September 11, 2018
 
 
 
 
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St. John's mission is to inspire people to grow into the heart and mind of Christ by engaging together in worshiping, serving, and spiritual formation.

 
 
 
 
 
 

How to remember an unwanted day

 
 
 
 

This week I reflect on the 17th anniversary of September 11th, 2001.


In 2001 I was living in rural Alaska. We did not have a television and did not miss having one. So I did not immediately hear the news that an airplane had flown into a skyscraper in New York City. The first plane hit at around 5:45 am Alaska Standard Time. Not long after that, I trundled in my pajama bottoms and a heavy sweater across the road to the café for a latte and on their television set I saw with horror the news of what we thought at the time was a terrible accident. How could it be anything but? Everyone who stopped by the café that morning stayed, mesmerized by the news as it became evident this was no accident and more acts of terror would quickly follow.


It’s not as though the coffee shop owned the only television in the village. There were certainly others, but those of us stalled in the cafe silently acknowledged we were clinging to the comfort of being together. The terrible events were playing out on the other side of our continent, but as flights became grounded in Alaska (and all across the nation) the far-reaching effects of the day were brought home to us who relied on airplanes large and small to go everywhere.


Seventeen years later, simply writing about that day has the power to call forth deeply unsettled feelings in me. Something in my world shifted and it has yet to shift back into place. I imagine you too recall where you were that day, how you learned the news, how you responded and felt, and I imagine you too can still tap into those buried feelings of unease, can still spot the crack in your foundation that that day produced.


This is not the way I want to remember this unwanted day, this day of remembrance that all of us would rather never have unfolded as it did. So the question becomes “How then should we live?” How then do we go forward with this annual reminder that life is fleeting and uncertain? How do we live with biblical texts that underscore the transitory nature of life?


James 4:14 “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes;”

Psalm 114:4 “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow.”

1 Peter 1:24  “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls…”


Many more scriptures speak of life as a sigh, a breath, a flower that withers and dies, or a shadow. Job (7:6-7) declares his days pass more quickly than a weaver’s shuttle flying across the loom. Jesus tells parables about the uncertainty of life as a way of teaching his followers to live with intention, honor, holiness, and peace.


Jesus was alive at a time when Stoicism was a prominent Greek philosophy (~ 3rd c. BCE to ~180 CE). Stoicism (and other schools of philosophical thought) influenced Christian theology and the New Testament writers. Stoicism encouraged its adherents to contemplate their own deaths as a way of fostering gratitude for the gift of the present moment. I think the Stoics captured the first half of the equation. If one only subscribed only to Stoicism, the equation might go something like, “Be grateful for life no matter how bad it may be today because instead, you could be dead.”


For me, it is the life-death-resurrection-and-ascension of Jesus Christ that supplies the second half of the equation. When I was a little child my mother taught me the prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I thought this was terribly dark and twisted at the time but with the perspective of years I can see this simple prayer as an invitation to gratitude and trust: gratitude for the day that has just been with the knowledge there may not be another, and trust that beyond this day, this life, is a God who is good and who waits to greet us. And therein lies the second half of the equation: “Beyond this day, this life, is a God who is good and who waits to greet us.”


Life is to be cherished, for it is as fleeting as a shadow, as swift as a weaver’s shuttle, as temporary as the grass which withers and dies. And when life ends—no matter how it ends nor how unprepared we may be for that ending—there awaits a God who is good and who welcomes us home. This is how we live when our world shifts and stays shifted. This is how we live.