Faith Works 9-11-2026
Jeff Gill
A lasting search for light, and hope, and faith
__
By the time I got to a television on Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon had been hit by Flight 77, the South Tower of the World Trade Center had fallen, and Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
I had been in a long meeting in downtown Newark from 7:00 am, but thinking on my way there just how beautiful the morning looked. The first deaths took place at the hands of hijackers shortly after 8:19 am, but it was the impact of the first jet over Manhattan’s streets at 8:46 am which became marked as the beginning of what we now just call “9-11.”
By 10:00 am in a crowd of Denison students at Slayter center, we watched a number of televisions all displaying the same station, the same clips of the impacts of Flights 11 and 175 in New York, the distant plume across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
The collapse of the South Tower was suspected, but it happened so quickly, and with so much smoke and dust hurled into the air, even the network anchors weren’t certain. At 10:28 am we all saw it, all too clearly, as the North Tower fell. The crowded room grew silent for a few moments, then the buzz of quiet discussion grew.
We’ve been talking about that day for twenty-five years now. Even for those of us without personal connections to lower Manhattan, to the dead on the flights, at the Pentagon, there’s a visceral reaction if you were alive and aware that day in 2001 every time we’ve had a crisp, clear morning with starkly blue skies, cloudless and deep. It’s not the same feeling we had before 9-11. It left a mark, a wound of sorts.
Now a quarter-century later, many of us have been to the Ground Zero Memorial, even to Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We’ve watched documentaries and films, heard the last voicemails referenced in “Love, Actually,” seen the impress of 9-11 on our national awareness. Of the world, of Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamic terrorism, and now in Iran and Yemen and Gaza.
We have scar tissue. It is an unimaginable event that’s now part of our everyday consciousness, and of a sort that threatens to overcome our best impulses, our hopes for the future, even our faith in divine benevolence. Yet another case of “if a loving God could…why not stop…” even if the list was long already.
How do we as people of faith deal with incomprehensible evil? We can reason our way into it, contextualize the circumstances, even psychoanalyze the cold-blooded killers who knifed flight attendants and pilots even more brutally than the execution of the passengers who died with them in four horrible crashes. It doesn’t help much, but we do it. Trying to make sense of things.
John 16:33 gives us a window out, or forward, but knowing “in this world you will have trouble” is little comfort, even twenty-five years on. Small children who lost parents that day now have children of their own, and they have to figure out how to tell the story.
There are geopolitical and partisan politics all engaged by the events started in motion by 9-11, and that day’s events are still used to justify today all sorts of agendas, self-serving and otherwise. Where people with a religious belief have to start is in the middle of the tragedy of that day. We ask why our free will is such that anyone can choose such an evil, and how good can come out of those results.
In a short setting, I can only report my return again and again to the opening of John’s Gospel, and his assertion “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Some translations say “has not overwhelmed it” and others choose “has not put it out.”
But the light still shines. I stand in that light, even today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s got memories still unsorted. Tell him your recall of that day at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
https://millercenter.org/remembering-september-11/september-11-terrorist-attacks
Jeff Gill
A lasting search for light, and hope, and faith
__
By the time I got to a television on Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon had been hit by Flight 77, the South Tower of the World Trade Center had fallen, and Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
I had been in a long meeting in downtown Newark from 7:00 am, but thinking on my way there just how beautiful the morning looked. The first deaths took place at the hands of hijackers shortly after 8:19 am, but it was the impact of the first jet over Manhattan’s streets at 8:46 am which became marked as the beginning of what we now just call “9-11.”
By 10:00 am in a crowd of Denison students at Slayter center, we watched a number of televisions all displaying the same station, the same clips of the impacts of Flights 11 and 175 in New York, the distant plume across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.
The collapse of the South Tower was suspected, but it happened so quickly, and with so much smoke and dust hurled into the air, even the network anchors weren’t certain. At 10:28 am we all saw it, all too clearly, as the North Tower fell. The crowded room grew silent for a few moments, then the buzz of quiet discussion grew.
We’ve been talking about that day for twenty-five years now. Even for those of us without personal connections to lower Manhattan, to the dead on the flights, at the Pentagon, there’s a visceral reaction if you were alive and aware that day in 2001 every time we’ve had a crisp, clear morning with starkly blue skies, cloudless and deep. It’s not the same feeling we had before 9-11. It left a mark, a wound of sorts.
Now a quarter-century later, many of us have been to the Ground Zero Memorial, even to Shanksville, Pennsylvania. We’ve watched documentaries and films, heard the last voicemails referenced in “Love, Actually,” seen the impress of 9-11 on our national awareness. Of the world, of Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamic terrorism, and now in Iran and Yemen and Gaza.
We have scar tissue. It is an unimaginable event that’s now part of our everyday consciousness, and of a sort that threatens to overcome our best impulses, our hopes for the future, even our faith in divine benevolence. Yet another case of “if a loving God could…why not stop…” even if the list was long already.
How do we as people of faith deal with incomprehensible evil? We can reason our way into it, contextualize the circumstances, even psychoanalyze the cold-blooded killers who knifed flight attendants and pilots even more brutally than the execution of the passengers who died with them in four horrible crashes. It doesn’t help much, but we do it. Trying to make sense of things.
John 16:33 gives us a window out, or forward, but knowing “in this world you will have trouble” is little comfort, even twenty-five years on. Small children who lost parents that day now have children of their own, and they have to figure out how to tell the story.
There are geopolitical and partisan politics all engaged by the events started in motion by 9-11, and that day’s events are still used to justify today all sorts of agendas, self-serving and otherwise. Where people with a religious belief have to start is in the middle of the tragedy of that day. We ask why our free will is such that anyone can choose such an evil, and how good can come out of those results.
In a short setting, I can only report my return again and again to the opening of John’s Gospel, and his assertion “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” Some translations say “has not overwhelmed it” and others choose “has not put it out.”
But the light still shines. I stand in that light, even today.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s got memories still unsorted. Tell him your recall of that day at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on X.
https://millercenter.org/remembering-september-11/september-11-terrorist-attacks
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