The preacher today shared some memories of September 11, 2001 and suggested we might want to do the same, during this week, not to cling to them but to acknowledge and remember the past, live fully into the present, and embrace the future. Not a bad idea. You might want to do the same thing. I remember…
*Watching the whole event unfold, with my staff, frozen to the TV in our midtown Manhattan office…
*Worrying about my fiancee who was at a meeting closer to Ground Zero than I was…
*The sound of silence in the city streets, even with so many streaming past our building…
*Volunteering to take some shifts as a chaplain, whatever that might mean…
*Days later, putting my fiancee on a train in Grand Central, crowds like a train station in a WW II movie…
*Serving food at the Seamens’ Institute, talking with construction workers in St. Paul’s Chapel…
*Presiding and preaching at a requiem for a clergy couples’ son in our Chapel of Christ the Lord…
*Wondering, as I still do, why this nation chose misguided vengeance rather than reconciliation and healing…
We left church this morning with these words, sung to the tune of “Melita,” the great Navy hymn, still ringing in our ears:
“So brief, the joy since each was born/ So long the years in which to mourn/ Give us compassion to sustain/ Each other in this time of pain.
Guard us from bitterness and hate/ And share with us grief’s crushing weight/ Help us to live from day to day/ Until, once more, we find our way.”
Indeed. Help us, O God, as a individuals…and as a nation…”find our way.”
That We All May Be One 
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