Remembering and Keeping Faith
A September 11th Reflection

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, September 11, 2006

Am I, are you, our brothers, our sisters, keeper? This is one of the questions on my heart.

There is a hole in the sky of New York City…there is a hole in the ground at ground zero…there is a hole near the Pentagon, and a hole in the field in Pennsylvania…there is a hole in so many many families…and there is a hole in our hearts as we relive that day five years ago.

I remember standing in a meeting room at church that morning…watching the towers crumble…seeing it for the first time…I felt a coldness move through my body…I felt myself as separate and alone…in a kind of atomized state…

Last night when I watched video film taken that day, by two young men who were making a film about a probationary fireman- and saw the footage they took in the towers on 9/11…I felt the same coldness move through me…again, I felt completely alone in the world…separate.

In some way, I can’t quite explain, the shock my eyes were taking in…kind of paralyzed me…I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk coherently, I couldn’t get on with things that day…or even last night…I stayed up quite late…and then had fear-filled dreams.

I feel like I’m still in shock. I suspect many of you feel the same.

When I think of it…think deeply on those events…I feel myself exist in the world in bold relief…almost like I am in outline…standing out in the world…alive within life.

And I also feel, within myself, the solidity of those who lived through the horror and those who died that day. It’s as if, I caught the falling bodies, one by one, it’s as if, I collected the ash and bones…and am carrying them still.

Somehow, I feel myself standing among the dead, in a place where there is no place to stand…I stand in the emptiness created by the dissolution of the towers…those tragic minutes erased boundaries…left everything vague, white, ashen…I no longer feel a clarity about where a skyscraper begins and ends…where a jet will land or fall, where a street becomes a hole, where a person becomes ash and dust. All lines are blurred when I think of that day…and of those events.

Clarity, sureness has been lost. It still seems surreal, not real.

I don’t feel the pain every day, but the uncertainty is always there.

I’m still too cold to feel the heat of anger or hate, or the need for revenge that some have felt. I’m still lost…suspended in that place where there is no place to stand. The hole in ground zero, that hole in the heart of NYC, that hole in the heart of our nation, that hole in my heart.

Perhaps we all feel alone…isolated, atomized…perhaps we all carry burdens from that day…the ghosts and angels from that day walk beside us all.

But erasure of boundaries can be a good thing. After 9/11 we wanted to meet our Muslim neighbors, In the months following, I visited both a Mosque and a Muslim School. We wanted to stand on street corners in our neighborhood holding lighted candles, we wanted to gather in our sanctuaries for consolation, we wanted to be with those who would understand, we wanted to thank the firemen and the policemen, we wanted to acknowledge the life within a high rise office building…all the workers, all the executives, all the secretaries…and we wanted the world to see us in a new light. Because for a moment we were more like the rest of the world.

Wounded and in need of help. Experiencing evil close at hand. In those days we knew we were our brothers, our sisters, keepers.

In those first few days, we shouldered the grief together…we knew the terrorist act as uncommon, and rare evidence of the worst of human nature…we saw in each others eyes, the reflection of the crumbling towers…we had lived through it together. We were still alive.

And now, five years later. So much more grief, so much more killing, so much more fear. As a nation we are desperately trying to redraw boundaries, to clarify and reinforce separations among nations, among faiths, among neighbors. Now the pictures of the dead are not office workers, firemen, travelers and pilots, now the dead are soldiers, and civilians far away.

Staggering out of the rubble of that September day…our country’s leadership has lost its way…

The world cannot be put back together the way it was…we must find a new way forward…we must preserve the best of our national values and we are not the first nation to have to rebuild out of the ruins…we are not the first to have no dead to bury, we are not the first to be afraid…. We are not the first to need help.

Perhaps it is good news, that the boundaries are blurred and destroyed. The walls have come down…there is a hole big enough to hold the foundation of a new day, a vision for our nation. War is not the answer.

Those of us who love peace must awake and find our voice….we must find a firm place to stand…we must join with others who pray for peace….we must dissent and we must work…to lift this nation that we love to a higher destiny, a new plateau of compassion, a more noble expression of humaneness. We don’t yet have all the answers, but we have the vision of unity, of compassion without boundaries.

We must do stand for peace on behalf of the grandchildren and the great grandchildren of the 9/11 victims and for the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Only then will we have gained more than we lost on that beautiful blue sky day.

And to build in its place a center of welcome for the world, a center of peace for the world. A unity out of blessed diversity. This is our hope, our dream, our commitment. And in this way we will learn together how to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So May it Be/Shalom/Salaam/Peace