Craving Quiet

Apart from a PBS Frontline piece entitled "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero", I've deliberately avoided the 9/11 memorial programs and retrospectives that have flooded the airways and the ether over the last several days. 

To be sure, one day . . . someday, I will make the pilgrimages to New York and Pennsylvania.  Respect will be paid. But tomorrow, I think the TV will be off.

We all have our memories of that day.  We all process them differently.  For my own part, I'm not entirely sure what makes 9/11/2011 any different from 9/10, or 9/12, or any other day since that awful, surreal morning.

For 9/11/2001 still affects the lives of every American on a daily basis . . . and will continue to do so until long after all of our lives, and our children's lives, and our childrens' children's lives are over. 

It changed everything.  Evil is real and walks/lives among us.  Safety and security are illusions.  We knew it all along.  But we didn't.

On the flip side, ordinary people can act with amazing grace . . . and make extraordinary sacrifices for their fellow man/woman and the common good.

The Frontline documetary was basically about how different people process grief - and how their faith was challenged, strengthened, or died altogether on that horrible day . . . when many people wondered where God was.

PBS being PBS, the atheists also had their say.  Too much say, I thought.

A focal talking point towards the end of the documentary pondered the image of an unknown man and an unknown woman reaching out to one another and holding hands as they jumped to their deaths from one of the Tower's melting windows. 

A choice.  But love and humanity triumphing, in its way, over unimaginable horror.

Which takes me back to a post from 2006, in which I tried to imagine being in their place:

Have you ever been in the middle of a crowded, noisy somewhere and ever looked out beyond it . . . into a blue sky . . . or a lush green field or forest . . . or out over perfectly still/clear aqua water . . . and wondered (1) how you found yourself in the middle of the crowded/noisy somewhere and (2) why couldn’t you be OVER THERE . . . enjoying the quiet . . . basking in the light of a clear blue sky . . . or lost in fresh green fields & forests . . . or bathed in perfect aqua water?

That has always been my question when I look upon the images of 9/11 . . . especially of the people who were crowded in smoke-choked windows, and clinging to hope in the Towers before they fell. After the phone calls were made and the goodbyes were shared, what could these people see and what were they thinking in those last moments when they looked out . . . beyond the heat and the smoke and the terror . . . into a cool, clear blue autumn sky . . . the same unmarred blue sky that I vividly remember looking up to that day, my eyes swimming in tears?

I wonder if their hearts and souls craved the unreachable, perfect quiet? Were their final thoughts a silent scream pleading, "Please God, get me out of here . . . PLEASE let me be OVER THERE!"?

And then the prayer was answered.

Tomorrow morning, a Sunday morning, I will be craving quiet.  Remembering my countrymen and women.  Pondering the mystery.  And talking to a God I don't talk to enough.  

He had nothing to do with it, yet everything to do with it. 

And He most assuredly was there. 

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