The Kansas farmer wrestles not against flesh and blood in getting his crops or his livestock to market. He wrestles not against the banker, the insurance man, or his fellow man. His is not a calculus of hybrids and concentration, nor the karmic discipline of early rising and late resting. He is a man who must live ever on the edge of the illusion that everything depends on whether he discs the land on the right day, on whether he irrigates on the right timetable, on whether his cows calve at the proper times. All the while knowing that blight and blizzard, death and drought stalk his every step.

But still he puts his hand to the plow, fires up the old Massey-Ferguson, rubs the stubble on his chin, and leans forward. His is either the most reckless of hopes or the most dogged of optimisms. Then again, his is a desperation that may just be another word for faith. He hopes in that which is not seen, for if he hopes in what he can see, how is that hope of any kind? So let the ground crack and splinter in drought, let the markets fall, the Kansas farmer will still believe the rain will come. And when it doesn’t, he girds his heart and believes it will come anyway.

When brought to the end of all things human–all his back breaking effort, all the ingenuity of forecasts and futures, all the safety nets of finance and premiums–the farmer will believe, with all the tenacity of a conspiracy theorist, that the answer to his prayers will come. Some might call this a form of functional insanity. For the farmer it is a faith on which his very existence is built. Apart from this faith he does not exist. He might do other things. And those crushed by this process of sweat and desperation, those driven from this existence centered wholly on faith, do go on to do other things. But if they are farming men, they do these other things while having died a little inside. They might smile and hug the grandchildren, but there is the faint longing in the heart, never stilled, for the soil and the sun, the lonely herd beneath the blue heaven.

No, the Kansas farmer lives always on the edge of desperation, always on the borderland between the seen and known and the unseen and hoped for. In him echoes the cry he hears of a creation longing for the revelation of God’s sons. He knows by a process beyond and greater than reason that he is upheld by the invisible hand. As he stands in dusty boots looking out on barrenness he casts his heart, his being, outward in a wild toss of faith. He hopes, blindly and with little sensible evidence, that as he falls outward into the seeming abyss, his outstretched hand will be grasped and he will be drawn out of chaos onto the firm and lush prairie of the soul.

Settled on such a ground, he can meet his desperation and the emptiness he sees all around him and know it for what it is. The hidden presence of sacredness and help.

In the past couple of years, I’ve discerned these sorts of reflections orienting around themes. In 2010, I was looking to heal and to grow. That ultimately resulted in focusing on improving my physical health through diet and exercise, and spending time working through some of the emotional healing I was needing, including reflecting deeply on the factors in my life history that had influenced my choices and the outcomes of those choices. Last year, my reflections began to orient around “getting back to basics.” I focused on returning to working on fulfilling my obligation (and desire) to be a writer, on the basics of the spiritual life (prayer, almsgiving, fasting) among other things. Unfortunately, my ideas were larger than my capacities, so at the end of 2011 I found myself unfinished in a few areas.

Which gives rise to this year’s theme: finishing and finishing well. I’m going to continue to keep it simple, and just focus on a few areas. I’d begun to get in shape and lose weight in July 2010. I need to finish that “project” and reduce to my goal weight and accomplish my physical fitness goals (i.e., running a half-marathon). I also need to finish the novel (at least in first draft form) that I’d begun in August and September. There’s my Attic Greek review I need to accomplish as well. But I don’t want to get too starry-eyed. I need to keep this small and focused.

Of course this whole theme of finishing and finishing well is useful for the entire trajectory of one’s life. So I’m sure this is a theme I will revisit often.

May God bless that which is in accordance with his will.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 42,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 16 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I have written elsewhere on this blog on an incarnational understanding of religion. But I want to take a little different pathway here.

Full disclosure: as an Orthodox Christian, my faith is expressed in elaborate and ornate rituals of worship, in sometimes rigorous disciplines of diet, and in the regular recitation of the Psalter and other formal prayers. I don’t have an axe to grind, but I do have a way of life to promote.

