At first I was surprised by the depth of my grief as the first anniversary of September 11 rolled around. Just the week before at a lay ministry meeting, I shared how in some profound way the grief of September 11 did not really belong to those of us who did not lose loved ones. I didn't expect to be touched at a soul level by the grief.

I was wrong. This week, listening to NPR, watching the "Frontline" show on 9/11 and religion, worshiping with brothers and sisters from so many faiths at Trinity Lutheran Church, talking with loved ones, I found myself dissolved into tears countless times. The numbness I felt a year ago--so distinctive to that time--at times returned. Finally I had to say to grief, "Oh, you're back." I had to admit to myself that even though no one I knew personally was among the dead, I was deeply touched by the grief of September 11.

Of course anyone who has been intimate with grief knows the power of anniversaries. They know how anniversaries sometimes can hit with the force of a speeding freight train, often catching us off-guard. They know how an anniversary can seem like a time warp: emotionally you find yourself right back in the moment of the loss. This is how the first anniversary of September 11 has been for me and perhaps many of you. As I say this, I also must acknowledge how much more intimately and infinitely painful this anniversary must have been for those who did lose loved ones. My grief, though deep, is surely only a hint of what they must feel.

This first anniversary of 9/11 has been accompanied by much hype, media overkill, a troubling tendency to celebrate our patriotism rather than remember the dead, and even commercialism. But we should not let this layer of superficiality obscure the truth that a depth of grief does exist in the American people--and many people worldwide. The wound still shocks, still hurts, and, even a year later, leaves us deeply shaken.

As I think back a year, I picture myself going to the prayer corner in our basement on the morning of September 11, happily oblivious to the carnage that had already begun in New York City. This week I looked back on my journal entry that morning. I am struck by its naivete and shallowness which seem so pitiful given the events that were unfolding even as I wrote. I wrote about looking at a new car the night before; I wrote about how everybody in my family seemed to be in a good mood at breakfast that morning. After finishing my meditation time, I climbed the stairs and my wife Amy said, "Something's happening in New York!" In retrospect, it was a little like emerging from a bomb shelter after a nuclear war: the world I emerged into had changed.

I think most of us had the sense that day that our world had changed in some fundamental way. And though I don't think we understood well how the world had changed, I believe we were right about the reality of the change. One year later, I still don't think we have a very clear understanding of the contours of the change. In the scope of history, a year is nothing. We are still far too close to the event and far too early into our post-9/11 journey to really understand the changes. The blinders that so often obscure the deeper meaning of current events have not given way to the illumination of historical inquiry. Today, though acknowledging the blinders are still on, I want to explore with you some of these changes as I see them.

The first thing to say is that we have not really changed in some of the ways many of us hoped we would change. Those first days and weeks after the attacks were marked by kindness and civility and near national unity--the likes of which our society hasn't probably seen since Pearl Harbor. For those days and weeks, we understood that so much that had previously occupied our collective attention was not very important. Professional sports, the latest antics of celebrities, the pursuit of happiness as measured by the things we own: none of these things is really very important compared to the tragedy of 9/11. At one professional hockey game, the fans booed when a televised speech by President Bush disappeared from the jumbo screen so the game could resume. The fans actually thought that the speech was more important than the game! There were more "I love yous" and kids sent off to school with hugs rather than nags and trips to houses of worship than had been the case before 9/11. For a golden moment, we knew what was important and what wasn't important. The clanging din of commercials and sports stories and the petty carping that so characterizes life in Washington and in offices and factories and schools and families across our country ceased for a moment.

And then, as inevitably happens as the immediate rawness of grief subsides, we slowly returned to our pre-9/11 ways. Church attendance went back to normal levels, football fans in Cleveland pelted referees with beer bottles after a disputed call, baseball players and owners returned to bickering over how to split up billions of dollars of revenue, and "American Idol" became the talk of the nation. We became once again the sprawling, bickering, petty, silly and often dysfunctional American family that we've always been. The clarity of perspective gained in the horrors of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania faded away. Normalcy returned.

