September 11^th – One year Later

Finish the Journey Well
By Deacon Joe Anzalone

Matthew closes his Gospel with the words of Jesus—“And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”  There is no further explanation.  He says to all of us - wherever we are, whatever our situation is – I am there – I am in this with you – not just for the moment – but for all time.  It has been hard over the past year, especially right after 9/11, to see and to experience the reality of these words.  Jesus preached the Gospel with his life, and so must we.  This has never been made clearer than over the past year.

All of us can remember where we were one year ago today, and we know exactly what we were doing when the news of the attacks found us.  Only a day later, a new mantra was born: “Everything has changed.”  It remains to be seen just how much we have changed, beyond tolerating longer lines at the airports and pasting American flags onto our cars.  Journalist Steve Chambers writes, “These very public expressions of faith faded.  Church attendance dropped within weeks, back to pre-9/11 levels, and the number of people who actually enlisted in the military never rose.  Gradually, the flags came down.”  Maybe the soul of the nation is changing.  Maybe.  Pollster George Gallup said, “This was a dark night in the nation’s soul, but it didn’t have the staying power because it wasn’t personal to most people.”  This point can certainly be debated, but clearly one of the undeniable marks of being an American today is that we all miss the naiveté we enjoyed on September 10.

We are all retreating from that 11^th day of September in one way or another – not forgetting, but moving away.  One widow from Middletown, NJ said on TV a few weeks ago, “I can’t be a 9/11 widow forever – I have to move on, for me and my children.”  I have discovered strength “that I didn’t know I had within me.”  Her words spoke of such hope, desire, and perhaps for the first time in a long time, they spoke of a future, a rebuilding of life from death.

In my homily on Sunday, I mentioned Lisa Beamer’s new book, “Let’s Roll,” detailing her life with her husband Todd – one of the many heroes who died that day.  In a chapter Lisa calls “Inside the Nightmare,” she describes the tragedy from the inside – of one who was immediately affected.  She and Todd had just returned from vacationing in Italy on 9/10.  She writes of 9/11, “Vacation was over; life was back to normal…” and then continues, “our life was so good; we had many plans – I needed Todd.  He always made everything OK.  We naively thought we could control our own destiny…we had clear ideas about what life should look like.  If we are honest – how many of us still think the same thing?  We all have ideas of how life should be.”

Lisa’s face is the personification of the widow with children...her husband Todd, the face of ordinary heroes like Chuck Costello and others who are not household names but American heroes none-the-less.  She writes, “…for the Beamers, God wasn’t just for Sundays.”  If there is a single thing that keeps her moving it is that undying faith and the invisible thread heard in today’s Gospel...“I will be with you always.”  God has to be taken into the streets and the stairwells as companion, as life partner.  This is our task – as believers.

Last September 11th, it became painfully clear that death can always bridge the distance to find any of us.  What crumbled on that dark day were not just skyscrapers, but also our illusions; that we were somehow safe from the violence the rest of the world has known for a very long time.  It doesn’t matter how wealthy, well defended, or far removed we are from evil.  Terror can still find us, whether in NYC, Washington or in our mailbox.  Last September 11th was just another date on the calendar, but it quickly became a date we will never forget.  It is a day that our President, filled with emotion would say, in a hurried speech to America that evening, “Our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature.  And we responded with the best of America.”  Yes, we have responded and are recovering – but we must never forget the God who was always with us, from the smoke-filled hallways, in the rubble, and later at the hospitals as baby after baby was born to widowed mothers.  He promised He would never leave our side, and He has kept that promise.

This is our faith; it is our only hope – yours and mine.  After every cross, resurrection remains a possibility.  The stone that covered the tomb has been rolled back for all eternity, but it will be up to us to walk out of it as new creatures—or, in the case of September 11, a new nation.  It all depends on the choices we make and how each one of us chooses to live out that faith in our world.

Lisa Beamer rightly asserts, “God has chosen to give us another opportunity, another day to live, another chance to love.  Others whom we know were not as fortunate.”  She writes, “Todd was not a Hollywood hunk or a comic book hero.  He was an ordinary guy with ordinary faith in a great God.”  That description would probably fit most of us – we are ordinary people with faith in a great God; I will close with the dedication of her book.

To Todd,

My husband, my everyday hero.

Thank you for loving God, loving us, and always playing hard.

Thank you for teaching me patience and mercy.

I love you and promise to finish our journey well

See you later …

This too, should be our promise to each other: finish the journey well, wrapped in the promises of God; and in the words of the Prophet Micah – “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).  With that begun, we can then live in the hope and promise of a God who says to all of us, “I am with you always – ‘see you later.’”