"Go Find a TV"

Into the Fire - Bruce Springsteen (mp3)
The Kingdom - Bethany Dillon (mp3)


One of seven faculty speeches given in memory of 9/11/01 on Friday morning at our school.

My wife called me just before 9:00 a.m. She was at home nursing our second daughter, who wasn't even a month old.

"I'm watching the Today Show, and they think a plane hit the World Trade Center," she said. "Go find a TV. You need to see this."

"Honey, I'm right in the middle of finishing up this story," I said, or something to that effect. "Why don't you just tell me what's happening?"

We were on the phone no more than three minutes when she said, "Oh my God oh my God."

"What? What?" I said.

"Hold on. Oh my God. I think another plane just hit the other building."

"What? Another plane? Are you..."

"Go find a TV," she said.

I walked across the floor where I work, and then up the stairs, and then slowly down the first floor admissions office hallway, looking in rooms for a TV set; it now seems like some weird 60s mind control movie. I remember passing people's doorways, and they're coming out into the hallway, too, because they've just heard, and they're looking for a TV. And we all have this dumbfounded look of confusion and disbelief on our faces.

I might have been the sixth or seventh person in the office of the one dude who had a TV. Another dozen or so crowded in over the next 10 or 15 minutes. By that point, we knew it had to be the work of foreign terrorists.

I'm 37. Vietnam ended before I could say "Mama." I never had drills in school where I ducked under my desk just in case a nuke dropped on us. The only conflicts I ever knew my whole life were quick and simple. Grenada. Libya. Panama. Kuwait. The fights were over almost before they started, and they made us proud to be Americans, and everyone said you just don't mess with the USA. As if to add exclamation points to this, the Berlin Wall fell, the USSR collapsed, and everyone who wasn't distinctly an American ally seemed to experience calamity and disaster. It really was as if God was speaking, and He was telling us all, "America is my country, and everyone best follow suit or prepare for the apocalypse."

At 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when that second plane hit... well, clearly something happened on the way to paradise. And it created a fear in me and others that was to that point in our lives unknown and unthinkable.

Many of you aren't too crazy about coming into the Chapel three days a week. I understand that; I do.

But let me promise you something. There are times when this place means everything. If you were a student at this school on September 11, 2001, if you were a teacher or a staff member, if you were Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Hindu or completely 100% atheistic, you wanted desperately to be in this place. The power of a community gathered together for comfort in a time of high emotion cannot be explained. The value of hope that someone or something greater and wiser and more loving than humankind might be out there cannot be adequately explained.

On September 11, I learned that the world had changed, that my children would grow up in a different time, that hate existed and we were a target. And I was also made eternally grateful for this space and for this community. We were fortunate to have this Chapel and to have one another.

It's only unfortunate that we need tragedies of unspeakable proportions to be reminded of such simple truths.