The words of Psalm 46 have long comforted me.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, my parish church was full of people: parishioners, neighbors, nearby workers – people who needed to be with others, people longing for refuge and strength.
Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
And yet I did fear. The earth had changed that day, without a doubt. People stood by one another, not just in New York and Arlington and Pennsylvania, but in Emeryville and Santa Clara. People struck with fear. Fear of abandoned boxes on highways; fear of hand-addressed envelopes from people we didn’t know.
God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved; God will help it when the morning dawns.
Is this faith that God will help – or is it hope? Does it matter at those shuddering times? When we are feeling insignificant and powerless, does it matter what spiritual lifeline we have to grasp? I don’t think so. I think both faith and hope are simple gifts from God.
The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.
Somehow, the attack on the WTC tower was on my TV at 5:45 when I woke up here in California. I used the TV as an alarm clock and there, in a special report, was tape of the airplane slamming into the first tower. It was surreal. More surreal was seeing the second plane strike the second tower, live. Now, it sounds a bit melodramatic to say my life passed before my eyes, but that is what happened.
Groundbreaking for the twin towers began the year I started college in New York City. The first tower opened the year I graduated. Staying in New York after my graduation, the towers were always there in the skyline, amazing us with their massive strength and glittering light. It was an extra special event for me to have steak tartar in the towers restaurant, Windows on the World. It signified a coming of age for me. “If you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere….”
In time, I moved away from New York but will always have those memories. An enduring vision of the towers did not last for others, still in New York.
A friend of mine had met many financial people while earning her MBA at Harvard. She works four blocks from Ground Zero. She not only saw the towers fall, she attended 24 funerals of people she knew there.
Another friend taught kindergarten in the shadow of the towers. Moving the little ones to a safe place, a little boy looked at the towers and said, “Look, sister, that bird is on fire!” She replied, “God will take care of it.”
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.
Oh, if we had allowed God to stop us from warfare, to stop us from adding tens of thousands more to the 3000 who died that day. If only “we” and “they” could refrain from making God our excuse for warfare.
Perhaps what we need to do to “make wars to cease to the end of the earth,” as the Psalmist wrote, is to ask God to help us live in God’s will rather than our own, individually and collectively. It is a tough order. But it will not happen if we don’t try to do it in all areas of our lives.
Be still, and know that I am God!
In a retreat in 2002, I joined a watercolor painting group expressing their responses to a bible verse. It was this verse, “Be still and know that I am God!” I drew the towers in their grey ruin. But through it I saw a golden string of the Holy Spirit, blessing the pain and hardship. It was then that I began to release the pain and loss and to turn to God’s hope. “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Let us each say, “Let it begin with me.”