TEN YEARS AFTER 9/11--THE HOUSE IN YOUR HEAD

It’s difficult to believe that ten years have passed since 9/11. I remember that day. Clear skies, balmy temperature—the weather was all wrong. If ever there was a day in need of God’s metaphoric disapproval or wrath—a thunderstorm or hurricane—it was that day.
Ten years ago, we were dealing with questions about whether one can have a funeral without a body. When should we give up on the miracle of finding our loved one alive? When should we give up on finding our loved one dead? When should we give up? That was the real question; it was a question about hope.


We all go through periods of hopelessness. At those times, if we have clarity of mind, we will seek help. We seek help from a spouse, friends, therapists, or clergy. We may take medication. We explore our faith traditions with greater seriousness. We pray and hope that God will answer us.


There is a prayer, a line in Psalm 27 which I love because it is so outrageous.  "May I dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of my life…"  (Psalm 27: 4).


What a request. I’m clergy and even I don’t want to live in the House of the Lord all the days of my life. Sometimes I want to travel, or go shopping, or get a haircut—none of which takes place in the House of the Lord. But the psalmist cannot possibly be asking to live in the House of the Lord for that duration. What the psalmist is really asking is to live a life of peace, of being an instrument of God’s goodness in a world so often lacking in that presence.


In our post 9/11 world, it is easy to live life with a lingering sense of anger and bitterness, with sweeping generalizations about Moslems, with a sense of cynicism, that is the very rejection of hope itself. We can live like that and many do, but imagine yourself with that type of attitude walking around in the House of the Lord—a space of peace, and hope, and love, and inspiration to further the goodness of God on earth. It’s incongruous.


The synagogue or temple or church that you attend is very important, but the house of worship that you carry in your head is more important. The God we believe in is the One who urges us to fill this world with solutions not problems, hope not despair, dialogue not destruction, love not death.


Of the 3,000 or so lives lost on 9/11, the greater tragedy would be the silencing of the living, for when the living are silent, they are as good as dead—bodies that are absent from the world. It was bad enough that people had to mourn without their loved one’s body to bury. Let’s make sure that our bodies—our hearts and minds—are used in the next decade to spread the world with abundant and generous acts of kindness and love because that’s what people who live in the House of the Lord all the days of their lives, do.