Healing and Forgiveness – Can it start Today?

9/11/2001, that’s one of the days when we all remember exactly where we were when the attack happened. I was at my desk, saw the pictures of the burning Twin Towers, and closed my office and turned on the TV in the living room.

Together with millions of other people, I was suddenly there in downtown Manhattan through the images on television. We stared with the people of New York at the plane-shaped holes in the Twin Towers. We watched people, trapped high above the ground and driven by the terror of the fire, jump to their deaths. Then we watched the two gigantic towers of steel and concrete collapse, dragging thousands of people with them to their deaths.

Disbelief, shock, sadness, horror—so many emotions were set free.

Where was my husband? When I finally reached him on the phone, I begged him to come home. His crew worked in a public building downtown in Texas. I needed him beside me, wanted him safe. The feeling of not being secure is perhaps the worst feeling you can have.

Hours later, in the afternoon, I sat outside, on the steps to our front porch, and smoked a cigarette. I remember the stillness. The sky was clear, no white lines left by planes; all flights had been canceled. Neighbors came out and joined me. We all felt the same way. How do you articulate a turmoil of emotions? Sometimes words are not big enough, but faces are. People’s faces showed what I felt.

The pictures of 9/11 will stay with me for the rest of my life. The fire. People who jumped out of the windows. The collapsing twin towers. The smoke, the cloud of ash. The faces of the firefighters and helpers who worked tirelessly.

That day changed America. It changed Americans. It changed the world. It changed me.

Twenty-five years ago, the world stood beside us. Our allies spoke up and assured us they were on our side.

When the World Trade Center burned in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia, when almost 3,000 people died in a few hours, it was clear: “Nothing will be the same after this day of terror,” it was said, and at the time, that sounded plausible. How could a country wounded like this ever return to normality?

America declared war!

But the enemy had no state, no army, no atomic bombs, no infrastructure, and no territory, and therefore no border. And since the nature of an enemy also determines how it is fought, the war on terrorism has also become a borderless, amorphous war that takes place largely in secret. 

I don’t have to write about the wars that followed or the thousands of soldiers and civilians that were killed. The United States of America was wounded, and the people who caused the hurt had to pay.

Revenge. Vengeance. Hatred.

Today, two decades later, the pain, the anger, the grief, the shock that there are people in the world who want to do something like this to the United States, have subsided. More than a third of people in the United States are under the age of 25. They have no, or at best a vague personal memory of that terror. But the new normal is different from the old normal. 9/11 has engraved itself in the everyday life of Americans in many ways, whether they experienced the day themselves or not. The country and life are indeed no longer the same as they were on September 10, 2001.

As an agnostic, I am a bystander.

I watch how religion and organized religion are lived, without living it myself. It is a peculiar position to be in, but an interesting one. I listen, and I wonder. Isn’t it time to live what you preach? Isn’t it time to not just talk but walk…in Jesus’s shoes?

Isn’t there a point when we have to live what we preach?

I like much of what Jesus stands for and much of what he taught. Differently, I admire Plato and Socrates. Across centuries and very different philosophies, I hear variations of the same challenge:

Be better. Be good. Rise above.

Why can’t we forgive?

Not just our enemies but ourselves.

The hatred planted that day has grown. It’s an enormous beast now, and it lashes out toward everything different, strange, foreign, or unfamiliar. Just like love, hate has to go somewhere.

Is that why we have turned against each other?

I don’t know much, and I don’t dare to tell other people what to do, but in my humble opinion, it’s time to forgive.

We will never forget, and we will always remember and honor the fallen.

But perhaps remembering does not require us to keep hating.

Forgiveness! Can it start today?