That said, while Jesus did in fact cry “woe” on the Pharisaic traditions and on the mercantile exchange which was morning prayer at the Jerusalem temple, his Apostles, and the early Church with them, quite readily continued the observance of the hours of prayer during the day, the dietary codes of the Jewish faith, and the observance of various feasts of the Jewish faith. Either one ought move the supposed Constantinian devolution of the Church back a few centuries or perhaps Jesus was decrying not tradition per se but rather the sinful distortion and manipulation of tradition.

From here it would be a simple matter to demonstrate how Paul and the other Apostles advocated the handing on of the traditions of the Christian Faith, which were, simply, “the Way.” That is to say, they handed down a way of living that was uniquely Christian. But this has been done elsewhere (including by myself: here, here, and here), so I’ll refrain here.

Rather, following along the lines of my more recent post, I want to continue looking at religion from the standpoint of incarnation. That is to say, we have religion because we are incarnate creatures. Correlatively, being incarnate creatures we are inescapably religious. This is not simply a matter of being in our pre-resurrected state, either. Even the saints in heaven, who await the final Resurrection, are inescapably religious (cf. Revelation 4-5).

Why is this so? I think Paul gives us a clue at the end of 1 Corinthians 9 when he uses athletic imagery to encapsulate the need for spiritual disciplines. If we follow his analogy, I think we will uncover some helpful insights.

Without adhering too rigidly to the metaphor (all comparisons ultimately break apart in the details), it is nonetheless true that athletes live what we might call a very religious sort of life. Indeed, whenever we perceive that someone very closely follows a routine or demonstrates a tenacious focus about some matter, we say that person is “religious” about it. “He’s very particular about being punctual, almost religious about it.” Athletes are similarly focused and tenacious about their regimens and routines. They eat particular foods at particular times in particular amounts and combinations. They exercise at specific times, utilizing specific movements. They meditate and visualize specific matters. They have a particular jargon, or language. Their lives revolve around a particular orientation (their sport). The Olympics will soon be televised (this coming summer), and we will hear about athletes who are mere teens who arise long before daybreak and swim their laps or perform their gymnastic routines. We may well even hear that for them this is “their religion.”

While we could look on such devotion to routine and discipline and a single sport as “a bit off,” or that such priorities are “out of whack” with regard to normal life (especially if the athletes are teens missing out on normal teen living), if we look at such lives in terms of the purpose of such a life, we might be more impressed. That is to say, if the manner of living (dietary regulations, sleep regulations, mental/thought disciplines, physical regulations and routines) results in the often awe-inspiring excellences in gymnastics, swiming, track and field, etc., that we see during the televised Olympics (we’ll leave the distortions of narrative creation and back story out of it and focus just simply on the athletes performing their respective sports), we will be forced to acknowledge that such a “religious” way of life, even if revolving around a single sport, is effective and to be admired.

Let us now turn that paradigm to the life of Christian faith. Instead of excellence in sport, the Christian seeks to know Jesus, whom to know is eternal life. But the Christian also knows that without holiness no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). A holy life is a virtuous life. That is to say, the virtues are nothing less than the best things about being human: courage, wisdom, justice, and so forth. Thus, knowing Jesus means a pursuit of the excellences that are the virtues–not simply in living a moral life (which can be only a mere external form of living) but rather living the sort of life God lives–a life good and beautiful and true. If there is a manner of living such that it produces that sort of life, then we would do well to imitate such a life. Religion, understood in the paradigm here we are considering, as an askesis, a wholistic set of disciplines, a way of life, is just that sort of life.

In other words, far from being an impediment to getting to know Jesus as he is, religion is the disciplined pathway toward excellence by which we make room for and acquire the holiness God produces in us, thereby freeing us from our moral and mortal impediments which hinder us from the final goal: knowing Jesus as he is.

