Dear Friends of Second Church,

The anniversary of 9/11 comes on another beautiful morning, much like the one many of us remember from 2001.  

23 years later, the shock of it is hard to explain — “explanations” don’t convey the feelings of it very easily.  

The photographs do a better job at expressing the shattering humanity of it, and some have become iconic (from what we would come to call Ground Zero, there were “the falling man,” “the dust woman,” “the twisted cross,” “the fire department chaplain,” to name a few).  

As time has gone on, those images have gone from being almost unbearable to indispensable, at least for me.  

Within our faith communities, the conversation has also shifted.  

Especially in the first year, there was a lot of reflection about where God was—should have been? Must have been?— on 9/11, including how we could even possibly speak about God in the wake of such a tragedy.  

There are no simple answers to such questions, and time has not offered much new clarity along those lines.   Many gestures toward an answer risk taking someone’s pain too lightly, as if preserving our ways of talking about God should matter more than the lives of our neighbors, both those who survived and those who didn’t.  

I don’t want to do that, either.  

But with each anniversary, faith communities come face to face with a central task of our own vocation: what it means to be communities of memory.  

In particular, Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities — the People of the Book, as we are sometimes known — have always understood ourselves in relation to a God who enters into human history, and the act of gathering in worship to be one of remembering loss as well as victory.  

What makes us faithful is, to some extent, our profound refusal to forget.  This is what tells us who we are and guides us toward what we will be.  

For Christians, we don’t remember the joy of Easter without the devastation of Good Friday.  

We don’t remember the blessings of the moment without the memory of the women and men who came before us and lived in faith as best they knew how. 

That commitment to memory is large part of what gives us “eyes to see” the presence of holiness among us now.  

Similarly, it is the memory of those 9/11 firefighters walking resolutely into the towers that has taught me to look at first responders with ongoing gratitude and concern.  Few of them were probably perfect people, or “saints” in the usual sense of the term.   But memory teaches us to see depth of what it takes to do that work, and sometimes asks of those who do.  

I respect the sanctity of that.  And thank God for it.  

May their memory guide us in ways of healing, peace-making, and new life–and the vocation of being the church.

See you in church….