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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 21st 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.”