In the first couple of years, the world of Orthodox bloggers (Russian, Greek, Antiochian, convert, cradle, and mostly laity) was pretty small. I could keep up with all of them. My how things have changed. Some, like Karl, no longer blog. But now there are so many more. I don’t even try. I keep up with a few, like James’ blog, but mostly now I’m more offline than on. In the “good ol’ days” Orthodox blogging was pretty much “how do we live this thing we call the Orthodox faith?” which meant a lot of stuff about work and family, but of course, being the geeks we were (are), there was plenty of theological discussion. Nowadays, I see a lot more polemics. I don’t have time for it. I don’t have the stomach for it. I guess it’s the age we live in.

For several years, this blog reflected the core aspects of my life: academia, becoming Orthodox, fatherhood. But in the last few years, I have begun to sense something of a lack of purpose for the blog. I no longer feel the need to search out the questions I once had regarding Orthodoxy, and feel even less need to pontificate on matters Orthodox and theological. Since my chrismation four and a half years ago, I have become aware of the need for reticence about one’s spiritual life. While questions of philosophy still animate me, I am no longer part of the academic community I once worked in, and am well satisfied simply reading and reflecting on such matters. And what can I say about fatherhood? The longer I am a father, the more I am aware of the need for urgent prayer and thoughtful action. It is a mystery, and a joy, and requires nothing less than constant dependence upon God’s gracious energies.

Further, in recent months my writing focus has changed. I have, in a sense, returned to my first love–the writing of fiction. I do not yet see how to fit together this blog and my present focus of writing. I’ve got no advice to offer. I’m no literary genius. If I ever were to publish anything, it certainly would not make it to the “classics” list.

So here sits this blog. Once again dormant. And here I sit once again on the brink of nuking it, and yet once again finding myself unable to push the delete button. It’s not as though this is some sort of existential struggle. It’s a blog. Keep it. Nuke it. Whatever. And yet . . . perhaps there’s a future for it. Perhaps a little more patience will bring a little more clarity.

But I can say this, I like my little corner of the blogosphere. It doesn’t get any traffic to speak of. It’s not as though any of my posts will ever travel much beyond the orbit of a few readers (like my west coast buddy, Tripp). But it’s my homely little creation. It’s been a good nine years. We’ll see how much more life this little thing has in it. And maybe by next year I’ll have finally figured out where it goes from here.

Today is the feast day of St. Catherine, patron saint of philosophers.

For a little bit about her life and why some churches celebrate St. Catherine’s day on the 24th, read this piece from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese Online Chapel:

Saint Catherine, who was from Alexandria, was the daughter of Constas (or Cestus). She was an exceedingly beautiful maiden, most chaste, and illustrious in wealth, lineage, and learning. By her steadfast understanding, she utterly vanquished the passionate and unbridled soul of Maximinus, the tyrant of Alexandria; and by her eloquence, she stopped the mouths of the so-called philosophers who had been gathered to dispute with her. She was crowned with the crown of martyrdom in the year 305. Her holy relics were taken by Angels to the holy mountain of Sinai, where they were discovered many years later; the famous monastery of Saint Catherine was originally dedicated to the Holy Transfiguration of the Lord and the Burning Bush, but later was dedicated to Saint Catherine. According to the ancient usage, Saints Catherine and Mercurius were celebrated on the 24th of this month, whereas the holy Hieromartyrs Clement of Rome and Peter of Alexandria were celebrated on the 25th. The dates of the feasts of these Saints were interchanged at the request of the Church and Monastery of Mount Sinai, so that the festival of Saint Catherine, their patron, might be celebrated more festively together with the Apodosis of the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos. The Slavic Churches, however, commemorate these Saints on their original dates.

A fuller account of her life can be found here.

Troparion of Great Martyr Katherine Tone 5
Let us praise Katherine, protectress of Sinai,
Bride of Christ and our helper.
With the sword of the Spirit she silenced the wisdom of the wicked.
She is crowned as a martyr and asks mercy for us all.

Kontakion of Great Martyr Katherine Tone 2
You lovers of martyrs raise a chorus now
in honour of wise Katherine.
She preached Christ in the stadium
and spat on the knowledge of philosophers.

Holy and Great Martyr, All-Wise Catherine, pray for us that we may take captive every thought to the obedience of Christ, and pray that we may be made worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven.

