9/11 Reflections

     Tomorrow marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Like the assassination of JFK or the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in earlier years, everybody remembers where they were when the planes flew into the buildings and the world changed forever. Now you have an opportunity to share your reflections about that fateful day.

     On the church’s website is a tab bearing the title “Food for Thought.” This is where you can find a repository of my essays that go out every Thursday, and there is also a page (less used, sadly) where you can share your own thoughts.

     This feature is always available and open for your contributions, but I want to highlight it today because of the solemn day of remembrance coming up tomorrow. I invite you to write a reflection about your own experience of September 11, 2001—what you thought, what you said and did, and how it affected you. Please send your submissions to Jeff Kistler (office@communityucc.net), and he will add them to “Food for Thought” in the coming days.

     To kick things off, I would like to share a reflection I wrote to my students (I was the American Baptist campus minister at West Virginia University at the time) about a week after the attacks. It will give you an idea of where my thinking was in the (almost) immediate aftermath of 9/11. It’s not a perfectly crafted essay—my thoughts were still a little jumbled, and I was distracted by a calamity going on in my personal life—but I still stand by what my 32-year-old self thought and tried to communicate to a group of young people who were also reeling and trying to figure out how to respond to these evil acts.

     Read my reflection, "How Do We Respond"