But I would argue that beneath the veneer of normalcy there have nevertheless been some fundamental changes. The first is a gnawing, deep realization of our basic insecurity as well as the fragility of life. The illusion of invulnerability--deeply entrenched in a nation that with the exception of Pearl Harbor hadn't been significantly attacked on our own soil by foreign forces since the War of 1812--died on September 11 and in the anthrax scare that followed. It has been replaced by fear. When and where will the terrorists strike back? Will it be a dirty bomb in New York or Washington or a heartland city like Appleton? Will it be biological terror like anthrax? Will it be an attack on a nuclear plant? Will it be more hijackings? Will it be a shoe bomb on a plane? Will it be an attack at a sporting event? Will it be a suicide bombing? Will it be a crop duster equipped with poisonous gas or chemicals? Or will it be, as may be most likely given the terrible, deadly skill of our enemies, something we haven't even imagined yet. We know there are sleeper cells in our own land that may well have awakened by now. We know that Al Qaida, even if its command and control has been disrupted, will not lay down their arms and say "Okay, you've won." And so we wait, profoundly uneasy, profoundly fearful, constantly if often subtly on edge, with no end in sight to our waiting.

At the same time we are engaged in a war so unlike any other that it can only fill us with more uneasiness. We are fighting a shadowy enemy scattered around the world. After the initial phase in Afghanistan, most of the war is taking place secretly. Intellectually we know we a war of some kind with very high stakes, but in most of our everyday lives, it's hard to tell. In some ways it's a phantom war, more like the "War on Drugs" or the "War on Poverty" than any of our shooting wars. There is no end in sight in this war. Many of us worry that if the war is widened to include an attack on Iraq, the danger and the fear we feel will only escalate as the powder keg of the Middle East is potentially ignited.

A second change--the result primarily of this gnawing, pervasive fear--is a loss of freedom. As has always been the case with Americans, we are all too willing to trade away our precious freedom for security. I must say that I am surprised the erosion of freedom hasn't been worse in spite of John Ashcroft's best efforts, though we have seen significant loss of freedoms and civil rights, particularly for immigrants. And an even more significant loss of freedom seems only another terrorist act away, with Ashcroft poised to pounce on any opportunity to further erode our constitutional freedoms.

A third change, though yet very tentative and not particularly embraced by the Bush Administration, is perhaps the most significant: an understanding that the United States is part of an increasingly interdependent world. This may well be the abiding lesson of 9/11. Despite the oceans that have long protected our nation from so many of the ravages of the world, despite of the military might that is ours as the only remaining superpower, what happens in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Karachi or the refugee camps of Palestine effects us deeply. And what we do effects them deeply. As the scholar Benjamin Barber said the other night at a lecture at St. Norbert's College, there are truly no borders in today's interdependent world. If others suffer near or far, we suffer, too. We are all related. This is the truth the firefighters instinctively understood as they ran into the Twin Towers: not only were they heroically doing their job, but they understood at some basic level that their lives were connected to the lives of the strangers trapped on the 103^rd floor.

This truth has been expressed both locally and nationally to an unexpected extent in the unprecedented inclusion of the Muslim community. I know that many of us have found much to be pessimistic about in this past year, but we make a mistake if we do not acknowledge and celebrate this incredible transformation. In the days following the 9/11, Muslim leaders were included in all of the major national and local interfaith services. President Bush went out of his way to differentiate the vast majority of Muslims from the perpetrators of the attacks. Locally, Muslims received many more hands outstretched in love and support than hands curled up in fists. A Muslim presence was even invited to be part of not just the liberal interfaith service we co-sponsored, but also the patriotic anniversary event at Calder Stadium this week. The amount of progress our society has made in this area just in the eleven years since the Gulf War is truly remarkable. In reaching out to our Muslim brothers and sisters, we act on the same impulse that spurred the firefighters into the doomed towers: an understanding that we are all truly brothers and sisters. This understanding is, I hope, a deep and permanent change from 9/11, a gift rising out of the ashes of that horrible atrocity.

A failure to understand the truth of our interdependence opens the door to evil. In the "Frontline" show exploring religion and 9/11, NPR correspondent Margot Adler (who incidentally is a Unitarian Universalist) describes evil this way: evil occurs when you lose your sense that another human being is a human being. Evil, she says, is an estrangement from your connection, from the reality that these humans you're attacking are truly just like you. This is the evil embodied in the hijackers and their accomplices. And this evil potentially resides in each of us; this is part of the human condition. And we each have a choice whether to act on it.

