September 11th 2001 : Standing Before The Mystery
The mystery that is vast enough to hold both the horror and the love without having to explain either away.
There are events before which any explanation begins to feel entirely inadequate.
September 11th is one of them.
We can tell the history. We can name what happened, trace the decisions that led to it, remember the aircraft, the towers, the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania. We can count the dead. We can study causes and consequences.
And still, something remains beyond all telling.
Perhaps this is where contemplation begins.
Not in trying to discover some hidden reason why such a thing happened. Not in imagining that suffering was required by some greater plan. There are wounds for which no explanation could ever be enough.
The mystery lies elsewhere.
It lies in the fact that, in a matter of minutes, thousands of ordinary human lives were suddenly gathered into one immense moment. People going to work. Drinking coffee. Answering telephones. Saying goodbye without knowing it was goodbye.
And then the unimaginable arrived.
Yet within that unimaginable darkness, another reality appeared.
People turned toward one another.
Strangers carried strangers. Firefighters climbed stairways while others were descending. People made telephone calls whose final purpose was simply to say, I love you. Hands reached for hands. They gave their lives for each other—for people whose names they would never know.
None of this makes the tragedy less tragic.
But it reveals something.
When everything superficial is stripped away—our schedules, our arguments, our possessions, our certainty about tomorrow—something astonishingly simple remains.
We belong to one another.
Perhaps that is part of the great mystery that tragedy sometimes exposes with terrible clarity.
September 11th showed us the abyss of what human beings can do to one another.
But in the very same hours, it also showed us something else: the extraordinary depth of what human beings can be for one another.
And so perhaps our contemplation today is not meant to answer September 11th.
Perhaps it is simply to become quiet enough to stand before it.
To remember those who died.
To remember those who ran toward danger.
To remember the countless lives that were permanently changed.
And then, for a moment, to enter the silence beneath all our explanations.
A silence in which grief is allowed to be grief.
Love is allowed to be love.
And the mystery remains vast enough to hold them both.
Nigel Lott teaandzen.org
Meditation Sans Frontieres 501 (C) 3 Registered Charity Tax EIN 81-3411835
May the work offered here serve peace, serve healing, serve remembrance, and serve the quiet dignity of being alive. May this sanctuary belong not to one person alone, but to the field of life itself.
And may all who encounter it feel, even for a moment, that nothing is missing and they are not alone.