What is it about writing that, unless you’re a published author with titles on the New York Times bestseller lists and making gazillions in royalties, admitting you do it places you in a category somewhere above politicians and telemarketers but below tax accountants and postal workers?

Perhaps this is why whenever I’m asked what I like to do I usually say something like, “Watch sitcoms.” It may not have more socially redemptive value, but at least my interlocutors understand that and can pigeonhole me among the “safe” nerdy set.

I have long aspired to “be a writer.” When I was in first grade I recall riding in our family’s dark green (so dark green it was almost black) Pontiac station wagon. To a first grader, it felt like a land ark. Now granted this memory comes down corridors nearly forty years long, but as I remember it I had in my lap a Big Chief tablet and one of those pencils the size of horses legs. I interrupted whatever I was doing at the time and asked my mom, translated into forty-four year old speak: “Will a publisher accept my manuscript if it’s written in pencil on Big Chief tablet paper?” Being a father of two young and precocious girls I understand what goes on in the mind of a parent while driving children on errands in the car and simultaneously running through mental checklists and responding to the random chatter of said children. I do not know whether or not my mom actually heard the question, and if so whether or not she actually took it seriously, and if so whether she had any definite knowledge of the subject. But I do remember the answer: “I think so.” Whether by intent or happenstance, the answer my mother gave set within my little first grade heart a desire that has never left. To be a writer.

One does not harbor such a desire however before one discovers how awkward admitting such a desire is. If one does not have enough courage–and I have not down all these long decades–to admit the desire, one will keep it buried, unless pried out by trusted friends or canny junior high English teachers.

But even if one hides the desire and the wish, it is another matter to fail to practice it. There is, I think, something of a compulsion for writers to write. At least this is how I’ve experienced it. The delicious delectibility of how words sound, how they sound together, the smell and look and feel of a printed page. The heft of a book in one’s hands. Writing, as all the arts such as painting and astronomy, is very sensory.

If one lacks the courage to admit the desire to write and yet indulges the compulsion, writing becomes a very lonely art. There’s a beauty to this, and a necessity. But it is also fraught with dangers. Writing is expression. To spend long hours talking only to oneself leads to manifestos and bombmaking, or by grace to the monastery. What will save a writer is the same thing, the only thing, that saves all of us. He needs love. If not a lover, he needs someone who can come alongside him and love his art and love him for his art. It is best at least in terms of his art, if this person brings nothing more than an eagerness to read. Critics do not function well here. A mentor is best of all.

So love bids the writer to come out into the daylight. But it does not prepare the cowardly writer for the next round of questions. Because once having found the courage to admit, “I am a writer,” then one’s interlocutors force one to validate and to justify one’s existence.

You know the question: “That’s great. What have you published?”

Because everyone knows you are only a writer if you get published.

This is not entirely untrue, of course. Every writer wants to get published, to see his creation enjoyed by others. Every writer lives with the fear that he is not “good enough” to get published. Every writer continues to write, following rejection after rejection, because he is alive and full of joy when he writes. That is why he writes. That is his sole and necessary validation and justification.

But still to answer no is a hard thing. Is the lack of publication because one is “too good”? He is a fledgling Nabakov or Joyce whose art is so far beyond the current milieu that he is misunderstood. Of course, the unpublished writer knows deep inside that this isn’t the case. And if his interlocutor would only read his work, the truth would soon be revealed. Or, and the bogeyman of the quiet hours pokes out his head, is the lack of publication simply because the writer isn’t “good enough”? Affirming that one writes merely for the joy of writing is tantamount to admitting: Yeah, I suck.

At last, though, one has gotten past that scraping thorn patch. Then comes the other inevitable question: What do you write? Here a writer longs to say something like: history, or literary fiction or even self-help books. Those at least have some cache. But what does one do if he says, “Oh, a little science fiction or a little fantasy,” or, God save him!, “thrillers.”

Well, now one is not only not good enough to be published, but now one is not even good enough to write popular fiction.

Sigh.

