September 11th

“MRS. BOWDEN!” | SEPTEMBER 11th

Certain events punctuate the present with an exclamation point. Others create new chapters altogether. But some are so jarring they draw to a close what we call “the past.” Those events demand that the resilience of humanity, in cooperation with God’s grace, begin a new volume.

My parents’ generation speaks of remembering exactly where they were when JFK was shot. My generation remembers exactly where we were when the Challenger exploded. And together with us, the millennials, exactly where we were when the towers were hit.

I had just pulled into the little full-serve gas station in my hometown on that still, blue morning, as I had hundreds of times before. But the attendant, instead of walking out slowly to ask, “Fill it up?” instead ran to my window with horror in his eyes screaming, “They’re bombing the City!” He rushed back to his office. I drove away.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was so frightened that I turned on the radio and drove to the nearest familiar house. One of my friends lived just down the block from the gas station. I didn’t knock. “Mrs Bowden!” She was watching the news on the television. The first tower had been hit.

Mrs. Bowden and I had shared a lot of life together up to that moment. She was the “second mother” for our friend group, if you know what I mean. I grew up with her sons. We were in that house all the time. Countless memories of the many chapters of a great story. When the second tower was hit, a new chapter began.

But it was a short chapter - the shortest of the whole book until then. I entitle it, “They’re doing it on purpose.” Then the towers fell. It all got really quiet, as it does when one finishes a book, then closes it gently, then sits back in the chair, looks up, and wonders if the author is going to write another volume. +

ALL COVERED | BY THE SAME ASH

Sin is on display in a new way. Tyrants, kidnappers, and terrorists. Murderers, thieves, and fornicators. There’s just more of them now. And they self-publish.

In that sense, the world is “getting the sin out there” more efficiently than ever. But it’s also still handling it just as terribly. It funds the construction of temples to sacrifice our young. And it packs its coliseums for publicly humiliating and ostracizing scapegoats. It still burns witches. It says, “It’s better than having the Caesar hate us,” and “It’s easier than acknowledging the evil in our own hearts.”

All of these, in my opinion, belong to one or more of the world’s three main ways of dealing with sin. It cancels the person, erasing any memory of him from history; it altogether denies the existence of any God to offend; or it caves in under the weight of self-loathing. Collectively dealing with sin in just one of these ways would be enough to account for the anxiety and neurosis we find in the culture. But often it’s all three, all the time.

The Church, however, proposes forgiveness. It’s a radical idea that Christ alone makes possible. The Pharisees were not wrong when they contended with Jesus, “Only God can forgive sins!” But God gave that authority to His Son, and His Son entrusted it to us. Now, for the first time in history, man has the right to forgive his neighbor. It is no longer an affront to God to forgive our enemy. Nor is it beneath our dignity. Because now, underneath the original sin of our humanity, a new foundation has been built by God. It is called the Church.

No sin is beyond the reach of God’s mercy, because the place where Jesus was baptized in the Jordan is the lowest place on the face of the earth. The Christian, then, is the one who, when dealing with sin, prefers the lowest place with the sinner, because God is there. As for entering into the glory of the Heavenly Feast with Jesus, He Himself told us how that will be. God will say to those who have taken the lowest places in this world, “Friend, come up higher.”

I remember hearing a survivor of September 11th describe his escape from the first tower. He said, “The color of our skin didn’t matter that day. We were all covered by the same ash.” It seems that only the man who strikes his own breast, who knows himself in truth to have been treated mercifully by God, and who acknowledges that he is covered always (while in this world) by the same ash as his fellow man, only he loves in truth, only he can forgive. +