I often tell people that I have a bad memory. It's no exaggeration -- for some reason, I can usually recall minute details about some obscure topic, but I'll handily forget the important things...like which car I drove to the grocery store or whether I've eaten breakfast on a particular day.
What I cannot forget, however, is the shower I took five years ago (please, control your imaginations). As I washed my (more ample but still receding) hair, the morning radio show hosts announced that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Given that these two bloviating fools often made outlandish claims, I reached out of the shower and turned off the radio...I have a strange sense of humor, but such a statement I did not find amusing.
Several minutes later I began to boil water for my tea and oatmeal and I turned on the television. Instead of being greeted by Katie Couric on the Today show, I met the awful and tragic images of two planes slamming into buildings and the realization that something awful, something evil, and something that defied all speech had taken place.
I wanted to memorialize this day, but I do not want to put words where gaping holes in time and space and lives now exists. I am not so brash as to think that I can dress up these events and find meaning in what is so meaningless, so senseless. I can offer only a prayer, a word of encouragement, and the pledge to do what can be done that such acts of horrendous violence are not perpetrated again, especially in the name of religion.
Mommies and Daddies, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, spouses, friends....all of them are the victims of this event. Innocent people who lived out their final day without any sense of what was going to happen...leaving behind innocent people who will live out their days wondering what in fact did happen.
My prayers today are with the victims and their families and loved ones. My prayer is for those who perpetrated these atrocities. My prayer is for each of us for whom it is so difficult to climb out from beneath the rubble that fell upon our hearts that Tuesday morning, for those who still struggle to find hope, for those who are still trapped by the debris and dust and horror of that terrible day.
3 comments:
Well put.
Yep. The hardest part, but I expect the most fruitful one is to pray for those who committed that evil.
And that's not even remotely easy.
AMDG,
-J.
I appreciate what you've said. But the destruction wreaked upon the citizens of Iraq by the U.S. is far, far greater than that visited on the U.S. on 9/11. And the war in Iraq had nothing at all to do with that awful event. Nothing...
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