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Out of the Ashes

Forrest Church • September 15, 2002

Opinion polls suggest that two thirds of the American people favor turning 9/11 into a national holiday. This year, for understandable reason, it certainly had an impact long since missing from our more routine and therefore often mechanical holiday observances. Almost as many people crowded this sanctuary for the anniversary service last Wednesday evening as were present last year just one day after the terrorist attack. How we choose to commemorate 9/11 will surely change as time goes by. I will be surprised, however–whether this day becomes a holiday or not–if we fail to pay it deep collective and individual emotional notice for years to come.

Taken seriously, holidays illustrate the soul map of a nation. Each of us has his or her particular favorites. I also have one holiday I actively dislike. Muting my distaste, let me simply say that New Years Day is to the spiritual calendar what the appendix is to the human body. It is a vestigial holiday, hearkening back to ancient times when daylight turned back the advance of darkness following the Winter’s solstice, prompting a pagan celebration of the return of the invincible sun. Back then (or so the story went) the apparently inexorable extinguishing of light was reversed every year by divine sufferance in answer to people’s prayers. Once the evidence was in–glory be to Jove!–that days were getting longer, people could begin making plans for yet another year. When the Emperor Constantine shifted his allegiance from the invincible sun to the Son of God, Christmas was moved from summer to winter to replace the pagan celebration, Saturnalia, and–with a little tweaking by the astronomers–coincide with the beginning of the new year.

Today, with nature’s recovery stripped of its life and death drama, apart from the flipping of an annual digit nothing worth mentioning actually begins on the first of January. If anything, we are battening down old hatches–psychically hunkering down for the heart of winter–certainly not opening up new doors.

Corresponding more closely to the rhythm of our contemporary experience, the ancient Hebrew lunar calendar is much better tuned than the Roman solar calendar to the seasons of the soul. Together Rosh Hashanah, the end of summer, and the reopening of school signal a time of new beginnings. Today I feel the pulse of this rhythm more deeply than ever. The reason is simple. From now on, to the familiar late summer, early autumn rites of new beginning, we must add the anniversary of 9/11.

That 9/11 should fit so well into the season of new beginnings can be added to many other ironies that mark the first anniversary of this tragedy. Rather than being thwarted by it (as logic might suggest), our experience of renewal may in fact be deepened by reflecting on 9/11. This can be explained–much as New Year’s used to be–religiously.

Religion is our human response to being alive and having to die. A deeper consciousness of life’s preciousness and fragility can only enhance our desire for new beginnings. What the rites today associated with January 1st confect with cartoons of Father Time and his scythe is cast today by the shadow of real death, by the memory of true courage in face of the abyss, and by a more profound awareness of our interdependencies. These three inspirations–the limits placed on and by mortality, the possibility of human achievement, and our need for one another–are, to me at least, much more conducive to meaningful New Year’s resolutions than are the actuarial conventions of New Year’s Day.

Does this mean we should turn 9/11 into a holiday. I really don’t think so, any more than we should have made December 7^th a national holiday to commemorate Pearl Harbor, or September 17^th for that matter, the day in 1862 when nearly 4,000 Americans died and three times that number were wounded or missing in the battle of Antietam. If, in each case, the United States and its people rose up from the ashes, that doesn’t mean we should celebrate the fire.

Nonetheless, whether it is made into a holiday or not, for years to come 9/11 will stand apart from other days. Its drama will remain vivid in memory. It is a cusp day, forcing us to reflect on the past and rededicate ourselves to a better future. Both are important. Only by weighing the past can we measure ourselves for the future. Turning one page, we open a new one, which can only be blank if we attend to the old page carefully. This is why, in the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah is followed by Yom Kippur, the days of atonement. Calling us first to weigh life’s meaning and then to harvest our own lives through acts of individual renewal, by reminding us of life’s preciousness and fragility 9/11 too prompts us to take a full and fearless personal inventory. Certainly we did so last year. And, from what I have observed in many conversations over the past week, prompted by this anniversary we are doing so again. Right on schedule. Right in time for the beginning of a new year.