Almighty God,
whose only Son has opened for us
a new and living way into your presence:
give us pure hearts and steadfast wills
to worship you in spirit and in truth;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Bonjour 😊
Merveilleux havre de paix, les Îles, Sion 💙💛💚 pic.twitter.com/LjvsfZOwYn— Délèze Dominique (@DelezeD) September 15, 2023
But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith; that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
–Philippians 3:7-11
Anticrepuscular rays over Baldoyle and Clongriffin from a misty sunrise earlier this month. #dublin #ireland pic.twitter.com/nPUeZSG7MW
— Sryan Bruen Photography (@sryanbruenphoto) September 15, 2023
As the UK sweltered under a ferocious autumn sun this week, Christians took part in 13 climate pilgrimages around the UK, from Glasgow to Brighton, to highlight public concern regarding the climate crisis, and to call on the Government to end new oil and gas expansion.
The Met Office announced that the heatwave in England and Wales this week was the first time since records began that temperatures have been higher than 30ºC for six days in a row in September.
The Revd Vanessa Elston, a pioneer priest in Southwark diocese, took part in a pilgrimage in Battersea. She said: “The public are really concerned about the climate issue. We don’t want to be paying sky-high energy bills to fossil-fuel companies in a cost-of-living crisis. Renewables are cheaper; so it’s high time our leaders made them a viable option on a large scale.”
As temperatures rose, leaders of the G20 group of nations met in Delhi, where they called for peace in Ukraine, agreed that the world needed $4 trillion to fund the energy transition away from fossil fuels, and called for accelerating efforts towards a “phasedown of unabated coal power”; they said that poorer nations needed financial support to ensure a “just transition”.
Before the summit, church leaders representing more than 600 million Christians, had called on the G20 leaders to implement progressive carbon taxes and to end subsidies for fossil fuels, which could raise $3.2 trillion for the needed energy transition.
Read it all (registration or subscription).
Christians held a prayer vigil outside World Vision this week, calling on them to stop banking with @Barclays – the largest funder of fossil fuels in Europe.
My latest piece for the @ChurchTimes on growing pressure for charities to clean up their banking.https://t.co/EtrzeomRfm
— Joe Ware (@wareisjoe) September 14, 2023
Christianity is a very strange and a very difficult faith. It is difficult to believe, and it is even more difficult to do what we were asked to do last Sunday — take up the cross of Christ and follow. Yet, in spite of the gainsayers, I do rather wonder whether Britain is as secular as the sociologists of religion maintain. In churches that take the trouble to present a well-conducted liturgy, to preach the difficult and challenging faith of Christ, people still respond.
The evangelicals in the Church of England manage to fill churches. The splendid liturgy of the Western Rite attracts thousands every Sunday to the great oratory churches in Knightsbridge and Birmingham. Even the oft-repeated claim that there are no more vocations to religious orders is not completely true — the Blackfriars in Oxford have a flourishing novitiate.
There has never been a time when it was easy to believe that a loving creator allows the innocent to die in earthquakes or children to suffer from cancer. Since the feminist revolution, and the change in societal attitudes to sexuality, the churches undoubtedly face some problems. But I do not believe that either the sheer difficulty in believing at all, or the sexual revolution, is what keeps people away from church.
Christianity is not destroyed by rival ideologies, such as Darwinism. It is just slowly gnawed at by secularism, consumerism, the “strange disease of modern life”. To visit a church where they still offer business as usual is to be stimulated, as no secular equivalent can stimulate: disturbed as no drama or work of art could disturb.
Excellent article by A N Wilson in today's Times. Well deserved praise for #frgraemerowlands, and a mention for the choir (or Latin Chorus!) aswell. pic.twitter.com/yTShNu2jyA
— ssktmusic (@ssktmusic) September 14, 2023
Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (‘Holyrood day in harvest’, as it was sometimes called in the Middle Ages), so here’s a fourteenth-century translation of the Crux Fidelis, a verse of the sixth-century hymn Pange Lingua:
…Steadfast cross, among all others
Thou art a tree great of price;
In branch and flower such another
I know not of, in wood nor copse.
Sweet be the nails, and sweet be the tree,
And sweeter be the burden that hangs upon thee.
