A Ministry of Idaho Mountain Ministries
Thoughts
on 9/11
Thoughts crowd into my mind each year on 9/11: The evil of those
who instigated it, the
grief and righteous indignation of the nation, the bravery
of the passengers in Flight 93, the selfless actions of the first responders, the
compassion poured out on those who lost loved ones, the bold response of our leaders. But one idea always stands above others: the uncertainty of life. It
was a normal day: September 11, 2001. No one expected to die.
Carolyn and I knew one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight
93; On board was Rev. Francis Grogan, a Catholic priest who ministered in North
Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In a recent e–mail, Fr. Francis had written,
Since I last wrote I have been asked to move on to be
Chaplain for a retirement home for our Holy Cross Teaching Brothers. They have
need of a new Chaplain having lost their Chaplain of some 23 years in an
accident on their property. So, I'm packing up and moving on. All your thoughts
in "Legacies" fit into my uprooting. I go from Massachusetts to New
York State (to Valatie, just south east of Albany.) Actually I'll have less
responsibility. I can relax in my 76th year and share my last years with retired
teaching Brothers!
A
few days later I read this report:
Washington
Post, September 12, 2001
The
victims (on United Airlines, Flight 93) included a Roman Catholic Priest, the
Rev. Francis Grogan, 76, who had been bound for a vacation with his younger
sister in Ramona, California, before assuming a new position as the chaplain of
a retirement home for Holy Cross brothers in Upstate New York.
Life’s uncertainty has inspired numerous metaphors: It is a dream,
a flying shuttle, a mist, a puff of smoke, a shadow, a gesture in the air, a
sentence written in the sand, a bird flying in one window of a house and out
another. The most apt symbol was suggested by a friend who reckoned that the m-dash
that separates the birth and death dates on a tombstone represents the brevity
of one’s life.
It’s
good to ponder the transiency of life now and then. I think of Moses’ prayer:
“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”
(Psalms 90:12). Life is too short to treat carelessly.
The
country parson, George Herbert, said he used to frequent graveyards to “take acquaintance
of this heap of dust,” and wrote…
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat,
And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayest know,
That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayest fit thy self against the fall.
Herbert
finds himself in a graveyard and ponders his own passing. He pictures the "dust
that measures all our time” running through the hourglass of our flesh, which
will itself in time become dust and be laid to rest with the ashes of those
who lay beneath his feet. “Mark here below (in the grave),” he writes, “how
tame these ashes are, how free from lust”—how unmoved by passion for money, sex
or power.
It’s
high time we took acquaintance of our
dust, its transient lust and what alone will endure.
David
Roper
9/11/21
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