A Reflection on the 25th Anniversary of September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001, began with the terrible innocence of an ordinary morning. The sky over New York was a clear, almost luminous blue, the sort of late-summer sky that gives no warning of anything except another beautiful day. Across the country, alarm clocks sounded, coffee brewed, children gathered backpacks, and parents hurried through familiar routines. Office workers entered elevators. Teachers prepared lessons. Firefighters began their shifts. Police officers took to the streets. Men and women boarded aeroplanes carrying briefcases, books, newspapers, photographs, and plans for where they would be by evening. There was nothing about that morning that seemed historic. It was simply Tuesday, and perhaps that is what makes the memory so unsettling even twenty-five years later. Catastrophe did not arrive beneath a blackened sky or with some ominous prelude. It entered an ordinary day and tore it open.

I remember going to school. I remember my mother and father going to work. I remember having the unquestioned confidence children often possess that the world would look much the same when the school day ended as it had when it began. Then my teacher was called out of the classroom. I no longer remember what lesson we were studying or what had been written on the board, but I remember the expression she carried when she returned. Memory has a strange way of preserving what matters. The ordinary details disappear, while a face remains. Something in her eyes told us that whatever had happened beyond those classroom walls belonged to a scale we did not yet understand. Children may not grasp terrorism, geopolitics, or national tragedy, but they understand when the adults around them have suddenly become afraid.

When I arrived home, Mom and Dad were already there, and the television was on. What I saw seemed impossible. Smoke poured from the towers of the World Trade Center into that same brilliant blue sky, black columns rising above Manhattan while sirens wailed in the streets below. Then came the images that have never really left us: people running through clouds of ash, firefighters disappearing into doorways, strangers grasping one another by the arms, sheets of paper tumbling through the air like a grotesque snowfall. Eventually the towers themselves seemed to fold inward, enormous buildings collapsing into mountains of dust, steel, glass, concrete, office furniture, and human life. Even as a child, I remember feeling the weight of it without yet possessing the language to explain what I was feeling. I knew people were inside those buildings. I knew they had gone to work that morning. I knew there were families somewhere waiting for them to come home.

Age has made that knowledge heavier, not lighter. Nearly three thousand people were killed that day, but numbers have a way of becoming abstract unless we force ourselves to remember what they contain. Those were not simply names that would later be engraved in stone. They were husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and colleagues. They had family photographs on desks, lunches in refrigerators, voicemails waiting to be returned, appointments scheduled for later in the week, children expecting rides home from school, spouses expecting dinner companions. Some had left home after a hurried goodbye. Some had probably argued over something insignificant and assumed there would be time to make peace later. Some had boarded aircraft expecting to arrive in another city by lunchtime. A tragedy of that scale is almost impossible for the human heart to comprehend all at once, so perhaps it is better to imagine one empty chair, one unanswered telephone, one front door that never opened again, and then to understand that thousands of families were given some version of that absence.

The attacks were designed not merely to destroy buildings or take lives, but to plant fear deeply into the American imagination. That is the nature of terrorism. It seeks to make ordinary places feel unsafe and familiar routines feel fragile. It wants a person boarding an aeroplane to think differently about the cabin around him, a worker entering a high-rise to glance upward with unease, a parent sending a child into the world to wonder whether normal life can still be trusted. In that sense, the attacks were aimed far beyond New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. They were intended to reach every living room where someone stared at a television in disbelief, every classroom where a teacher struggled to explain what had happened, and every family waiting for news. The men who planned those attacks wanted Americans to be afraid, and for a time we were. We were shocked, wounded, angry, bewildered, and grieving in ways the country had not experienced in generations.

Yet that is not the only memory I carry from September 11. Beneath the horror, something else emerged, something the attackers likely never intended to awaken. As smoke filled the streets and the country reeled, people moved toward one another. Firefighters climbed stairwells while terrified workers descended. Police officers ran toward buildings from which thousands were trying to escape. Paramedics knelt in streets transformed into landscapes of ash. Office workers helped colleagues they barely knew. Strangers carried the injured, offered water, shared phones, opened doors, gave blood, and placed their arms around people whose names they did not know. In those moments, the categories that so often separate us became almost absurdly small. No one stopped to ask a wounded stranger how he voted before helping him stand. No firefighter paused on a stairwell to ask a trapped worker which church she attended. No police officer demanded to know someone’s politics, race, social class, or background before pulling that person toward safety. There were simply human beings in danger and other human beings determined not to leave them there.

That is one reason the day has always brought to mind Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells of a man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho who is beaten, robbed, and abandoned beside the road. Others see him and continue on, but a Samaritan stops. Scripture says, “when he saw him, he took pity on him” (Luke 10:33, NIV). The power of that verse lies partly in its simplicity. He saw him. He did not first reduce the wounded man to a label or a tribe. He did not ask whether helping was convenient or whether the injured man belonged to the right group. He saw suffering and allowed compassion to compel him forward. September 11 was filled with people who saw in precisely that way. They looked past difference because suffering had made the essential truth impossible to ignore: here was another human life, precious and in need.

For Christians, however, remembrance eventually leads to a more difficult question. Where was God that morning? Where was He when the planes struck, when stairwells filled with smoke, when men and women placed final telephone calls to those they loved, when families stared at screens and waited for names that would never appear among the survivors? There are no neat answers capable of making such grief reasonable, and Christian faith is diminished when we pretend otherwise. Scripture itself does not speak about suffering with easy slogans. Job sits in ashes. David cries out in confusion. Jeremiah weeps. Mary stands at the foot of a cross. Jesus Himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. The Bible never asks us to pretend pain is small simply because God is great. Instead, it teaches something harder and ultimately more comforting: suffering does not prove God’s absence.