…This verse is used in the liturgy several times through the course of the year, and at different seasons its poetry will resonate in subtly different ways. This tree is like no other, and it bears at once both flower and fruit; what kind of tree you picture as you sing this verse will depend on what your eyes are seeing in the world around you. The hymn is sung in the spring, on Good Friday and at the cross’ first feast in May, and at that time of year the image of a flowering tree evokes blossom and the spring of new life; and it’s sung again at this feast in the autumn, when trees are laden with fruit (their own ‘burden’), and the image instead speaks of fruitfulness, sustenance, the abundance of divine gift. Imagery of Christ as the ‘fruit’ of the cross is common in the liturgy of Holy Cross Day, perhaps in part because of the time of year when it falls. One purpose for the image is to draw a contrast with the fruit of the tree in Eden, to link the sin and the redemption, the sickness and the remedy: as one medieval antiphon puts it, ‘Through the tree we were made slaves, and through the Holy Cross we are made free. The fruit of the tree seduced us; the Son of God redeemed us.’
The manuscript in which this little English translation of Crux Fidelis is preserved belongs to Merton College, Oxford….
14 September is 'Holyrood Day in harvest', the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. A medieval poem to the Holy Cross, steadfast at the still point of the turning world: https://t.co/4GPLwUH3hE pic.twitter.com/DxIRZ3kjxj
— Eleanor Parker (@ClerkofOxford) September 14, 2022
“Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.”
– T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” IV
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is an ancient devotion that dates back to the earliest days of the Church. The Cross is the great sign of our hope as Christians. pic.twitter.com/p43OcWoPHE
— Abp. José H. Gomez (@ArchbishopGomez) September 14, 2023
O God, who by the passion of thy blessed Son didst make an instrument of shameful death to be unto us the means of life and peace: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Wishing everyone a joyful Holy Cross Day from St Saviour’s, Pimlico pic.twitter.com/oTbSYX7AFs
— Fr Matthew Catterick (@vicar_stsp) September 14, 2023
Almighty God our heavenly Father, who hast bidden us to give thanks for all things and to forget not all thy benefits: Accept our praise for the great mercies we have received at thy hands; ever give us grateful hearts; and help us to magnify thee in our daily life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
I managed to catch some #orange during the #sunrise over the Palace Pier #Brighton @ThePhotoHour @StormHour pic.twitter.com/2LyojWa7MK
— Stephen Royle (@Steveontour1) September 14, 2023
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.
–Philippians 2:12-18
Délicieux moment au bord de l’eau, Les Îles, Sion 💙🧡💛🇨🇭#suisse #switzerland #schweiz #landscape #photography #paysage #nature #lake #mountains @MySwitzerland_e @valaiswallis pic.twitter.com/SCUYwJYgzL
— Délèze Dominique (@DelezeD) September 14, 2023
The Church of England has been “dealt a death knell” as parishes close at a record rate, a Telegraph investigation has revealed.
Almost 300 have disappeared in the past five years alone, analysis of church data reveals, the fastest rate since records began in 1960.
The startling figures come as a bombshell dossier accused bishops and senior clergy of “putting a gun to people’s heads” to drive through controversial plans to cut costs, merge parishes and cut vicars.
The claims come against the backdrop of declining congregation numbers, leaving many clergy afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs.
Read it all (one of many threads to catch up on).
Church of England parishes close at record rate https://t.co/G9xNCU2O1Q
— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) September 3, 2023
In What Makes Us Human, the artificial intelligence program GPT-3, along with Iain Thomas and Jasmine Wang, has written a fascinating book at the somewhat fluid intersection of self-help and wisdom literature. Given the capacity of computers today and the cleverness of their programmers, I don’t think we have to be surprised that such a book is possible; I will return to this point shortly. But I would also suggest that the book’s subtitle, An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions, does not tell the whole story. It is not hard to answer the biggest questions. It is hard to provide good answers to the biggest questions. To evaluate the quality of the answers provided by GPT-3, it is useful to have a sense of where they came from.
GPT-3 is a large language model form of artificial intelligence, which means (more or less) that it consumes vast quantities of text data and derives from it multi-dimensional statistical associations among words. For instance, when asked to complete the phrase “Merry . . .” Gpt-3 replies “Merry Christmas,” not because it knows anything of Christmas or merriment, but simply because those words stand in a close statistical relationship in its database. When asked to complete the phrase without using the word Christmas, it comes up with “Merry holidays” and then “Merry festivities.” One of the key features of this kind of program is that its internal operations are almost entirely opaque; it is extremely difficult to determine how the program reaches the decisions that produce the outputs that it does.
