To Remember Is to Make Present: Twenty-Five Years After September 11

 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was rector of a cathedral parish. As the first reports came over the radio and the second tower fell, I asked that all our students be gathered into the church for Mass. I remember walking to the ambo and looking out at rows of young faces — some of them barely old enough to read — and seeing, unmistakably, fear. They did not yet have the words for what was happening. Neither, in truth, did I. But I understood that my task in that moment was not to explain the tragedy; it was to bring the comfort of Christ’s presence into the chaos, to stand as a sign that even here, even now, God had not absented Himself from His people.

I have carried that morning with me for twenty-five years. And this anniversary, like every anniversary before it, is an occasion not merely to recall the past but to make it present — for in the Church’s own understanding of memorial, anamnesis, to remember rightly is to allow the past to act again upon us, to let its grace and its grief both press upon the living. This is painful memory. It does not grow easier with distance; if anything, the years sharpen what was lost.

And yet — and this is the paradox we are called to hold — out of that day’s horror came something we too easily forget we once possessed: a unity of mind and heart among our fellow citizens, a solidarity that crossed every line we normally draw between ourselves. Strangers gave blood. Neighbors who had never spoken stood together at vigils. And the world, in a rare and moving gesture, stood with us — Le Monde’s declaration that “we are all Americans” was not rhetoric; it was recognition of a common wound. That solidarity, both within our own borders and beyond them, is itself worth mourning today, for it is largely gone — spent, it seems, on smaller and pettier quarrels.

We remember, too, the courage of that day — courage that asked nothing in return. The first responders who ran toward the towers as everyone else ran away, many of whom still bear, a quarter-century later, the physical marks of what they breathed and carried that morning. The passengers of United Flight 93, ordinary men and women who, in the space of a phone call, resolved to do the extraordinary — “Let’s roll” — and who gave their lives to avert a catastrophe aimed at the heart of our government. And I remember, too, a president who in the days that followed had the moral clarity to stand in a mosque and insist that our Muslim neighbors not be made to answer, as a people, for the crimes of a few. That refusal to scapegoat a whole community for the sins of extremists was itself an act of courage — a lex vivendi lived out in real time, a practical charity that too few of our public figures today seem capable of summoning.

It is that contrast that weighs on me as we mark this anniversary today. Twenty-five years ago, tragedy briefly burned away our pettiness and revealed what we owed one another. Today, our public life is characterized by a vindictiveness that treats the fellow citizen not as neighbor but as adversary, and treats disagreement not as the ordinary friction of a free people but as grounds for contempt. We have, in a sense, inherited the solidarity of September 12 and squandered it.

But memory need not only condemn; it can also summon. The dead of that day — nearly three thousand of them, of every faith and none, of every background our nation contains — are owed more than our grief. They are owed our recommitment to the unity they, in their deaths, briefly called forth from us. Let their memory be, as we say of the just, a perpetual blessing — not a relic of a single terrible morning, but a standing invitation to the solidarity, the courage, and the charity that morning revealed us capable of. If we could find that in the ashes of the towers and the field in Shanksville, we can surely find it again, without needing tragedy to compel us.

Requiescant in pace.