The psalmist writes, “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way” (Psalm 46:1–2, NIV). On a day when the earth itself seemed to give way beneath steel and concrete, those words carry an almost painful resonance. I do not believe God abandoned America on September 11. I believe His presence could be glimpsed wherever courage overcame fear and love overcame self-preservation: in the firefighter taking another step upward, in the police officer turning back toward danger, in the paramedic kneeling beside a stranger, in the priest opening the doors of a church, in the nurse preparing for casualties, in the passengers of Flight 93 who understood what was happening and resolved that others would not suffer the same fate. We often imagine divine intervention only as rescue from danger, but sometimes grace appears as the strength to enter danger for someone else. Sometimes God’s presence is not the hand that removes us from the fire, but the hand we discover reaching for ours within it.

There is a phrase often attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant.” Historians debate whether he ever spoke those precise words, but the phrase has endured because it captures a familiar truth. There are moments when an attack intended to break a people instead reveals what lies beneath the surface. Those who planned September 11 hoped fear would make America smaller. What followed, at least for a season, was the opposite. Flags appeared on porches, businesses, bridges, firehouses, churches, highway overpasses, and automobiles. People lined up to donate blood. Houses of worship filled. Neighbours checked on one another. Members of Congress who had spent years arguing across political aisles stood together on the steps of the United States Capitol and sang “God Bless America.” The country was wounded, but the wound reminded us that beneath all our differences there remained a shared belonging.

The simplest comparison I know comes from family. Growing up with cousins meant arguing, teasing, irritating one another, and sometimes knowing exactly how to provoke a reaction. Yet there was also an unspoken boundary. We might fight among ourselves, but if someone from outside the family tried to hurt one of us, the argument ended. Whatever grievance had existed five minutes earlier suddenly became secondary because kinship mattered more. America has always contained something of that spirit. We disagree loudly, sometimes bitterly, about presidents, laws, taxes, schools, religion, culture, immigration, economics, and nearly everything else that free people can debate. That disagreement is not inherently a weakness; a republic depends upon disagreement. But September 11 reminded us that disagreement need not become estrangement. When New York was attacked, Ohio grieved. When the Pentagon burned, families thousands of miles away felt the wound. When Flight 93 fell into a field in Pennsylvania, its passengers ceased to be strangers. They belonged to all of us.

That is why, on this twenty-fifth anniversary, I find myself thinking not only about September 11, but about September 12. The morning after did not bring relief. Smoke still hung over Manhattan. Families were still searching. The dead had not all been identified, and the nation did not yet know what would come next. Yet people rose and moved toward one another. They prayed, volunteered, donated, comforted, gathered, and listened. For a brief time, the country remembered that neighbour is a deeper word than opponent. There is something profoundly sobering about looking at America today and wondering how easily we have forgotten that lesson. We live in an age that often rewards contempt. Political disagreement can become personal hatred within seconds. Social media teaches us to caricature rather than understand. We reduce people to labels and then convince ourselves that the label tells us everything worth knowing about the person.

The Gospel calls Christians to something better long before catastrophe makes it necessary. Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9, NIV). Peacemaking is not weakness, nor does it require the abandonment of conviction. It asks something far more difficult: that we refuse to strip another person of dignity simply because we disagree. It asks us to remember that behind every argument is a life as complicated and beloved as our own. Perhaps one of the most faithful ways to honour the dead of September 11 is not merely to recite their names, lower our flags, or promise never to forget, important as those acts are. Perhaps we honour them by refusing to require another national tragedy before we learn again how to see our neighbours as neighbours.

John’s Gospel tells us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5, NIV). September 11 was darkness in one of its most unmistakable forms. It was smoke against blue sky, ash in the streets, a final voicemail, an empty chair, a child waiting for a parent, a spouse watching a door that would never open. Yet the darkness did not stand alone. It was answered by courage, sacrifice, compassion, prayer, and love. The light did not erase what happened, nor did it make the grief less real. It simply refused to disappear.

Twenty-five years later, there are adults who know September 11 only through photographs, documentaries, memorials, and the stories of those who remember it firsthand. For them, the absence of the Twin Towers is simply part of the New York skyline. Ground Zero has always been a place of remembrance. But some of us remember before the memorials, before the museum, before the names were carved into stone. We remember when September 11 was not history. We remember when it was Tuesday. We remember going to school, our parents going to work, a teacher leaving the classroom and returning with something changed in her eyes. We remember coming home to a television filled with smoke and trying, as children, to understand why the adults around us looked afraid.

What I understand now is that the deepest memory of September 11 is not only the moment America was attacked. It is the moment ordinary people revealed what extraordinary love can look like when everything superficial has been stripped away. The towers fell, and the country grieved, but through the dust people reached for one another. Strangers became neighbours. Neighbours became family. Men and women ran into danger because someone they had never met needed them. In one of the darkest hours of our national story, countless small lights appeared, and together they kept the darkness from having the final word.

So on this twenty-fifth anniversary, I remember those who left home and never returned. I remember the families who have carried empty places for a quarter of a century. I remember the first responders who climbed, ran, carried, searched, and sacrificed. I remember the passengers who found courage at thirty thousand feet. I remember the people who prayed, donated, comforted, embraced, and rebuilt. And I remember a nation that, for one brief and painful season, understood that beneath politics, background, race, religion, region, and ideology, we still belonged to one another.

Perhaps that is the question September 11 leaves us with now. Not merely, Where were you when the world changed? but something more demanding: Do we remember who we became to one another afterward, and can we choose that kind of courage, compassion, and unity before tragedy forces us to remember again?

Share your thoughts in The Commons, where conversation becomes community. What do you remember about September 11, and what do you believe we should carry forward from the days that followed?