What Makes Us Human was produced by a GPT-3 that had been “prompted” “with selected excerpts [elsewhere characterized as “a few select examples”] from major religious and philosophical texts that have formed the basis of human belief and philosophy, such as the Bible, the Torah [sic], the Tao Te Ching, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, the poetry of Rumi, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, and more.” (A bibliography would have been useful.) Then the two humans would ask some big question (“What is love?” “What is true power?”) and subsequently ask the model to “elaborate or build on” “the most profound responses.” The book is the result of “continuing to ask questions after first prompting GPT-3 with a pattern of questions and answers based on and inspired by existing historical texts” representing “the amalgamation of some of mankind’s greatest philosophical and spiritual works.”
So when Thomas and Wang note that “We have done our best to edit everything as little as possible,” the disclaimer must be understood within this framework of iterative “engineering” of GPT-3 responses through their own sense of what is profound, a process that would only be undertaken by quite an intrusive . . . editor. In addition, they acknowledge two (more) significant editorial decisions. “In all instances, so as not to cause offense, we have replaced the various names for God with the words, ‘the Universe.’ Our goal is to unite around a common spiritual understanding of each other, and so while our decision may be divisive, we hope you understand the intention behind it.” As it turns out, Thomas and Wang do not entirely avoid mentioning God in their pursuit of unity through making a divisive decision.
What Makes Us Human? https://t.co/9O7HBSCaO3
— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) September 13, 2023
In other words, we’re tempted to “worship and serve what God has created instead of the Creator” (Rom. 1:25, GNT)—even more so because our newest creation isn’t just mute wood and stone that “cannot speak” but a conversationalist that can “give guidance” (Hab. 2:18–19). That conversationalist doesn’t deserve the reverence that’s reserved for God. But it does warrant respect.
“If we have an entity that looks like us, acts like us, seems to be a lot like us, and yet we dismiss it as something for which we shouldn’t have any concern at all, it just corrodes our own sense of humanity,” Brenner says. “If we anthropomorphize everything and then are cruel with the thing we anthropomorphize, it makes us less humane.”
We already know the potential for social media to turn us into crueler versions of ourselves. Christians find themselves at the whims of polarizing algorithms that push them to the extremes, and pastors find themselves struggling to disciple congregations about proper online behavior. On Instagram and Twitter (now X), however, a social component remains: We learn something from a scholar, share a meme that makes another user laugh, or see a picture of a friend’s baby. We are still interacting with people (though there are bots too).
But with ChatGPT, there’s no social component. That’s the danger. When you’re talking to a bot, you’re actually alone.
This CT cover story got me thinking of how much I instinctively "care" for robots—I say "poor thing" when my Roomba gets stuck, I feel bad that code generators never get a break … https://t.co/NHbctaKwWm
— kate shellnutt (@kateshellnutt) September 12, 2023
Moreover, they have put fetters on our feet and have bound your blessed limbs and the temples of God with disgraceful chains. . . . To men who are dedicated to God and attesting their faith with religious courage, such things are ornaments, not chains; nor do they bind the feet of the Christians for infamy but glorify them for a crown. . . .
Let cruelty, either ignorant or malignant, hold you here in its bonds and chains as long as it will, from this earth and from these sufferings you shall speedily come to the kingdom of heaven. The body is not cherished in the mines with couch and cushions, but it is cherished with the refreshment and solace of Christ. . . . Your limbs unbathed, are foul and disfigured with filth and dirt: but within they are spiritually cleansed. . . . There the bread is scarce; but man liveth not by bread alone, but by the word of God. Shivering, you want clothing; but he who puts on Christ is both abundantly clothed and adorned. . . .
