There is a moral dimension to memory. We have a duty to remember well. Today marks 25 years since the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Early that Tuesday morning, with a sky as blue as anyone could remember along the Atlantic seaboard, 19 men boarded four separate commercial aircraft on the East Coast. Once airborne, the men, trained and financed by the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, killed the aircrafts’ pilots and hijacked the planes.
At 8:46 AM, American Airlines Flight 11, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. At 9:03 AM, United Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower. At 9:37 AM, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Just before 10:00 AM, the passengers aboard hijacked United Flight 93, learned of the attacks in New York and Washington, and though unarmed, attempted to retake the cockpit. A struggle ensued. At 10:03 AM, the plane crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. United 93 is believed to have had as its target the United States Capitol. At 9:59 AM, the world watched as the 110-story South Tower collapsed. Just 29 minutes later, at 10:28 AM, 102 minutes after the attacks began, the North Tower collapsed.
Remarkably about 12,000 people were evacuated from below the crash zones of the Twin Towers, but 2,749 people were killed, including 147 airline passengers, and 412 heroic rescue workers from the New York City’s Fire and Police Departments and Port Authority. At the Pentagon, 125 were killed in the building and 59 on Flight 77. 33 passengers and seven crew members died on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.
These things are what we remember. And we should. We should remember all that evil wrought that day. But it shouldn’t be all we remember.
In Matthew, Jesus tells a story known as the Parable of the Tares. He compares the Kingdom of Heaven to a man who sows good seed in his field but whose enemy comes and sows tares, or weeds, in the midst of the wheat. When the wheat comes up, the tares do too. When the man’s servants ask him whether they should gather up the tares, the man tells them, “No, lest when you’re gathering the tares, you uproot the wheat. Permit both to grow together until the harvest.” In the season of the harvest, he says, harvesters would gather the tares and bind them in bundles to be burned, and the wheat would then be gathered and stored in his barn.
Here, Jesus seems to be saying that good and evil are as inextricable in the world as they are in the human heart, and that once sown, they can’t be separated. He suggests that God, like the man in the story, is saying for a time, “Permit them to grow together.”
About a decade ago, my family visited the National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero, where in one hushed alcove, there are photos of people in the towers who, being above where the planes hit, jumped to their deaths rather than be asphyxiated or burned to death. There, I read a quote from an eyewitness named James Gilroy. From a nearby skyscraper, Gilroy watched as a woman stepped to a window high in the North Tower.
“She had a business suit on,” Gilroy remembered. “Her hair all askew. This woman stood there for what seemed like several minutes and then she held down her skirt and she jumped off the ledge. I thought,” Gilroy said, “how human, how modest, to hold down her skirt before she jumped.”
Remembering well entails not just remembering soul-stirring things like this but trying to hear God speaking through those who perished.
On September 14, three days after the attacks, six reporters from the New York Times divided a stack of missing person flyers collected from lower Manhattan and began dialing the phone numbers on the flyers and speaking to family members of the lost. The reporters then began to write not obituaries but brief stories filled with telling details about every single extraordinary soul who lived, before dying that day.
The collection, entitled simply Portraits: 9/11/01, reveals the distinct and subtle beauty of our everyday existence. It’s a testament to the unforced dedication with which those who perished that day, and most of us, all over the world, quietly go about our lives as wives, as husbands, as life partners, as newlyweds, as parents, as students, as traders and teachers, coaches and clerks, window washers and investment bakers, security guards, police chiefs, and pastry chefs. And it’s in opening this sacred book of life each year that persuades me we live in a field of wheat, not of tares.
God—help us to remember well. Amen.
