The Slow Way Newsletter: Astonishment and Remembering September 11th
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Astonishment, Kairos Time, September 11
Twenty years ago this morning I woke up to a day I’d been planning for, a few months into my first job out of college. I was working for the university I’d just graduated from, scratching down sentimental words about “lives changed” and “young people pursuing purpose” in brochures for my small evangelical university. It was the beginning of the school year, and the president who had just begun his tenure at the end of the spring was officially being inaugurated that day, September 11, 2001.
I had bought a cheap suit from Kohls for the occasion. I still think of that suit and get the ickies. It felt like thin polyester made of paper, and it looked like I was trying too hard, shoulder pads to make my 22-year-old body look like I belonged somewhere, anywhere other than the student section. I was a grown up now, my white button-up pressed and my sensible boots with only a bit of early 2000’s chunky heel mixed in there. I drove to the campus, ten minutes on the loop and then I switched the radio on when I exited the freeway. I will never forget the right turn I took from the access road onto Ambler. That was when the radio told me about the first plane to hit the Twin Towers. It was a five minute drive until I got to my office on campus. I parked, my paper suit already wrinkled. I had time to get inside and turn on my computer, and maybe (did I?) get a cup of coffee before I reached Birda’s desk on the second floor. She had the TV turned on. We watched the second plane go in together.
Who else was there with us? Maybe Cheryl. We stood in silence, unable to comprehend. I don’t what what we said to each other, what we did. I know the inauguration ceremony was scheduled for 9 am Central time. And, not knowing what was happening in New York City, we went forward with it in the university auditorium. Someone said a prayer about the situation. My mentor and first instructor in poetry Dr. Bob Fink read a poem he had written for the occasion. We kept our schedule. At that time, when cell phones were still only used for phone calls, we stood around outside at the reception, under a tent, and relayed to one another whatever news we had most recently heard. Someone would sneak back to their office and check the news. So and so had tried calling their cousin in New York but hadn’t gotten through. The news said there were other planes. We stuffed more egg salad sandwiches in our mouths. I fidgeted with my Kohls suit.
A few days later, maybe, I’d come home to Molly, my dear friend and roommate, sitting on the floor in the living room as the sun was setting outside. She had some TV special on, movie stars raising money for first-responders. I remember her face streaked with tears when she turned to me: the panic, the loss of innocence, the invitation to an unknown-rest-of-our-lives. This was it. We were twenty-two-year-olds and this was the world we lived in. I felt that, the heaviness of all of it, the fear.
In the newest episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, Mike Cosper tells a story of two girls in 1917 who claimed to have played with fairies who appeared beside them in a few photographs. Their story and photos were believed and it captured the public’s imagination. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the women admitted the fairies were fabricated, made of paper. While Cosper says it’s tempting to write all the folks who believed their fairy story off as gullible,“the more generous and maybe more honest description is to say, ‘They were pursuing astonishment.’”
Pursuing astonishment. That phrase stopped me in my tracks. Cosper was quoting GK Chesterson who said “...we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.” It’s an instinct, Chesterton says, this longing to be astonished, this desire for awe.
Or, Cosper reminded his listeners, as the teacher of Ecclesiastes describes it, we have “eternity in our hearts.”
Now, the podcast goes in an entirely different direction from that statement, and a conversation about that episode is a whole other thing. We’ll save it. But I can’t stop thinking about that phrase of Chesterton’s: our instinct for astonishment.
It seems to me that the great struggle of the spiritual life is the both/and of “eternity in our hearts.” We long for astonishment, and we also just want a cheeseburger. We desire a life that exists deeper than the school pick-up line and Twitter’s latest news-storm, but when it comes down to it, it’s easier to settle for the fast seduction of the dollar bin at Target. (Buying those containers feels so good!) Eternity may be in our hearts, but cheeseburgers and cute containers are in our guts.
A few weeks ago we talked about , how some moments are holy: their reality plays on longer than the seconds they existed on the chronos timeline. In Kairos time, we live in a world where eternity reigns, where astonishment is our currency.
When I think about being twenty-two years old on September 11, 2001, I think about that longing for astonishment. I think about Karios time. I think about becoming an adult, and not because of my shoulder pads, but because of Molly’s face on the floor in front of the TV.
My reality is that I was so much farther removed from the actual day than so many of the people I live among now. Here on the east coast, where I live an hour from New York City, people were touched in much closer ways than the world I knew in Texas. There are memorials in my Jersey town for residents who were lost that day. My father in law’s office was across the street from the Twin Towers, but he had retired just a few months before. One year later I was teaching Writing 101 to Syracuse University 18-year-olds and I had my students write a reflection on their experiences. Some shared where they were when the towers fell, how they felt waiting for news for their loved ones who worked close by, what they had lost. I remember a student named Noah, who, only three or four weeks into his freshman year of college, read his reflection aloud to his classmates and cried.
The truth is: Kairos time isn’t always beautiful, even if it is holy. Holy means set apart, consecrated, and no one who lived through that day can deny that it was a day set apart. Sometimes time stops because evil cuts its life. Sometimes time stops because we were living in chronos and had forgotten that our currency is actually eternity.
When evil tears up our constructed realities, when we see our best friend’s face and recognize that the world has shifted unalterably and we’ve become grown-ups, we can be reminded that we are made for astonishment.
Astonishment is a muscle we can choose to exercise, or we can let it atrophy. If we are people looking for the miracles, the magic, the goodness in the world, we will find them: First responders in Ground Zero, searching for life. Neighbors caring for neighbors in the streets that morning in New York. My colleagues standing awkwardly around the sandwiches under a tent, our hearts set on eternity. The way I walked straight to Molly that night in Abilene, Texas, wrapped my arms around her on the floor of our apartment living room, and cried along with her, the TV lights dancing off our skin in the dusk.
We were made for astonishment. And maybe what that really means is we were made for transformative love, to live in a way that reminds us that we are not just creatures existing along a timeline, but we are whole selves set apart in a beautiful, dangerous world, created to know a God who exists outside of time and space. And, even in the darkness, we can touch that eternal truth.
a slow practice
Whatever age you are, you have been shaped by September 11, 2001. You have have lived through it or you may have arrived in a culture deeply gutted by it. Either way, you come to this day with a collective memory. Spend some time today sorting through how this event has shaped your life and your sense of the world.
Maybe you can write a journal entry about what you experienced that day, or about what was handed down to you about that day. Or maybe you want to draw a picture of yourself that day and how it transformed you. How have the events of 9/11 shaped your sense of safety, of patriotism, of what it means to belong to a culture or a country? Of what it means to be safe?
Now draw a picture of yourself in 2021. (Or you can still journal if you're not into drawing!) What fears do you carry with you still because of that day? What feelings are still easy to access from those events twenty years ago? Ask God to help you see them, and make sense of them.
Now draw a picture of what astonishment looks like to you. Ask God to reveal to you what it means to live in a such a way that you see beyond our boredom, our fears, our culture's collective stories, and into something eternal. Ask God to meet you in your feelings about the past and experience of the present.