Nine-Eleven 23 Years On (reflection)

 

I want to tell you today a story when my family and I felt God’s love, felt that God was caring for us. But note that without sticking to a Sgt. Joe Friday-like “just the facts ma’am” attitude, there is always a risk that as you tell such a story you may say truly hurtful things about other people, people who may not have experienced a sense of God caring for them.  My story took place 24 years ago today, when terrorists used airplanes as bombs to attack U.S., killing about 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000.   

 

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. I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an 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 with one starting the next year, and it was a sore topic. The argument was so heated that Elena stopped talking to me. 

 

Knowing 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 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.  The morning of my flight, we got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast together.  We started to talk again and were ready for me to go off for 3 weeks. 

 

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12:00 noon flight from Reagan.  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 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 is 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 20 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back.  Cell phones were not working.  The traffic of the city had quickly slowed to full gridlock in the entire DC downtown center. 

 

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 the love of my life, 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 high school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing.  His remains were never found. 

 

So what is my take-away from this story?  How does it relate to the love of God? 

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 and still feels 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 random victims of terrorism or even 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. 

Remember: Jesus ended up on a cross.  This does not prove 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. 

 

I feel that each day in my life in the last 23 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 them.  Shortly after that, came the blessing of 10 years of helping Elena as her principal caregiver as she faced the aggressive Parkinson's disease that eventually killed her, and of 10 years of my calling as a full-time parish priest at Trinity Ashland.  Then came the blessing of finding myself and recovering from the grief of losing spouse and parish ministry: I started singing in high end choirs, learning how to feel things again, started dating again (this time, men, given what I had learned about myself over the years).  And in June I married a new love of my life, Will. We are very happy, and good for each other.  And I am making real progress in my work on a life project, the Ashland Bible, a translation from the original languages into modern and inclusive English.   The last 23 years have been a grace.    

 

And maybe that is the real point:  all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. They are gifts from a loving God.  We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see despite the occasion horror, 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, we can hope with St. Julian of Norwich that in the end, all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.