Keeping the faith: Lessons in love, leadership and loyalty remain fresh from Sept. 11
On Monday, Dec. 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt, just hours after the attack by Japan on our bases in Pearl Harbor, stood before a joint session of Congress and with the following words began his speech before going on to describe and decry the attack:
“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy ....”
I often think of those words whenever the anniversary of the events of Sept. 11 — or what has come to be known as 9/11 — takes place. It was indeed a day that will live on in infamy, both in the collective life of our nation and in the personal lives of all directly impacted by it.
It seems almost impossible that more than two decades have come and gone since that beautiful and fateful Tuesday morning. And yet, even the passing of time and the coming and going of the years has not removed the pain that was felt and is still being felt today.
While it is not necessarily true that “times heals all wounds,” there is truth that time allows us a perspective, a perch as it were from which and by which we can look back and in the looking back we find hints and help, even hope.
That is where I am this year as I remember Sept. 11, 2001.
Let me be honest and admit that this year my reflections come amid all that is taking place in our nation and world, a time and place when there is conflict, controversy and even confusion.
As I listen to the rhetoric, hear the vitriol, watch the violence and see the embracing of so much that is not who we claim to be or aspire to be as a nation , 9/11 this year especially reminds me of what can be, of what our nation has often done in other troubled times. And from that reality and that history, I find hope.
For those of us who lived through those harrowing minutes, hours, days and weeks, there are some things — truths, even — that emerged, and they are what I pray we can see again.
The first thing I saw was love — a love for country, one not based on partisan politics but love of country and fellow citizens. It was a love that made us stand in line to donate blood, to send money and establish scholarships and to help others find and locate loved ones. It was love as the Bible speaks of agape, “seeking the highest good of another.”
The second spirit of that time that I saw was leadership. It was not just leadership from our president but from Congress, governors, mayors, local officials, and also clergy, school teachers and police officers. It was leadership at its best, which is what we often call in the church “servant leadership,” the kind modeled by Jesus and Old Testament figures like Moses, Esther, David, Deborah and others.
Finally, I saw loyalty — not blind, corrosive loyalty to a dogma or ideology but loyalty to a truth, a principle, an idea. It was a loyalty to the heart and true meaning of this experiment we call America.
As we pause to remember, to reflect, to mourn and seek to move on in a healthy and even holy way, it is my prayer that lessons learned from that fateful, infamous day will be remembered, rekindled and recommitted to.
That is our call and challenge, and it is a cause to which we can and should give ourselves.
Bishop Timothy Clarke is the senior pastor of First Church of God on the Southeast Side.
Keeping the Faith is a column featuring the perspectives of a variety of faith leaders from the Columbus area.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Column: 9/11 can teach us lessons in love, leadership and loyalty