Almighty God, who didst give to thy servant Cyprian boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of the same our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Episcopal Church today also celebrates Cyprian of Carthage, Bishop and Martyr, 258
Image: Window in St Cyprian's Clarence Gate. Photo by Lawrence OP (CC BY-NC 2.0), via Flickr pic.twitter.com/YL8JM4qE5w
— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 13, 2023
O God, who hast commanded us to walk in the Spirit and not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh: Perfect us, we pray thee, in love, that we may conquer our natural selfishness and give ourselves to others. Fill our hearts with thy joy, and garrison them with thy peace; make us longsuffering and gentle, and thus subdue our hasty and angry tempers; give us faithfulness, meekness and self-control; that so crucifying the flesh with its affections and lusts, we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit to thy praise and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Now Eli′jah the Tishbite, of Tishbe[a] in Gilead, said to Ahab, “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” And the word of the Lord came to him, “Depart from here and turn eastward, and hide yourself by the brook Cherith, that is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.” So he went and did according to the word of the Lord; he went and dwelt by the brook Cherith that is east of the Jordan. And the ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the brook. And after a while the brook dried up, because there was no rain in the land.
–1 Kings 17:1-7
Howe begins by describing an American malaise that most readers here will likely need little convincing is our present reality: a government that can no longer carry out even the most basic tasks of governance; rock-bottom public trust among the American people and in institutions more broadly; hyper-partisanship; high economic inequality; declining public health; moral and legal chaos; strife between the sexes; and a collapse of family formation and birth rates. All these and more, says Howe, were predictable circumstances. They are also, he declares, almost certain to turn soon for the better: winter is here, but spring is coming.
Howe’s prediction rests on a model that at its core is timeless and simple. In fact, it can be summed up by that four-line Internet meme: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Howe’s version manages to fill most of 500 pages with further nuance, however.
At least in the Anglo-American world that Howe has surveyed, history appears to move in predictable cycles of about 80 to 100 years that, resurrecting a Roman term for the concept, he calls a saeculum. These cycles each have four distinct phases—or “Turnings”—of around 20 to 25 years that always flow in the same order: a “High,” an “Awakening,” an “Unraveling,” and a “Crisis.” Turnings are driven by the changing of generations, or those portions of the population whose collective character was shaped by coming of age amid the societal conditions specific to a previous turning. Each generation’s character, embodied by one of four generational archetypes (“Artists,” “Prophets,” “Nomads,” and “Heroes”) is largely determined by its proximity to the last Crisis. Howe goes into great detail about each generation, but for our purposes all you really need to know is that Prophets, coming of age knowing only the softness of a spring High, begin to dream of utopia during a hotheaded summer Awakening and rebel against the world that their Hero fathers built, seeking to tear it all down during a quarter-century-long autumn Unraveling. This process culminates in a winter of true Crisis (a Fourth Turning), which a new generation of Heroes must struggle to resolve, after which they establish a new order, leading to another High. And yes: the baby boomers of the 1960s counterculture are our most recent Prophets, which means the millennials will have to be our Heroes.
Don’t be (too) alarmed, Howe urges his readers. We’ve been here before, multiple times in fact, and managed not only to survive but also to thrive.
"Riveting and revelatory" – @TonyRobbins
THE FOURTH TURNING IS HERE looks to America’s past to predict how our present era of civil unrest will end—and what our lives will look like once it has.
Available now: https://t.co/0ZSxbQ0BJR pic.twitter.com/4XInEy73L6
— Simon & Schuster (@SimonBooks) September 11, 2023
Here, from Sebastian Milbank, in an essay making a counterintuitive but compelling case for Tolkien’s place among the literary modernists, is a useful summary of the argument over the portrayal of good and evil in “Lord of the Rings,” which has been ongoing since the saga first appeared:
The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism,” which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favor of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of Dwarves, Elves and Hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.
Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash,” a battle between “Good people and Goblins.” The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil.”
I’ve read many variations on Muir’s claim over the years, especially once George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” became a dominant cultural influence, and it never ceases to be puzzling. There are various ways in which Tolkien refuses realism, and his books are in no way gritty or sexy in the contemporary style. But the idea that he wasn’t interested in the territory between good and evil is belied by even the most superficial reading of the story.
Yes, there is a mostly offstage villain, Sauron, whose evil seems fixed; yes, Sauron’s Orcish armies are fairly described as immovably depraved; yes, there is a set of characters who are unfailingly heroic despite various doubts and temptations. But between the “consistently good” and the “immovably evil” lies the zone in which most of the trilogy’s drama takes place — the corruption of the wizard Saruman, the fatal temptation of Boromir, the despair and subsequent redemption of Théoden, the curdled conservatism of Denethor and above all the complicated and tortured relationship between Frodo and Gollum, and within Gollum’s own divided consciousness. The Frodo-Gollum dynamic certainly features goodness and heroism, but not in any naïve way, and it ends with divine providence engineering the world’s salvation (though not its full redemption) through and despite their mutual corruption by the ring.