It’s a crazy world for a writer. The only way to address the insanity is to just keep writing. Shut out the voices and the fear, the criticism and the awkward party moments. To embrace the joy. Because really, as any writer knows, it really, truly is because of the joy that writers write.

This Joy is how writers know they were born to write. The floodgates of heaven open and raging torrents of joy flood the soul. Providence may make it possible that the joy is shared on the printed page. But if not, still the joy will be shared. Because no writer can contain that much joy. Having arisen from the keyboard, it drips from him, and he showers it on those he loves.

First, let’s rescue the word “religion” from the dunghill to which it’s been cast (and with it, the companion word “piety”). If you have a belief in a deity, you have a religion. That deity may be the U. S. Dollar, but it is still a religion. A religion is the body of worldviews, cultural systems, beliefs and practices which grow out from a central belief. “Dollar-ism” believes that “money makes the world go ’round,” that if you have a lot of money you have security, and it’s annual ritual of winter bacchanalia (i.e., “the holiday shopping season”) is a cultural force to be reckoned with that completely dominates and orients the lives, schedules and finances of individuals, homes, and this nation. What’s in your wallet?

Secondly, the word “spiritual” is so amorphous as to be unhelpful. Mass murderers, the Dalai Lama, the Pope and one’s newest boyfriend have all been described as “spiritual.” But the real problem is that “spiritual” is opposed here to “religious.” This is a false dichotomy. Here’s why.

In either it’s pejorative or more neutral definitions, “religion” is about what one does with one’s body. One goes to church. One kneels in prayer. One crosses oneself. One sings, raises one’s hands, prays aloud, and so forth. Being “spiritual” amounts, it seems, to inward emotional states, interior prayer, thoughts. Being “spiritual” means one may be the proverbial “brain in a vat,” just sitting there emoting, thinking, praying silently. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not as though feeling, thinking, and praying silently are somehow inherently wrong or of lesser quality. It is said of Mary that she “pondered these things in her heart.” If the example of the Mother of God is any indication, these are important.

However, even a brain in a vat is a body, of sorts, and cannot do it’s thinking (if one accepts that all thought occurs in the brain) without the physicality of a brain. One of my fellow parishioners quips, “I’m not spiritual, I’m highly corporeal.” Similarly, we cannot “be spiritual” without a body. And our bodies are among the most important tools we possess if we are truly to “be spiritual.”

What I mean is this: God did not save us on the basis of his inward disposition toward us. “I love you. I feel great about you. Therefore I forgive you.” (Similarly, God does not damn us based on some other inward disposition toward us. “I damn you to hell, object of my wrath!”) Rather God saves us on the basis of this fact: he took on our flesh, he took on a human body, and became man. Jesus was not some spirit who appeared to be an embodied human being. Jesus was fully enfleshed.

Furthermore, and this is incredibly important: when Jesus rose from the dead, he did not cease having a body. Luke is emphatic on this point: he asked for something to eat to prove that he had flesh and bones like us and was not merely some phantom. Nor did Jesus divest himself of a body when he ascended into heaven. Quite literally a man sits on God’s throne, at the right hand of the Father: the man, Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God.

Thus, if we will be like Jesus, we must fully inhabit our bodies and not descend to some Gnostic pretense that we are above our bodies, fallen though they are. Our bodies are not–as is too often and too regrettably preached at Christian funerals–mere containers housing our spirits, which are “set free” at our death to be with God. No, we are our bodies, our bodies house the Holy Spirit and are therefore themselves holy. This is why Christians do not cremate their dead: they do not desecrate the temple of the Holy Spirit, the temples made without hands.

All of this belaboring of the point to get to this: we cannot “be spiritual” apart from our bodies. Therefore we need religion to be spiritual. Because our bodies and our souls (or spirits if you will, I’m trying not to be too technical here) are so intertwined that even on our death the separation of the two is only temporary but they will be reunited at the resurrection. We will most emphatically not be angels on clouds strumming harps, but will instead, like our Lord Jesus, inhabit the same bodies in which we lived in this mortal life, but now transfigured, and, in our cases, cured of the stain of sin and death forever.

