The Shock on Our Soil

Not unlike the memory of the death of President Kennedy, the 9/11 attacks cause us to recall where we were when it all took place, the stunned silence as we viewed the images on television, the horror of realizing that the falling black dots were people who had jumped out of windows. We saw ash-covered faces of stunned New Yorkers not quite grasping what had just happened. Indeed, neither did we. Next the Pentagon. Next a farm field in Pennsylvania. We can look back and say much of where we are today can be traced back to that day 20 years ago, but it wasn’t just the attacks. It has become so much deeper.

I was born to a family who stayed closed in their homes as Hitler grew in power in Nazi Germany. He won by less than a 1/3 majority yet gained total rule during what could only be called a perfect storm post World War I. After the annexation of Austria, my father, a ballet dancer in Vienna, was quickly drafted and sent to the Russian front as a teen. Thin as he was, seen by the tiny-waisted dancing clothes he kept, he still lost another 60 pounds in an internment camp in Berlin at the end of the war before going back home to his beloved Vienna.

I heard all the stories as a girl growing up: the bombs that hit the home when my mother’s family was away for a weekend to visit her aunt, taking nothing but their clothes and the silver which my grandmother ran back to grab as they left.  All was lost; the furniture made by hand during my grandparents’ 5-year engagement, all of it. One would expect such stories from one’s family recalling the war years, and we were curious even though we were constantly chided by my grandmother in her thick German accent. “Don’t talk about ze var.”

The stories of loss, though sad, weren’t unusual for the circumstances. What did strike me as profoundly odd was the fact that my grandfather often came home, sometimes on weekends, until he was captured and spent 2 years in a prison camp in Maine. How odd that he could come home! I had to remind myself that the war was on their own soil. Maybe a few miles from where they lived, but this was their home. The whole cities that became piles of rubble and dusty bricks were now home.

To me that’s what changed twenty years ago. Yes, we were hit during World War II in Hawaii, but it wasn’t New York or DC. Those islands and that Navy base were so far away, it still didn’t seem to be on our soil.

 On 9/11 the security we have always had in our nation dissipated like steam into the sky. We were vulnerable. We were afraid. New laws were passed. We lost freedoms. We got used to it because we wanted to be safe. Twenty years later, more has been revealed. We began to realize how much of it is connected to the reasons why we meet together today. There is an unholy agenda that would keep us from living the life God intended for us to live, free of fear. We turn off the TV, we seek out alternate ways to stay in contact, we seek real information from places where it is hidden. We fight with whatever tools we find at hand. We resolve not to give in to fear, because it is a long road leading to nowhere.

If at any time these nearly last words of Jesus Christ can be applied to our hearts, it is now: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me…Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” John 14:1, 27

I remind myself of God’s words to us while realizing that the soil of my own property for which I care with such affection, the life I lead, the art I create for my work, is all temporal and not promised to me as an undisturbed reality until I peacefully die of old age in my sleep. Not since the civil war could soldiers walk home for the weekend. We don’t want that here. We don’t want it anywhere. May God give us the courage we didn’t think we had. May He give us the resolve to stand firm for what we believe, for our futures and our families and grant us His perfect peace.

Rosemarie Adcock