A while back I wrote some brief thoughts on Tolkien & his possible influence on English stasis. Here @DouthatNYT notes that I perhaps "[undersell] how much Tolkien subjected his own pastoral nostalgia to critique", which is a fair amendment, I think. https://t.co/yKApbFAJhp
— Niall Gooch 👍🇻🇦🏴🚅🏏✒ (@niall_gooch) September 11, 2023
The world is at “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, according to the leading global energy watchdog, which for the first time has forecast that demand for oil, natural gas and coal will all peak before 2030.
The International Energy Agency projected that the consumption of the three major fossil fuels will start to decline this decade because of the rapid growth of renewable energy and the spread of electric vehicles.
“We are witnessing the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era and we have to prepare ourselves for the next era,” IEA head Fatih Birol said of the projections, due to be published next month in the body’s World Energy Outlook. “It shows that climate policies do work.”
Read it all (registration or subscription).
Today the Episcopal Church commemorates John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830
Rector of Trinity Wall Street, 3rd Bishop of New York (1816-30) and founder of General Theological Seminary, he helped promote the extension of the Episcopal Church in Central & Western New York pic.twitter.com/wIkunzNNCd
— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 12, 2023
The striking and appropriate terms in which the prophet Isaiah depicts the character and offices of the Messiah, have procured for him, by way of eminence, the title of the Evangelical Prophet. He exhibits a glowing but faithful picture of the character of Christ, and all the humiliating and all the triumphant events of his life. In the chapter which contains my text, the prophet has dipped his pencil in the softest colours, and draws a portrait of the Saviour, which, while it conveys to us the most exalted ideas of his character, is calculated to awaken our tenderest and liveliest sympathy.
Let us then contemplate the character of Christ, as delineated by the prophet under the emblem of “a lamb brought to the slaughter,” that our penitence may be awakened, our gratitude enlivened, and our souls warmed with the ardent emotions of love and duty.
Under the character of a “lamb brought to the slaughter,” we are led to consider,
The innocence of Christ;
His tenderness and compassion;
His patience;
And, finally, to consider him as the victim for our sins.
12 –
O God, by your grace your servant John Henry Hobart, kindled by the flame of your love, became a burning and shining light in your Church, turning pride into humility and error into truth: Grant that we may be set … pic.twitter.com/uUsITf0tBG
— The Seabury Society (@SeaburySociety) September 12, 2020
Revive thy Church, Lord God of hosts, whensoever it doth fall into complacency and sloth, by raising up devoted leaders, like thy servant John Henry Hobart whom we remember this day; and grant that their faith and vigor of mind may awaken thy people to thy message and their mission; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Today the Episcopal Church commemorates John Henry Hobart, Bishop of New York, 1830
Rector of Trinity Wall Street, 3rd Bishop of New York (1816-30) and founder of General Theological Seminary, he helped promote the extension of the Episcopal Church in Central & Western New York pic.twitter.com/wIkunzNNCd
— The Anglican Church in St Petersburg (@anglicanspb) September 12, 2023
O Eternal Lord God, without whose aid we cannot do the things that we would: Look mercifully upon the waywardness of our hearts, and strengthen us against evil; that as citizens of thy holy kingdom we may walk henceforth in the power of the Spirit, and bring forth fruit to thy glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Beautiful sky over Charleston with a few towering clouds just offshore of the Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island! pic.twitter.com/Wkd33TWjS8
— Joey Sovine Live 5 (@JoeySovine) September 12, 2023
I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the word of God without fear.
–Philippians 1:12-14
Incredible. A vibrant double rainbow over New York City on the evening of 9/11. #NeverForget 🇺🇸 Amazing photo via Patrick McBride pic.twitter.com/sWcrB35t0G
— Ed Piotrowski (@EdPiotrowski) September 12, 2023
A San Francisco husband slept through his wife’s call from the World Trade Center. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again. We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.
She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.
We will #NeverForget911. pic.twitter.com/lkbNvyiEdl
— 9/11 Memorial & Museum (@Sept11Memorial) September 11, 2023
From here:
Flight 175 passenger Brian David Sweeney leaves a voice-mail message for his wife, Julie, after his plane is hijacked.
