Where Were You?

A 9/11 Reflection

Where were you?  Who should be allowed to participate?  Who should be kept out?  Should it be a celebration of life?  A memorial to the dead?  We were forever changed!  We haven’t changed a bit!  We came together.  We’ve been broken apart.  What do you think?  What’s your story?  Where were you on 9/11?  Where were you?  Where were you?

It is as if we are asking not each other, but God.  Where, dear God, were you?  Why did not Your hand stay the course of destruction?  Why did you not save us human beings from ourselves?  It is the question believing humans tend to ask only when the tragedy happens to us, forgetting John Donne’s poignant rhetorical advice to the ages: . . .  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee . . .”  — Donne, Meditation XVII

The images of September 11, 2001 are iconic.  The sound bites endless.  And the never-ending flow of statistics both tell and hide the story in all its horrible and glorious humanity: 

• Time it took to build the Twin Towers: almost twenty years

• Time it took the Towers to fall: 12 seconds

• Total number killed in attacks (as of 9/5/02): 2,819

• Number of nations whose citizens were killed in attacks: 115

• Number of people who lost a spouse or partner: 1,609

• Estimated number of children who lost a parent: 3,051

• Tons of debris removed from site: 1,506,124

• Percentage increase in Peace Corps applications from 2001 to 2002: 40

• Percentage increase in CIA applications from 2001 to 2002: 50

• Firefighters & police officers of New York City represented 13% of those who died

• FDNY & NYPD families received 25% of charitable monies raised

SOURCES:   Building of the World Trade Center and Statistics a Year Later

The statistic that strikes me the most is that the Peace Corps saw a 40% increase in applications, while the CIA saw a 50% increase.  People wanted, it seems, to do something.  The response, either to peace or to something more difficult to define, probably depended largely on individual personalities and convictions.  

It’s been 10 years now.  I wonder whether the increased interest in either or both held true over time.  Somehow I doubt it.  We’re a forgetful people.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  But sometimes it’s a costly luxury, this failing to remember.

And so I sit quietly at home, remembering and thinking on scripture passages that speak of the silence of God . . . not the non-responding silence of the seemingly absent deity, but the silence of the “still, small voice” . . . the silence that begets silence as its own worship-filled response. . . the silence of my own re-write of the Psalm . . . know that I am God and be still . . . it is the enormous silence of facing my God, who in the face of my own questions (to paraphrase William Sloan Coffin), is asking me how I could have let such things happen.

Where were you? 

Where was I?