Two links for September 11

To think about September 11, read Memorializing September 11th by Wilfred M. McClay in National Affairs:

And the greatest good is often done, as William Blake put it, in "minute particulars," in small but focused ways that individual citizens can manage on their own initiative.

To remember September 11, read the poem “For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims” by BJ Ward, available online as a pdf here.

Pray for them

The Anchoress (via NRO) has up a rant about first responders and clergy being excluded from the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It speaks for itself and I have nothing to add to that aspect of it.

I was, however, taken aback by this statement from one of the articles she links:

During the 2001 "Prayer for America" service at Yankee Stadium, leaders from the major religions—Roman Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Sikhs, Greek Orthodox—addressed the crowd of thousands and an even larger TV audience from a podium atop second base.

"I brought every major religion to this event in Yankee Stadium," said Mr. Washington, who is considering holding a news conference on Sept. 11 to object to the exclusion of clergy.

"I'm very upset about it," he said. "This is crazy."

It seems to me that if Mr. Washington is upset because he believes people would benefit from prayer on this sad and solemn occasion then the appropriate thing to hold would be not a news conference, but a prayer service. Or lots of prayer services at lots of houses of worship, perhaps at the same time as the official ceremony and including sincere, loving prayers for all those who were touched by this disaster. I think it would be a particularly nice touch if the first responders were warmly invited to these services.

There are two verses I remember from Sunday School that cover this situation pretty thoroughly:

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.

And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

It seems worth nothing that the latter verse ends:

And they marvelled at him.

Once removed

For the first two week of September 2001, I was vacationing on a small island off the East Coast of the United States. We had neither radio nor television in our rental and we certainly never read the newspaper. We spent our days at the beach and unless we went out to dinner we wouldn’t exchange more than brief greetings and a casual comment about the beauty of the ocean with anyone else. If I hadn’t called my sister-in-law on the morning of September 11 to discuss what to get my brother - her husband - for his birthday I might not have heard about the World Trade Center for days.

But I did call and she told me the Towers had come down and there were rumors of an attack on Washington. I walked into the living room in shock and told my husband. We called the people we knew who worked in Manhattan and made sure they were okay. When the restaurants opened we went to lunch at a bar that had all the televisions tuned to news channels rather than to sports channels and talked about what to do. We considered going home early but decided to stay where we were. We went back to spending our days at the beach. We talked about what had happened and remarked on how even the little air traffic we normally heard had disappeared. On the way home we stopped at the pullout on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and looked at all the ship traffic. We saw a submarine heading out to sea.

The result of all this is that the events of September 11 have always been far less sharp for me than for most Americans. I wasn’t surprised by the news from an impersonal voice on the television or car radio. I didn’t hear about it at work surrounded by near strangers. I don’t have endless loops of the Towers coming down burned into my memory. The contrast between my experience of September 11 and the experience of my neighbors in Northeastern New Jersey is even greater, a yawning chasm.

A few years ago I visited Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, New Jersey. It’s a largely outdoor sculpture garden and a wonderful place. They had bronzed and displayed a poem called “For the Children of the World Trade Center Victims” by BJ Ward. I read it. I cried.

The poem is available online as a pdf here.