by Chris Koellhoffer, August 14, 2016
This present moment, this sacred now, is all we really have. Yesterday is unrepeatable and held in memory. Tomorrow is not guaranteed to any one of us. This train of thought has lingered with me since I visited the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City this past week.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in New York beginning a certificate program in spiritual direction. I spent the next 24 hours in the company of frightened yet compassionate strangers, all of us haunted by the eerie silence of a normally noisy city, all of us desperately searching for information and trying to find a way home. Home for me at that time was the 10th floor of a high rise apartment in Jersey City, across the Hudson River. From that perch, I prayed and wept for days as I looked out on the smoking, smoldering Manhattan skyline with its terrible, raw scar and its gaping emptiness. I had not been able to return to the site of this overwhelming loss and grief until just this past week, some 15 years later.
Last week, spending time at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, I realized that I was once again in the company of strangers, all of us reverently trying to absorb the enormity of what we were witnessing. There were a few hushed whispers, many quiet tears, but mostly, there was the remembering and the cherishing, especially in the memorial exhibition, In Memoriam. Together, we entered a corridor and gazed up at the “Wall of Faces,” portrait photographs of the nearly 3,000 men, women, and children whose lives were taken by violence that day and in the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. We lingered over the touchscreen tables that offered a further glimpse into the 
precious lives commemorated through photographs, audio recordings, mementos. Outside at the reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers, we searched for familiar names and let our fingers linger when we found them.
That day at the memorial and museum, I who am a writer and lover of words had no words. No words. Words were not enough for the bright lights snuffed out not only here in New York City but in all the places in our world that have experienced acts of violence and savagery. No words. Only a reverencing for all that had been so brutally taken away. No words. Just a sense of communion with the corporate ache and the collective weeping of the human family.
Since then I have carried with me a wondering at what those lives might have become, what gifts and graces they might have showered on a world that continues to mourn their absence but honors them by moving forward in hope. Most probably, none of the beautiful, smiling faces filling wall after wall of the 9/11 memorial had any intuition that a September morning would be their last. All they had, which is all we have, is the present moment.
Their faces, and the faces of the many who have known both the beauty and the brokenness of our world, challenge me, impel me, plead with me: “Live with awareness. Don’t delay in sharing your love. Be extravagant with compassion. And do this right here, right now.”
Takeaway
Pause for a moment of quiet.
Name any loss which you are carrying today.
Ask God for healing for your own heart as well as the hearts of your neighbors across the world.
In the moments ahead of you today, how might you be invited to be a person of peace and tenderness?
NOTE:
To automatically receive a new blog as soon as it’s posted:
Go to the beginning of this current blog.
As you scroll down slowly, you will see a “Follow” button in the lower right hand corner.
Click on “Follow” and a form will appear for you to fill in your email address.
After you do that, you’ll receive an email asking you to verify your address.
Click on this link, and you’ll receive a confirmation that you’re now automatically subscribed.
Thanks for signing on and Following!
consequence of that moment. But in the days since, the boot has offered a powerful spiritual practice to me.
So my boot, initially an inconvenience and an irritant, has grown into a daily meditation of sorts, a reminder of the invisible brokenness, diminishment, and limitations in my own life and in the lives of the people who come into my circle of awareness each day. St. Paul wrote of desiring to have the same attitude as Jesus, to see as Jesus did, to put on the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5). In much the same way, the poet and mystic Rumi urged us to
in-law spent an entire day pulling the wire fence out of the ground. At the end of the day, only one thing was left standing: the little wire gate. Everything else was clear and open space, now without borders or boundaries.
life’s biggest questions, questions of identity and belonging. Saul, who became Paul, first hunted Christians and threw them into prison. Later he’s knocked off his horse by a blinding light, and what happens next? He hears a question: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And Saul answers the divine question with his own: “Who are you?” Who are you? Because he pays attention to these questions, Saul/Paul spends the rest of his life in pursuit of the change of heart this persecuted God invites.
Questions invite us to a deepened awareness. As we pray and reflect on the stuff of our lives, we’re also tending to the interrogative, the question marks in our lives:
growing outside the kitchen door. One of my community members didn’t share my appreciation of this determined herb. Over time, she tried every means available to eradicate mint from its coveted spot. She pulled out its long tentacles of underground root runners, sprayed it, even crushed its leaves underfoot. Still, knowing mint’s propensity for refusing to give up, I was unconcerned for its survival. Every time I passed the patch of mint that was under threat of disappearance, it was as if I could hear it saying, “See you around. I’m here to stay.” And stay it did.
Those of us who have had to eulogize a loved one know, in a particular way, the challenge of re-membering. When we re-member, we revisit and extract meaning from the lives of those who have died. We ask: what might we highlight, underscore, lift up for our listeners to reveal the essence of those who have graced our life? How do we pay tribute, how do we distill a lifetime of stories and memories into a collage of tender, humorous, or moving images? How do we honor and re-member a life?
and gesture is laden with significance. As we celebrate the individual anniversaries that mark the passing of our beloved who now deepen into risen life, and as we come together for collective remembrances–Memorial Day, All Souls day, the feast of All Saints–may we re-member the life of Jesus and the great cloud of witnesses. May we become more aware of their light all around us. May we embody in our own lives their choices for compassion and justice that have left such a profound impact on our beautiful, yet wounded world.
occur, listening must be present. This is true not only in developing relationships with one another, but in our relationship with God as well.
In a landscape blanketed in grief and loss, another definition of disaster also applies, and it’s the one I embrace. Madeleine L’Engle defines “disaster” by its etymology, its root words: dis and astrum—“separation from the stars”. So dis-aster is, quite literally, finding oneself distanced from hope, from dreams, weighed down by a worldview devoid of light and promise.
lens. I quickly removed the lens, but in spite of repeated rinsing with eye solution, the irritant remained fixed. Tears and mucus built up as my eye tried to expel the foreign object. With the constant discomfort sometimes escalating to pain, I could think of nothing else but finding relief for my eye and my blurring vision. Many hours later, I was able to find an eye surgeon who treated the abrasions in my eye and put an end to the flow of tears.