Answering machine: “Message one.”
Brian Sweeney: “Jules, this is Brian—listen, I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you, I want you to do good, go have good times, same to my parents and everybody, and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I hope I call you.”
Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum, Gift of Julie Sweeney Roth
Today, we pay solemn tribute to the lives lost on 9/11, a day that forever changed our world. Through the darkest of times, we found strength, resilience, and unity. Let this beacon of hope stand as a symbol of our unwavering resolve to never forget #NeverForget pic.twitter.com/FC8X6m76qK
— One World Observatory (@OneWorldNYC) September 11, 2023
From there:
I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.
I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.
You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.
One World Trade Center rises through fog as the sunrises on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Monday morning #newyork #newyorkcity #NYC #sunrise #neverforget @agreatbigcity pic.twitter.com/rliOYFgq4D
— Gary Hershorn (@GaryHershorn) September 11, 2023
On [a] Monday [in September 2003], the last of the 343 firefighters who died on September 11th was buried. Because no remains of Michael Ragusa, age 29, of Engine Company 279, were found and identified, his family placed in his coffin a very small vial of his blood, donated years ago to a bone-marrow clinic. At the funeral service Michael’s mother Dee read an excerpt from her son’s diary on the occasion of the death of a colleague. “It is always sad and tragic when a fellow firefighter dies,” Michael Ragusa wrote, “especially when he is young and had everything to live for.” Indeed. And what a sobering reminder of how many died and the awful circumstances in which they perished that it took until this week to bury the last one.
So here is to the clergy, the ministers, rabbis, imams and others, who have done all these burials and sought to help all these grieving families. And here is to the families who lost loved ones and had to cope with burials in which sometimes they didn’t even have remains of the one who died. And here, too, is to the remarkable ministry of the Emerald Society Pipes and Drums, who played every single service for all 343 firefighters who lost their lives. The Society chose not to end any service at which they played with an up-tempo march until the last firefighter was buried.
On Monday, in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, the Society therefore played “Garry Owen” and “Atholl Highlander,” for the first time since 9/11 as the last firefighter killed on that day was laid in the earth. On the two year anniversary here is to New York, wounded and more sober, but ever hopeful and still marching.
–First published on this blog September 11, 2003
A total of 343 New York fire service personnel died trying to save lives on 9/11. pic.twitter.com/7ziMiFBLnq
— Prof. Frank McDonough (@FXMC1957) September 11, 2023
President and Mrs. Bush, I want to say a personal word on behalf of many people. Thank you, Mr. President, for calling this day of prayer and remembrance. We needed it at this time.
We come together today to affirm our conviction that God cares for us, whatever our ethnic, religious, or political background may be. The Bible says that He’s the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles. No matter how hard we try, words simply cannot express the horror, the shock, and the revulsion we all feel over what took place in this nation on Tuesday morning. September eleven will go down in our history as a day to remember.
Today we say to those who masterminded this cruel plot, and to those who carried it out, that the spirit of this nation will not be defeated by their twisted and diabolical schemes. Someday, those responsible will be brought to justice, as President Bush and our Congress have so forcefully stated. But today we especially come together in this service to confess our need of God. Today we say to those who masterminded this cruel plot, and to those who carried it out, that the spirit of this nation will not be defeated by their twisted and diabolical schemes. Someday, those responsible will be brought to justice, as President Bush and our Congress have so forcefully stated. But today we especially come together in this service to confess our need of God.
We’ve always needed God from the very beginning of this nation, but today we need Him especially. We’re facing a new kind of enemy. We’re involved in a new kind of warfare. And we need the help of the Spirit of God. The Bible words are our hope: God is our refuge and strength; an ever present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.
But how do we understand something like this? Why does God allow evil like this to take place? Perhaps that is what you are asking now. You may even be angry at God. I want to assure you that God understands these feelings that you may have. We’ve seen so much on our television, on our ”” heard on our radio, stories that bring tears to our eyes and make us all feel a sense of anger. But God can be trusted, even when life seems at its darkest.
But what are some of the lessons we can learn? First, we are reminded of the mystery and reality of evil. I’ve been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept by faith that God is sovereign, and He’s a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering. The Bible says that God is not the author of evil. It speaks of evil as a mystery. In 1st Thessalonians 2:7 it talks about the mystery of iniquity. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah said “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” Who can understand it?” He asked that question, ‘Who can understand it?’ And that’s one reason we each need God in our lives.
