Celebrating Unity on 9-11

​Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this 9-11 commemoration again this year. Gathering here this morning to acknowledge this day is a sacred act, and I am honored to be part of it. I’m grateful to the Fire Chief for the invitation to participate.
 
This is the fourth year I have been part of this event, the fourth time I have had the opportunity to reflect on what 9-11 meant and means, to me personally and to us as a nation.
 
My experience of 9-11, of the day of the attacks, was, I think, a little unusual. I was really busy that day. I had just celebrated my 36th birthday. I had two small children at home. I was a teacher at the time, and preoccupied with all the craziness that comes with the start of a new school year. As a result, the full horror of what was happening didn’t hit me right away.
 
When I first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I assumed that it was a small plane and that the crash was an accident. I didn’t learn any different for the next hour or two.
 
As the news kept coming, I gradually realized that it wasn’t a small plane and that it wasn’t an accident. Our nation was under attack by hostile agents who had killed hundreds innocent people in an effort to terrorize us and to undermine our financial, political, and military institutions.
 
But by the time I fully realized we had been attacked, and as I learned the whole story over the next few days, there was already a lot more to it. First responders had already rushed in to help the people trapped in the wreckage of the World Trade Center, many at the sacrifice of their lives. Passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 had already retaken control of their plane from hijackers, knowing full well that they would die.
 
The story had villains. It had victims, too, lots of them, people we will never forget. But it also had heroes, and we will never forget the heroes either.
 
9-11 was a horrible atrocity. It was a day of tragedy and loss. But it was also a day of courage and of self-sacrifice. It was a day of evil, but it was also a day of good.
 
And that goodness kept going.
 
Soon I began to see American flags everywhere. People started coming together. People tried to do whatever they could to help. This was ordinary people, not heroes necessarily, but good people who had been reminded about what matters most by the tragedy of the day and the example of its heroes.
 
As a nation, we were angry, of course, and rightly so. We grieved the losses of that day, and we still do. But we were also inspired. And we were united.
 
After 9-11, faced with a common enemy, brought together by common anger and grief but also inspiration, we found that many of the things we tend to fight over among ourselves didn’t matter so much. We remembered our common commitment to the values on which our nation is founded: the self-evident truth that all people are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
 
For me personally, the most moving experience of unexpected unity to come out of the horror of 9-11 happened a couple of months after the attacks. I was living in Rome Georgia. Out of the blue, I received an invitation from the Muslim community of Rome to join them in a feast of unity. Until I received that invitation, I didn’t know there was a Muslim community in Rome. But that year they invited all the religious leaders in the town to come together for a shared meal.
 
Rome’s Muslim community wanted to assure their non-Muslim neighbors that they, too, condemned the terrorist attacks for what they were, unjustifiable violence in service of an evil cause, that they, too, believed in the founding principles of our nation, that they, too, grieved 9-11 as patriotic Americans. At their feast, despite our religious differences, we were all brothers and sisters, and we were all Americans. It was a beautiful thing.
 
That kind of unity, and the goodness and generosity of so many people in the days and weeks after the attacks, is what 9-11 has come to mean for me.
 
Sadly, as we all know, the unity didn’t last. Our lives resumed their courses. In my case, I was still busy with work and Church and family, so I didn’t pursue what might have been wonderful friendships with my hosts in the local Muslim community.
 
More generally, as time went by, many Americans seemed to lose sight of how much we share, of our common commitment to our founding values, despite our political and other differences. In recent years, our divisions have become bitter.
 
And that’s a good reason for us to come together every year on this day. We come together to remember and grieve the victims of the attacks. We come together to celebrate the courage and self-sacrifice of the first responders that day, and every day since. And we come together to remind ourselves that we are Americans and that, when faced with danger or tragedy or suffering, we can come together as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
 
I’d like to end with a prayer.
 
Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace. In your name we pray. Amen.