Forgotten Lessons: Remembering a Nation Unified Post 9-11, 2001

We were all Americans then. From the moment the planes impacting the towers became clearly an intentional act, orchestrated by an enemy both within and without, we were knit together beyond recognition of skin color, socioeconomic strata or religious belief. I remember as it was yesterday standing in a circle of people who had gathered at Rapid City’s Memorial Park for a noon prayer for our nation after the morning’s events. Clasping hands with strangers and familiar friends, looking into watered eyes and tear stained faces and feeling a deep resonant grief for what it all meant that was radiated and communicated by every person there without a single spoken word. All we could do was lift broken hearts to the Almighty for mending. For clarity. For peace. Prayers from opened eyes and open hearts.

There were no Democrats in that circle that day. No Republicans or conservatives. No right wing fanatics or leftist idiots. There were no deplorables or social justice warriors or Trumpublicans or members of “The Resistance.” Only American children of God gathered as one and reaching out in the agony of shared sadness for simple truths and kinship to transcend confusion.

There were no Democrats in that circle that day. No Republicans or conservatives. No right wing fanatics or leftist idiots. There were no deplorables or social justice warriors or Trumpublicans or members of “The Resistance.” Only American children of God gathered as one and reaching out in the agony of shared sadness for simple truths and kinship to transcend confusion.

In that moment and in a way that only built to the following Sunday’s crescendo when churches across America overflowed out of doors and congregations overwhelmed pew and fire code, people pressed in, seeking the comforts of faith and friendship and unity in a way that made the pitiful distinctions of political allegiance and ideological difference seem like sins of selfish children in need of national repentance. And repent we did.

We mourned together on that day, wept together, prayed together and hoped together in a silent vigilant promise to one another that regardless of catastrophe or cataclysm, our bonds of honor, dignity, compassion and faith would see us through. That nothing would divide us. Nothing would dissolve our resolve to hold together and hold each other until the world made sense again, if it ever could. Even if it never would.

My grief today, as much as it always is for the scar that 9-11 has left on an entire world of rewritten maps and laws, manipulated agendas, foisted erosion of liberties and loss of sacred trust, is a grief that we as a nation so quickly forgot the lessons felt so clearly on that Sunday, September 16, 2001.

A list for all the things lost by our nation and lost to the world since those days would exhaust any space alotted for reasonable accounting. The most important things lost aren’t possible to commit to words. American, Afghan and Iraqi children who could barely walk on that day now lie buried for all the ways all the world has changed. Or, was made to change. Children of the millennium have never lived a single day in a world without war. It is doubtful they ever will. In plain and painful truth, it is possible that their own children will fight each other on the streets and battlefields of this nation we call home. It happened once before.

In 2018 and on the brink of smoldering civil conflict in America that threatens to burn full flame in an instant and in a time when things like decency, civility, kindness and understanding seem equal casualties of this strange new age of national estrangement, I wonder what history has in store. I wonder what history remains to be written. I wonder most of all if those grown children of 9-11 will ever feel again as we all did on that sacred Sunday of communal grief as church bells rang from coast to coast and when nothing between us mattered except the love and pain in our hearts and the ground beneath our feet. The bells are tolling again.

What more might we lose, if we fail to heed their call?

And what more will we lose, if we never again remember what it felt like in those days when we brought our common wounds for healing at the altar of God and found the irreplaceable comforts of neighbors and strangers and friends, blind to all else but the deep human cry for peace in our time.

We were all Americans on that day and for a long time after. My prayer today, in history’s long ugly shadow of the twin towers, is not just that we remember 9-11 and those who died. But that someday, we will all find a way to journey back again to that golden September Sunday that followed and that with similar humility, contrition, healing and forgiveness, with hearts open to each other and laid bare before our God, we will all be Americans again.