At some point over the next ten days or so I will pluck up the courage to sit down and watch (for only the second time) Paul Greengrass's magnificent film about the September 11th attacks, 'United 93'. There is something about this 10th anniversary that makes me want to sit up and pay attention again.
Maybe it is the need to reflect on how the world has really changed since that awful day in 2001. We all thought, quite soon afterwards that the world had changed in some indefinable way. We all felt, as the magnitude of the events became clear, that 'nothing would ever be the same again'. In the intervening decade our world has been horribly transfixed by conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have been traumatised afresh by attacks in Bali and Madrid and London.
And yet life has continued. The world did not change so irrevocably on September 11th 2001 that people stopped getting married, having children, starting jobs or graduating. Human beings, especially those in New York, have demonstrated their remarkable capacity to just get on with life. Air travel has become somewhat more inconvenient and we have got terribly used to the images of coffins being removed from planes at military air bases but for most of us life has just gone on.
But for all the attempts to carry on as normal we are a generation that has been marked by those attacks. We do remember where we were when we heard the news that clear autumn day. (I was in my car travelling to Downpatrick and listening to Simon Mayo on Radio Five Live as he attempted to describe to his listeners what he saw unfolding on the monitors in front of him). The images of first burning and then collapsing buildings are seared on our minds. The recognition that something so evil could come literally out of the blue and devastate thousands of lives haunts our memories.
The evil that occurred on that day scarred the beginning of the 21st century the way the loss of Titanic scarred the beginning of the 20th. It made us (for however brief a time) recognise that we needed help just to survive on a planet where such things were possible. It made us look beyond ourselves to something or someone greater just to supply the ability to get out of bed the next day and face a world where such events take place.
But then we got used to that world again. We decided that we didn't need to look beyond ourselves any more. We shifted back into the comfortable routines that didn't include the need to admit our own mortality, our own finiteness. For that reason alone perhaps it is important to mark this 10th anniversary. Because we need to remind ourselves as human beings that we are human. We are finite. In our own strength we are intensely limited. It is only then that we tend to look for something greater, something infinite, something with the limitless resources to supply our needs even if we don't have the answer to every question.
And of course that something is not a thing at all but a person. Like the apostle Paul we might beg for the pain and the hurt and the confusion of this world to be removed from us but when we do, like Paul we will hear the voice say to us, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'
If the events of that day a decade ago made us feel powerless, weak and inadequate in the face of evil, then we need to know that the power of evil is already broken. It was broken by love. It was broken moments after the planes hit when people ran into those buildings to get people out. But in reality it was broken 2000 years before when a man hanging on a cross endured the uttermost depths of human evil and cried out 'It is finished.'
My heart goes out to anyone for whom every September 11th is a reminder of a missing family member. I have never lost a family member to violence and I cannot appreciate the experience of anyone who lost someone on that day or in the foreign wars that have followed 9/11 but I know this; evil does not have the last word. God has not allowed it. At the cross and the empty tomb we hear the words 'Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.'
