The Year My Heart Learned to Stay Open

On Sept. 11 a year ago, I and twenty-five other theologians and church leaders were in downtown Manhattan at 74 Trinity Place, the street that becomes the east side of the World Trade Center plaza. The plan was for us to gather there at 8:45 a.m. and then proceed to Trinity Church's television studio on the fourth floor for an all-day taping of four meditations on the shaping of holy lives. The form of our meditations on that subject would take a radical turn, beginning at 8:48, when the first plane flew into the north tower.

That morning we entered what Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams called "the school of death," where we learn everything there is to know about speaking of God. For this reason, it is important to say a few words about our near-death experience that day. Before the collapse of the second tower, we had been evacuated from our building, and were picking our way through a landscape that looked like nuclear winter. Utter negation of life. Everything in sight was blanketed in the grayish powder of the south tower's previous collapse. Ankle deep in steel shards, pulverized glass, and the detritus of lost lives, we were heading south on Greenwich Street when we began to hear people scream "Here it comes!"

At first a low rumble, then louder, and louder. Then the vibration under our feet began to swell like an earthquake. But the air overhead crackled as well, like the sound of military jets breaking the sound barrier. The two merged, from above and below, and the whole earth thundered. And then the screaming, wailing, crying, stumbling stampede--the numbing images that you've all seen on TV...

There is something about being confronted with your own certain and immediate demise, one hundred stories high, barreling down on you in a way you are completely helpless to do anything at all to stay or stop, that has the effect of teaching surrender. In the direct apprehension of mortality, you can feel the life within you instinctively leaping to offer itself up. In that moment you know life does not belong to you. You must go--give it up; give it away. That is your life's ultimate tendency and destination. I discovered in those seconds that

life up will be my last act.

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