The lesson of this event is not only about the mystery of iniquity and evil, but secondly it’s a lesson about our need for each other. What an example New York and Washington have been to the world these past few days. None of us will ever forget the pictures of our courageous firefighters and police, many of whom have lost friends and colleagues; or the hundreds of people attending or standing patiently in line to donate blood. A tragedy like this could have torn our country apart. But instead it has united us, and we’ve become a family. So those perpetrators who took this on to tear us apart, it has worked the other way; it’s back lashed. It’s backfired. We are more united than ever before. I think this was exemplified in a very moving way when the members of our Congress stood shoulder to shoulder the other day and sang “God Bless America.”
Finally, difficult as it may be for us to see right now, this event can give a message of hope–hope for the present, and hope for the future. Yes, there is hope. There’s hope for the present, because I believe the stage has already been set for a new spirit in our nation. One of the things we desperately need is a spiritual renewal in this country. We need a spiritual revival in America. And God has told us in His word, time after time, that we are to repent of our sins and return to Him, and He will bless us in a new way. But there’s also hope for the future because of God’s promises. As a Christian, I hope not for just this life, but for heaven and the life to come. And many of those people who died this past week are in heaven right now. And they wouldn’t want to come back. It’s so glorious and so wonderful. And that’s the hope for all of us who put our faith in God. I pray that you will have this hope in your heart.
This event reminds us of the brevity and the uncertainty of life. We never know when we too will be called into eternity. I doubt if even one those people who got on those planes, or walked into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon last Tuesday morning thought it would be the last day of their lives. It didn’t occur to them. And that’s why each of us needs to face our own spiritual need and commit ourselves to God and His will now.
Here in this majestic National Cathedral we see all around us symbols of the cross. For the Christian–I’m speaking for the Christian now–the cross tells us that God understands our sin and our suffering. For He took upon himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, our sins and our suffering. And from the cross, God declares “I love you. I know the heart aches, and the sorrows, and the pains that you feel, but I love you.” The story does not end with the cross, for Easter points us beyond the tragedy of the cross to the empty tomb. It tells us that there is hope for eternal life, for Christ has conquered evil, and death, and hell. Yes, there’s hope.
I’ve become an old man now. And I’ve preached all over the world. And the older I get, the more I cling to that hope that I started with many years ago, and proclaimed it in many languages to many parts of the world. Several years ago at the National Prayer Breakfast here in Washington, Ambassador Andrew Young, who had just gone through the tragic death of his wife, closed his talk with a quote from the old hymn, “How Firm A Foundation.” We all watched in horror as planes crashed into the steel and glass of the World Trade Center. Those majestic towers, built on solid foundations, were examples of the prosperity and creativity of America. When damaged, those buildings eventually plummeted to the ground, imploding in upon themselves. Yet underneath the debris is a foundation that was not destroyed. Therein lies the truth of that old hymn that Andrew Young quoted: “How firm a foundation.”
Yes, our nation has been attacked. Buildings destroyed. Lives lost. But now we have a choice: Whether to implode and disintegrate emotionally and spiritually as a people, and a nation, or, whether we choose to become stronger through all of the struggle to rebuild on a solid foundation. And I believe that we’re in the process of starting to rebuild on that foundation. That foundation is our trust in God. That’s what this service is all about. And in that faith we have the strength to endure something as difficult and horrendous as what we’ve experienced this week.
This has been a terrible week with many tears. But also it’s been a week of great faith. Churches all across the country have called prayer meetings. And today is a day that they’re celebrating not only in this country, but in many parts of the world. And the words of that familiar hymn that Andrew Young quoted, it says, “Fear not, I am with thee. Oh be not dismayed for I am thy God and will give thee aid. I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand upon “thy righteous, omnipotent hand.”
My prayer today is that we will feel the loving arms of God wrapped around us and will know in our hearts that He will never forsake us as we trust in Him. We also know that God is going to give wisdom, and courage, and strength to the President, and those around him. And this is going to be a day that we will remember as a day of victory. May God bless you all.
🇺🇸 In Memoriam #September11 pic.twitter.com/0tnKjDTywR
— William Reymond (@WilliamReymond) September 11, 2023