September 11: An Apology

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There’s really nothing to say about September 11 that hasn’t already been said either far more bombastically than I have ever felt or far more eloquently than I have ever achieved. Thus I doubt it adds anything to the word mountain to say, simply, “I’m sorry.”

Yet the need to apologize best captures what I’ve long felt about that morning, and that feeling has only grown with the passage of all these years since 2001.

On that bright, clear Tuesday morning we were, oddly enough, all at home. We had just moved in to a co-housing arrangement in suburban Cleveland over the previous weekend. We had planned to spend the morning getting our two boys enrolled in school.

I was stretching for a morning run when, as I recall, we got a call from a friend prompting us to turn on the TV just a few minutes before the second plane flew into the south tower. Like millions of others, we watched in shock and horror as the first reports came in.

Before the towers fell, I took off on a run.

Running is often my time of prayer and meditation, and it surely was that morning. I was due to begin a new job at a church in Cleveland Heights the following week, and, as I ran, I kept having the same thought over and over again: now it is our time, now it is our time.

The moment the second plane flew into the south tower it was obvious that this was a terror attack, and before I took off on that morning run, the speculation was rampant that the attack was the work of fundamentalist Islamists. To me it was as clear as that morning’s sky that the U.S. response would be to declare September 11 a day that will live in infamy and, like December 7, 1941, before it, the end result would be war.

But the thought running through my mind – now it is our time – was not about responding to violence with violence. It was not about responding as a patriot going to war. It was about responding as a follower of the Prince of Peace to the suddenly urgent call to put peacemaking at the center of the life of the church.

That’s why all I have left to say about September 11 is, “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry that we failed to make peacemaking the central calling of the church in these first decades of the 21^st century. I’m sorry that we could not persuade the neoconservatives in the American government to pursue justice and accountability through means other than invading Afghanistan. And, although for one, brief, shining moment world public opinion was loudly and clearly opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I am sorry that we failed to disrupt that fiasco before it cost a half million lives.

I’m sorry that we allowed an energized peace movement in the United States to be coopted by the Democratic Party and the first Obama campaign. We were not unaware nor indifferent to that process even as many of us – myself included – went door-to-door to help Obama get elected. Nevertheless, I am sorry we failed to create a more compelling and persuasive narrative imagining new lines of peacemaking in that moment of hope and promise.

Perhaps had we done so, new leaders would have emerged who might have helped us avoid the catastrophe the culture has collapsed into in these awful years of Trump. As he invokes the memories of September 11 today, and lies yet again about his own actions that September morning, all I can manage to say is, “I’m sorry.”