Religion, among other things, gives us things to do with our bodies. We kneel, we bow, we lift our hands, we bow our heads, we sing, we pray aloud, we hear, we see, we smell the incense, we taste the Body and Blood of the Lord. What we do with our bodies affects our souls, our hearts, our spirits. St Paul writes to the Corinthians about bearing the death of Jesus in the body, that we might also bear the life of Jesus in the body. We are saved in our bodies. Not apart from them.

Furthermore, the ritual and repetition of religion brings home to us the grace of God in ways that merely “thinking about” something does not. One who has made dozens of bows or prostrations during the Great Canon of St Andrew can attest to the difference. That is to say, the emphasis of “spiritual” religionists on authenticity via inwardness (emotions, interior prayer, thoughts and beliefs) misses the point of religion, which is to habituate through nature and grace the purity of heart that wills one thing. “Spirituality” is too concerned with having content in one’s self. Worship must produce feelings, prayers and thoughts. The problem with “spirituality,” aside from its disincarnate heretical tendencies, is that it is not empty enough.

Religion is only empty if one does not stand ready to receive the energies of God. But if one stands so ready, then religion can do what “spirituality” cannot: it makes grooves in the soul from which spring rivers of life.

As Jesus was going with Jairus to heal his daughter, a woman who has had a flow of blood for twelve years finally gathers her faith to touch the hem of his garment. Both Mark and Luke point out that the daughter of Jairus also was twelve years old. The woman is healed immediately, and Jesus stops to address her, tenderly speaking to her of her salvation.

Mark and Luke being the fuller accounts (Matthew here appears to be a whittled down summary of the key points), and Luke being a physician, we may take it as authoritative when they provide the detail that when Jairus sought Jesus his daughter was still alive. Then Jesus stops to heal the woman, and he is delayed in going to Jairus’ house. Having resumed their journey, Jairus is informed that his daughter is dead, and encouraged to not impolitely trouble the Master any longer.

What must have been going through Jairus’ mind? If we may take as one possibility the reaction of Martha to Jesus when he comes to Lazarus’ tomb, Jairus may well have said, “Lord if you had been here, my daughter would not have died.” Jesus accepted the reproach from Martha without rebuke, but then gently exhorted her to a new faith in who he was, that he held absolute authority over life and death. That is to say, Jairus may have still had faith in Christ, but such a faith needed stretching. His temptation may have been to have rejected that which his faith was not large enough to contain, to doubt even while he believed. And like the father of the demonized boy who met Jesus after his transfiguration, he may have cried in his heart, “I believe, help my unbelief!” We may assume, then, that Jesus would likely have replied in a similar way to Jairus as he did to Martha. “Have no fear, Jairus, if I have power over all sickness and all demons, then I have power over death as well.” But instead of a shout, Jesus tenderly takes her by the hand and says “Little girl, arise.” Who could resist such a command?

Or perhaps Jairus may have been tempted to a little desperate envy. He saw the woman with an issue of blood healed, and then he learns that his daughter has died. He may have lost hope, he may have said to himself, “Why couldn’t it have been me? Why didn’t I receive such a blessing for my daughter and for our family?” We should not be too harsh on Jairus. The man was in pain. He may have had the understanding that Jesus could only heal those who were alive. It may not have been comprehensible to Jairus that Christ could raise the dead. The raising of Lazarus would come later. He may not have known of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain. Or if he had heard, he may have dismissed it as a mistaken report, or an old wives’ tale. Perhaps he thought Jesus could only perform one miracle a day. We do not mean to be flippant, only to suggest that in his pain, the man may well have begrudged the woman her healing which appeared to be at the expense of his daughter.

But it seems most of all that Jairus was tempted to despair. He had placed all his hope in a particular outcome, a specific chain of events. His daughter was dying. He would go to Jesus whom he believed could heal her. Jesus would come and heal his daughter. But that is not what happened. He did go to Jesus, and Jesus did say he would come and heal Jairus’ daughter. But then the course of events that Jairus had envisioned began to unravel. Jesus delayed. His daughter died. It was over. Do not trouble the master any longer.

