My 9-11 Story (Midweek Message)

My 9-11 Story

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

September 11, 2019

In 2001, I was working at the Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland.  

 I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program.  At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place to spend more than 1 hour on transit.  (This has since changed—I now LOVE going through Narita on 12-14 hour trans-Pacific flights, if only for the shower/shave/nap in the hour-rate hotel in the terminal and the great sushi opposite Gate 33 in the International Terminal).  At any rate, I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul. 

About a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what  else?—money and family finances.  We had two kids in college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic.  We both emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me. 

Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife.  And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms. 

 So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.   

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul.  Not good, but I wanted that time at home.

The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast with Elena.  We had started to talk again.  Both of us knew it was important to connect before a separation of three weeks. 

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12 noon flight from Reagan/ National.  We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C. 

Twenty or thirty minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center and Georgetown, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river, in Arlington.  It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be.   There were lots of sirens too. 

Just as we took the turn onto the 14^th Street Bridge across the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges. 

“Please officer, can you let us get over?  One last car?   Otherwise I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.” 

“You won’t be flying anywhere today.  The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S.  Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation’s under attack.  The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.” 

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home.   It took 30 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back.  Cell phones were not working.  The traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock. 

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out.  I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife. 

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon. 

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would have been on that plane. 

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

Our son Charlie hugged us as well.  He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing.  His remains were never found or identified. 

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I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Mennonite minister who coordinated relief work in East Asia and was strongly involved in aiding the hungry in North Korea.  He asked, “So what did you learn from this?  What is the take-away?” 

I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.

I answered him this way:  I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day).  There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good. 

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight.  I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute.  She died on the flight together with everyone else. 

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life.  God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come.    But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared. 

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day.  Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.  

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared,  and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists.  I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved. 

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters,  or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all.  I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.

The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope were empty wishes.  The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen.  This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my feelings to this day.

I feel that each day in my life in the last 18 years has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God.  The most important work I did at State Department came after the attacks.  My calling as a priest came about 5 years after I was granted this extra time. And the blessing of helping Elena as her principal caregiver as she faced Parkinson's disease has come only in the last 8 years, as has my calling to serve the loving community at Trinity Ashland. 

And maybe that is the point:  all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all, though we do not understand how the world's brokenness can continue in the presence of such love. 

 
Thanks be to God.