Sunday Morning, Sept. 16, 2001
Posted September 11th, 2007 by Graeme Burk
These are some stories about Sunday, September 16, 2001. True things happened in them. But they are stories.
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Peter didn't go to church a lot, but on September 16, he made the effort to abandon CBC Radio's Sunday Edition and leave the house at 9:30 in the morning.
Five days before, on September 11, Peter was in his cubicle in the software company where he worked as a programmer. It was go-live day for a project they had been working on. In the kitchenette, a bottle of Veuve-Cliquot was chilling for a celebratory drink scheduled for 2 pm.
The bottle would stay unopened in the fridge until Christmas.
Maddeningly, there were no TVs in the office. When Peter found out about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, he had to rely on the web for news, learning about the unfolding tragedy through the BBC website (the CNN and CBC websites had crashed their servers by 10 am). At around 11, he received an e-mail from a friend writing from Long Island. There was no subject line and just a single phrase: "It's gone."
The rest of the day--the rest of the week-was a cacophony of news reports and talking heads and the weeping families of the dead and the missing, punctuated by the same horrifying images again and again: Planes. Explosions. Billowing Dust Clouds. Falling men. Ground zero.
Peter was 32. For the rest of the week he went to sleep with the lights on.
Peter went to church on Sunday, September 16. He did not go all that often, but he went that Sunday. He went...he didn't know why but he went anyway.
What he got was a Sunday like any other. A Sunday where the events of the week didn't touch the service. The usual hymns, the usual readings and the usual prayers. And when the minister got up to preach, he said the events of September 11 were a tragedy...and then did his usual sermon.
Peter didn't know what he was looking for, but he knew then and there he didn't find it.
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Molly went to her church because it affirmed the values of justice and peace which she cherished. A child advocate lawyer, she had gone there for years. She met a man she would marry, and later amicably divorce, there. She served on committees, sang in the choir for a while and recently spearheaded a refugee sponsorship process. She felt church was a natural outgrowth of her activism.
On September 11, she was in a meeting in the conference room at the office where she worked when it was interrupted by a senior partner who told them what was happening. She stood in reception with 20 or so colleagues watching everything unfold on CNN until the second tower fell. At that point, she picked up her three year-old son from daycare, took him home and baked cookies with him. She quietly cried into a pillow while her son watched Thomas the Tank Engine.
She intellectually understood that the terrorism which just took place on US soil was happening elsewhere in the world all the time. It didn't help her from feeling any less safe than at any time in 42 years of living. When she took her son to the park, she was constantly looking up, feeling as though any second now, all this would be taken from her forever.
On Sunday, September 16, Molly went to her church as she always did. And the service espoused the values of peace and justice she had always believed in. But for the first time ever, she was offended. She was offended by a litany that asked God to be with all sides of the conflict. And when she heard a sermon that reminded people to consider that, for all the deaths in New York and Washington, many more have died in US-sponsored actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan, and Turkey and that the actions of September 11 were a direct response to an indifferent American hegemony, she was more than offended--she lost heart.
Molly had started smoking again the previous Wednesday. After the sermon, she went outside and smoked another, nodding to two or three bewildered-looking visitors who left. After she was done, she got her son from Sunday school and drove home. Never to go back to church again.
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Sunday, September 16, 2001 might have been the most important church service for a whole generation. Some people experienced expressions of patriotism and jingoism. Some experienced prophesy against the principalities and powers. Some learned new depths of lament. And some heard nothing new at all.
These are some stories about Sunday, September 16, 2001. True things happened in them. But they are stories. Stories about how if we miss the moment to speak to people's hearts--it's a moment wasted forever.
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Comments
Yikes!
Thanks for your thought-provoking blog, Graeme. It makes me anxious to think we have to fret and worry that much about every single thing we say and do. I also believe that no matter how perfect the service/sermon is, it doesn't touch everyone. Most growing, vital churches only retain about 10% of their visitors.
Thankfully, God has some responsibility in the "saving of the lost", eh?
the word?
I agree with Anna that a preacher or worship leader cannot carry the burden of feeling that every effort must hit the target's center. What I appreciated about the BLOG was the sense that people often don't know what they come for but they know when they don't find it.
As a preacher/clergy I used to find it incredibly frustrating to ask people to identify those intangibles that make people decide in those first few seconds whether or not there is a "fit." They usually cannot say and yet those "pre-impressions" carry so much weight.
Now that I am on the other side of the pulpit, I often know the feeling and surprisingly am becoming aware of how much of me is making a decision about "fit" before I even sit down.
9/11 sermons
I like the stunning honesty of this blog. It gives me pause for thought as a citizen of the world, and leader in the church.
As a citizen of the world, I too cried quite a bit that day. On that day, I thanked God my mother, who died in 2000 and who I miss everyday, was not alive to see this horror. She had seen enough with the Great Depression and World War II.
As a leader of the church, my message included the princpilities and power from the Romans letter. I am not sure I did much that day to help anyone but was keenly aware that guests may appear for the church service. No guests that day.
The difficulty is recognizing that worship leaders are human too, and equally gob smacked by 9/11.