But then, see the great mercy of Jesus: when Jairus had lost all hope, when he was tempted to despair, to give up, to not take that next step of faith into a fuller understanding of Jesus and his power, Jesus with great loving compassion says to him “Do not be afraid; only believe.” And Luke adds “And she will be made well.”

Do not be afraid. Only trust me. And she will be made well.

Made well? Jairus must have thought. She’s dead. How can she be made well? Yet she is made well, she is delivered from death. Luke describes her soul returning to her body. She gets up, walks and they are told, “Give her something to eat.” Because that’s what healthy people do after a long fast.

We may, like Jairus, have a great and pressing need. We may, in love, pray for others and see the blessings God rains down on them. We may thank God. But we may also be tempted to rebuke the Lord for what we perceive to be his failure to act in love. We may be tempted to a little envy, wishing the good of the other had been bestowed on us. Or, if our situation feels desperate, we may indeed be tempted to despair, to hopelessness.

It is at that lowest point that Christ says to us: “Do not be afraid. Only believe. It will be made well.”

When the call came, I was on my way out the door of the apartment. I watched the coverage for a few minutes, unable to adequately grasp the magnitude of it. Then I headed out the door. The weather where I was held bright and sunny all day. The morning air was cool. As I drove the car, I turned on the radio to the NPR station. The announcers seemed to be absolutely struggling to describe and contextualize what was going on. It seemed too unimaginable for it to have been a terrorist attack, and theories abounded about pilot error, technical malfunctions or anything else but a cold, hard suicidal terrorist attack.

By the time I arrived at my destination, the Towers had come down. At first, the casualty figures were mind-blowing: 20,000 people in both Towers. I almost burst into sobs. I said out loud, “That’s almost three times the size of my hometown!” I couldn’t get my mind around it. Even once the counts achieved the level of fact, it was unimaginable: 2606 in the Towers or on the ground; 125 at the Pentagon (including 55 military personnel); and 246 on the four planes. Four hundred eleven emergency workers died, including 341 firefighters and 2 paramedics, 23 police officers, 8 EMTs/paramedics from private companies, and 37 Port Authority police officers. There were also the 19 Islamist hijackers who killed themselves in those evil attacks.

Of course it was soon confirmed that al-Qaeda Islamists, with the help and patronage of Osama bin Laden, planned and executed the murderous attacks. For what seems now like such a brief and fleeting moment, the country was united in the pain, the help and support, and the resolve to see justice done. It will be hard to forget the visual of the nation’s political leaders singing “God Bless America” together on the Capitol steps. It all fell apart so quickly as various partisan interests began to use and manipulate a nation’s grief and gritty resolve for cynical power grabs. It felt like we had so little time to enjoy the sort of national community that is so lacking in our country, the sort of national pride that is so cynically deconstructed everywhere in the media.

I have no relations to anyone who died or was injured in the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, or United Flight 93. I have never lived in those locales and thus have not gained the sort of pride of place that comes from living and breathing in a geographic location. I am invested in no political activist cause associated with 9/11. I have no memoir to tour. I’ve not created any Youtube videos to which to drive any internet traffic.

I am a simple citizen who still finds it difficult to come to grips with the horrifying tragedy unleashed on our country by the attacks. I alternately gripe about the security measures I have to adhere to while traveling, and am thankful that through diligence and God’s mercy our nation has not suffered another 9/11. I am as disgusted by the cynical use of 9/11 for partisan ends as I am by the seemingly willful neglect to remember the military personnel who have lost their lives so that we Americans here at home can keep ours.

I am a simple citizen who wishes simply that the national unity and resolve we all saw and experienced in those days immediately following the September attacks were not such a distant memory, nor something only called out by horrific evil and unspeakable tragedy. But I am also grateful that in those moments of death and murder and evil our nation could find within itself a basis for that unity and that resolve. Pray God we never lose it.