Remembering 9/11 – 25 Years Later

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in the departure lounge of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, waiting for my connecting flight home from Boston, where I had been attending a meeting the day before. Blissfully unaware of what was happening in New York, I was quietly reading a book and planning the afternoon in the back of mind. As I recall, my connecting flight was scheduled for later in the morning, so I didn’t pay much attention to the announcements at first.

At some point, I looked up and noticed that the television monitors had been turned off and that there were fewer people in the departure area than there had been before, so I wondered if I had missed something. Then there were a series of announcements about the airspace being closed, the length of time increasing with each one, until I heard “five hours” and the suggestion that passengers might want to find accommodations for the night. This was obviously not going to be a short delay.

I called home to ask my mother to pick up my younger daughter from school, and she burst into tears. She had been waiting for a call, surrounded by neighbours and my brother, everyone wondering if I had made it out of Boston safely. That’s when I became aware of the gravity of the situation. I called my wife and then headed to the baggage area, where the luggage of those who thought they would be flying that day had been offloaded. I collected my suitcase and began calling hotels, but by then they were full.

So I began calling friends, finally reaching Frank Rivas, minister of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, where I had been for a board retreat only two weeks earlier. He picked me up and took me in. Frank lived under a flight path, but it was eerily silent for the next few days except for military planes. The church staff and I gathered around the one television in the office and watched in horror as the twin towers of the World Trade Center came down. There weren’t words. It was all beyond words, just raw emotion. We wept, and hugged, and some of us prayed.

Over the next few days, we watched the continuing coverage, reached out to see if there were places where we could help, even from a distance, and reflected on what it all might mean. I was back in Winnipeg late on Saturday, then drove up to the little Hnausa Unitarian Chapel where I preached a very different sermon that the one I had planned. The morning’s theme became “The Faith Above All Fear,” but I cannot recall what I said or whether it made a difference for anyone. My mind was a blur by then.

A couple of weeks after the attack, Lillian Vilborg MacPherson, one of my predecessors as editor of the Icelandic newspaper Lögberg-Heimskingla, devoted one of her thoughtful editorials to what had happened, describing it as “a black day for the world” while acknowledging the stress that many were feeling.

“Many have waited with diminishing hope for news of missing loved ones. Many have lived with disruption to their lives. … For many, life has changed inexorably.” She addressed the talk of war that inevitably emerged, while recalling stories from her own childhood that she admitted she couldn’t comprehend at the time. “This is a very sad time in the world. We can only hope and pray that the leaders we have elected, who are in office at this time, will act wisely, and from that place of love in search of justice rather than hate, anger, or fear.” That’s not what happened, in hindsight, but it was the aspiration of many.

Still, Lillian was an optimist at heart, with a positive view of human nature, so she reminded her readers that: “Stories of acts of heroism and kindness abound. That essence of goodness and love that makes up a large part of humankind pushes to the fore at times like these.”

Looking back over the past 25 years, it seems clear that the world did change that day. It still seems so surreal, and an entire generation has now grown up in its aftermath, but I find myself stirred by Lillian’s calm, clear reflections just two weeks after the event and her admonition to act wisely “from that place of love in search of justice rather than hate, anger, or fear.” After a quarter of a century, I find comfort in her words as I choose to remember the heroism and kindness, goodness and love that pushed to the fore after the nightmare of it all.