A neighbor new to the city asked me if the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday brought back traumatic memories of September 11 in New York. No, I said, but it made me think about September 10, 2001, a day that is imprinted just as indelibly on my psyche.
Once more the country finds itself in the grip of collective anxiety over the prospect of a terrorist strike. Paris, Beirut, the possible downing of a Russian airliner by a terrorist bomb. We’ve been here before and likely we will be so again. We live in an open and free society, singularly vulnerable to acts of mayhem and murder at the hands of extremists whose principal aim is to fill our hearts with dread, acts that often can’t be predicted or prevented.
So why do I recall that Monday, September 10, with such stark clarity? Like the infamous day that would follow, it was a perfect late-summer day, the twin towers rising against a lucid blue sky. It was utterly inconceivable that in 24 hours these seemingly indestructible monuments to America’s preeminence would be nothing more than a smoldering mound of twisted metal and ash and that 3000 people would be dead.
The tabloids whose pages would soon be filled with iconic images of the stricken towers were packed with news of the baseball pennant races and breathless accounts of various tawdry celebrity scandals. I took a friend to lunch for her birthday, and we groused that the restaurant was out of the crab cakes we came there specifically to enjoy. The last thing I did at work that day was make plane reservations for a business trip the next week. I didn’t think twice about it. I flew all the time. All I really cared about was getting an aisle seat toward the front of the cabin.
There is no need to describe what happened the next morning. Suffice it to say that September 10 was a line of demarcation, the end of an era. And yet I am haunted by it, knowing now that the evil that was to descend on us was already metastasizing even as I slept the final hour of the day.
September 10, and indeed the recent attacks in Paris that have shaken the world, tell us that tomorrow is always uncertain. The future is not ours to know. Yet we are given a knowledge far greater than the ability to see into tomorrow. The one thing I know about tomorrow, the one single thing I know with the utmost certainty, is that God will be there. God is with me today, tomorrow and forever, to guide me through angst and uncertainty. I am in the hands of a power so much greater than my fear, greater even than any harm that can come to me.
The terrorist rampage in Paris was not so much a wake-up call as a reminder that the violence of human beings has been with us since the beginning, since Cain slew Abel. Yet so has our refuge, a loving God to meet us in our greatest strife.