In addition to living our lives as if we truly believe we are all related in this interdependent world, I think there are two other things we could do that would turn at least some of the ashes of 9/11 into important, positive lessons. The first is to look with more intentionality and more seriousness at our individual and collective actions. I know that there is some risk in saying this, that some will see this as a unjust attempt to blame not the terrorists but us for the 9/11 atrocity. I don't buy this at all. The terrorist attacks were evil, and this evil was solely the responsibility of those who planned, funded, supported and carried out the attacks. But I agree with Heidi Gehman, who writes:

...the hatred and anger that motivated (the terrorist attacks) have many sources, and perhaps we need to be willing to recognize our culpability for some of them. In other words, I am drawing a distinction between the immediate act of September 11, which is to be unequivocally condemned, and the context of the action, the conditions which allow terrorism to seem for some a legitimate, or the only possible, response. The U.S. is not responsible for September 11, but may be responsible for some of the conditions that provided the context for it and we should try to identify and correct those conditions. There are other parties who have allowed the conditions for terrorism to flourish, and they, too, should carry out this same kind of analysis.[2]

In 1943, in the midst of the Holocaust, in spite of his knowledge that many of his own family and millions of other Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel urged his fellow Jews not just to cast blame but also to look at themselves. He said this not to excuse the Nazis for their atrocities, but to focus attention on the lessons for all available in that horrendous crime. He highlighted this quote from the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism: "If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what was shown to him is also within him."[3]

At the "Mingling of the Waters" service last week, I asked us to join our Jewish brothers and sisters in looking fearlessly at ourselves, at our own and our society's good deeds and misdeeds. Sharing in a Rosh Hashanah ritual practiced by many Jews, we cast bread crumbs into the pond as a symbol of our willingness to transform our misdeeds into positive learnings and energy. I think individually and collectively, we Americans need to do this. We need to look at our consumption of oil and other resources, our materialism run amok, our support of corrupt and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The other thing we need to do is maybe even harder. It is in some way to keep the knowledge of the terrible grief and pain from a year ago fresh. Not to keep the wound raw--that is impossible and undesirable to sustain. But to stay in touch with that pain enough so that we do not lose touch with the insights that accompanied it. That terrible moment gave us a glimpse in a profound and powerful way of truths we too often miss about life: that we are all related; that life--our lives and the lives of loved ones included--is incredibly fragile; that all life is a gift to savor and appreciate every day; that it is important to say "I love you" to those we love because we never know when death might visit them or us. In the "Frontline" show about religion in the aftermath of 9/11, one rabbi has taken the words from some of those last cell phone calls from the hijacked airplanes and doomed towers and turned them into haunting, poignant chants. In doing these chants, he keeps alive a part of the pain of 9/11, but along with it a part of the lesson, too. The chants remind him of what he ought to be doing today. He is allowing the pain of 9/11 to transform his life today. This is how 9/11 can change us for the good. This is how a phoenix can rise out of the ashes.

I imagine that different images and sounds reached through the layers of scars and defenses and touched some of you this week. The one that most penetrated my soul was a poem shared in a piece on NPR's "All Things Considered." The poem, called "How My Life Changed," expresses powerfully the pain of grief, and it ends with a lesson. I don't know the name of the woman who shared the poem; I gather from it that she worked on the 103^rd floor of one of the Twin Towers but for some reason wasn't there that day. "How My Life Changed" by an anonymous survivor of the terrorist attacks:

I can no longer flirt with Lou.
I can no longer dance with Myra.
I can no longer eat brownies with Suzanne Y.
I can no longer meet the deadline with Mark.
I can no longer talk to George about his daughter.
I can no longer make a good impression on Chris.
I can no longer smile at Paul.
I can no longer hold the door open for Tony.
I can no longer confide in Lisa.
I can no longer complain about Gary.
I can no longer get to know Yolanda.
I can no longer call the client with Nick.
I can no longer contribute to the book drive organized by Karen.
I can no longer give career advice to Suzanne P.
I can no longer laugh with Donna G.
I can no longer watch Mary Ellen cut through the bullshit.
I can no longer drink beer with Paul.
I can no longer gossip with Anna.
I can no longer run into Dave P. at the vending machine.
I can no longer call Steve about my computer.
I can no longer compliment Lorenzo.
I can no longer hear Herman's voice.
I can no longer see the incredible view from the 103^rd floor.
I can no longer take my life for granted.[4]

B Alford followed the sermon by singing her song, "Maybe if I", written in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Copyright 2002 by Roger Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1] Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in From the Ashes: A Spiritual Response to the Attack on America (Rodale, 2001), pp. 62-68.
[2] Ian Markham and Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi, eds., September 11: Religious Perspectives on the Causes and Consequences (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002), p. 14.
[3] From an e-mail message by Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center about his Eleven Days in September: Remembrance, Reflection and Renewal" project.
[4] From "A September Story" by the Sonic Memorial Project, broadcast on September 10, 2002 on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." The audio can be found at http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20020910.atc.05.ram.