Memories of the Fall 2001
It was just after 7.50 on the morning of September 11th, and I was ducking out of my office to teach an 8 a.m. World Literature Class. It was my second week of teaching at Taylor University, so I occasionally still tried to get to class on time. My office door opened directly out to the desk of our secretary, Rhonda Gretillat, without whom nothing. Rhonda usually had her radio on (it was 2001 folks) and she usually kept us informed about things. I was rushing to class, so it took me a minute to tune in to what she was trying to tell me.
"One of the World Trade Center towers in New York City just exploded."
Rhonda knew that I used to live in New York, that I love New York, and that, like most former New Yorkers, I am often talking about New York. Stunned and foggy, I didn't mention the news at all in that early morning class. And believe it or not, students were not all scrolling through their Facebook feeds and Instagram accounts before and during classes back in 2001. Anyway (or anyways, as some of my favorite people say), I didn't want to freak out and then find out later that what sounded like World War III had turned out be an electrical fire.
Like a lot of people around the world, my colleagues and I spent much of the rest of that day around the radio (or what screens we could find) for further news. I remember the feeling of absolute despair and disgust (a literal emotional "sinking") that came, first, when we heard that the second tower had been hit, and, later, when we heard the incredible, unbelievable news that a tower had collapsed. Collapsed?
I thought, somewhat selfishly, of one of my favorite spots on earth, one I had treasured from the first day this boy from a little Texas town had hit the Big Apple. Just off the shore of lower Manhattan, gliding back at night towards the city on the Staten Island Ferry, with the proud Towers dominating the skyline. A bright vision. A beautiful dream.
But the day wasn't over. I had to teach again, unless I was going to cancel my classes (which didn't seem right that day). As a professor in a "Christian college," I thought that I should at least try to relate the horrors of that day to some larger picture, some ultimate story within which it could be framed, if not understood. Even sharing my understanding that it was beyond our understanding might help.
Most of all, I wanted to help my students connect our experiences that day with the lives and concerns of other people who have faced and still are facing similar trauma. Some people experience something like 9/11 every day. To them, sadly, it's just called life.
So when I came back to my afternoon World Literature class, I came with the words of C. S. Lewis from a speech, a sermon really, he gave to Oxford students in the early days of World War II, now titled "Learning in War Time." Lewis had seen the Great War from trench-level and from a hospital bed. Now, in 1939, he was addressing his students in the context of the uncertainty of a new war, yet without a name.
Granting the facts of crisis and tragedy, Lewis points out that if human beings had stopped teaching and studying every time the level of human suffering reached crisis proportions (whether a war or a world-changing terrorist attack), we simply would have shut down all our schools a long time ago. Moreover, if we really could see things as they are, we would realize, as the scriptures and Christian tradition teach, that the world is always at war, that a battle is always pitched, that we are always living in crisis time.
How dare we, Lewis asks, stop learning (and thinking, marrying, culture building, being human) when an external, physical conflict touches our lives, if, as our religion teaches, a dangerous, terrible (and terror full) spiritual conflict rages around and within us every single day.
Then, having asked their permission, I went on to talk about World Literature. Specifically, we discussed the amazing fact that, when he finally arrived at the destination of his great Odyssey (his beloved homeland of Ithaca), the great Odysseus, conqueror of Troy, the Cyclops, and pretty much all the known world, was fast asleep.
Maybe, I thought afterwards, September 11th was a great personal and communal "wake-up call." Not in the jingoistic sense that Americans now would remember that we really are the center of the universe and everybody else better be careful or we will kick their non-American butts (a version heard often on popular radio programs back then). But a call to something higher. To wake up to our lives, to our journeys, to our homes (both here and in our ultimate Ithacas). To the great and awful responsibility we have of living in and caring for this dangerous, beautiful world. To remember that every time we wake up, or every time we walk out of our office door on the way to an early morning class, some miracles and some tragedies are waiting to happen. No, they are happening. People are suffering. Some people are, right now, sacrificing everything for a greater cause, for the good of someone else. To save someone. To rescue someone. Risking everything.
This morning while I'm teaching. Tonight while I am sleeping, some people are finding ultimate meaning on the brink of despair. People are, to put it mildly, reordering their priorities. The call to wake up is also the call to dive in.
One final note. Just around that time in my first semester at that new school, my friend Twyla Lee told me about an alternate route to Upland from my home in Huntington. Instead of driving on I-69 and fighting the Indianapolis traffic through the relative sameness of the Interstate landscape, she said I should try taking County Road 300W/State Road 5, going past the Huntington Landfill, the little Lancaster school and cemetery, Van Buren, Eastbrook school, and lots of farms. "It's all two lane farm roads," she said, "but it's about five miles shorter. And . . . there aren't any police."
Dear reader, I fell in love with every inch of that stretch of country road the mornings and afternoons after September 11, 2001. I can't describe how comforting and reassuring it was through that traumatic time to drive past school buses on their way to Lancaster or Eastbrook, or to get stuck on that winding rural road behind combines and tractors bringing in that fall's fine harvest. "God and the farmers are on speaking terms, again," I remember saying to my wife, after seeing so many good people bringing in their sheaves one late October day.
Thanks to that 8 a.m. class, I even got to see the early morning sun rising above the old landfill and the Lancaster cemetery day after day. The old barns, the little dying farm towns, the corn stubble glistening with dew every morning and shining like gold in the late afternoon sun -- these bright things will forever be connected to the dark memories of that autumn.
I don't think I'm making this up (but you never know I guess), but we all seemed to be waving like neighbors to each other those days, or giving the thumbs up instead of the more offensive digital signal I usually get from other drivers. In slight, almost invisible, ways, we were doing significant healing work. At least that's how I remember it. And felt it. Even rolling down the windows and talking to complete strangers about things I knew nothing about -- like harvesting soybeans or the Eastbrook football team -- took on a deeper meaning.
Sometimes people in these parts are labeled as narrow-minded. Perhaps a bit stuck in the mud. More than a little old fashioned. Those things looked a lot different to me during the autumn of 2001. It looked to me like people who had taken a big slug in the gut. But who had climbed up out of the ditch to start caring again. After that hard fall, it felt good to be in the heartland.
Well written, Joe!
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