press, Boston,
2002.
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