Let it be

Today has been a rough day. Every year on this day, we Americans, New Yorkers, remember where we were, what we were doing. Everyone marks this day in their own way. And now it's been ten long years, and we say goodbye to a decade lived under the shadow of the Twin Towers.

I can remember passing under them as a kid, bending my head as far back as it would go and still unable to see the top of the World Trade Center buildings. There was almost something sacred about them, that something in this world was bigger than me. It's like a punch to the gut to see the Manhattan skyline with those buildings missing like a giant gaping hole. And more, to think of all those trapped inside, how when the buildings fell, they took 3,000 innocent lives with them.

I visited Ground Zero for the first time in early October 2001, only a few weeks after the attacks. There was a makeshift chain-link fence set up around the site which, then was still a smoldering, dark, smoky pile of horrifically twisted steel.


I will never forget, as long as I live, what it felt like, smelled like, walking down that long block to Ground Zero, made eerily still by the death that, too, had passed by. Everything was still covered in a thick, powdery grey ash, like a blanket laid over a body at rest. The dust caked cars still left there, shoes, crushed phones, abandoned ambulances, blown out shop windows and apartments. I will never forget turning from busy, bustling downtown Manhattan into what could only be described as a graveyard.  I could never fully describe the feelings that day, looking over the site, my parents, my family, New Yorkers to the core, weeping.




Ten years later, I've grown up a little, I have lived a little bit more, I have lost. I've said goodbye to friends and family who answered a call to serve this country overseas with a bravery and a bones-deep courage that is staggering. I've watched others do the same; haven't we all? I've tried to make sense of death, of this brave new world we all find ourselves in, of the raw, pure evil that has taken so much from so many. I've asked, like I'm sure all of us have at some point in the last ten years, "Why, then, should you forget us,
abandon us so long a time?" 

But now, I think, there is no making sense of it. There is no understanding it.

And the only thing to do is to keep on living. To not give in to the temptation to let this heart of flesh become a heart of stone. We hear story after story of those who died spending their last moments on this earth speaking love to their families. Because, at the very end, isn't that the only thing that really matters? Isn't that the lesson of 9/11? Love will be with us to the bitter end, and for all eternity. Not death, not evil, not hate, not anger will last, not money -- only Love.

When I find myself down on my luck, moping about being unemployed, being in debt, the weather being too hot, whatever, I remember that I am a child of God, that I am free no matter what because He lives, and He broke the chains. I was lost but now I'm found. Evil did not win that day. And that is a truth it has taken me a long time to accept, and one I will probably wrestle with for the rest of my life. Evil did not win. Death did not win. Christ had and has and will have the victory.

The endless stories of heroism, of men and women who died helping others to safety, who rushed into hell when everybody was rushing out, the firefighters and policemen and EMTs and priests and ministers  , the ordinary people who flew a plane into the ground who likely saved the White House and hundreds of others they had never met: This is Love. Because we were created by Love Himself, and we bear His marks. He lives and dwells within us, this Love.

So, now, when I visit the new memorial, I will likely feel, as I have always felt at Ground Zero, a deep, profound sadness. But I can also smile because I know that no matter what happens next, Love will always win. It already has. Hallelujah.