As I sat in Eucharist this past Sunday morning the church possessed for me a solemn mood. A blanket of quiet reflection fell over the congregation as our visiting bishop rose to give the homily. The homily, for those that are not familiar, is the equivalent of a sermon. He began by asking us an all too famous question. “Where were you?” Now we all knew to what he was referring. This past Sunday was the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. And as his question fell on the ears of the congregation all mouths fell silent. All bodies ceased moving and not a sound resonated through the chapel. I knew in that moment that he had captured our complete attention. I began thinking about where I was. I was young. Just four years old, sitting in preschool with twenty other four year olds. Nothing significant happened to me on that day but I still remember. I wasn’t among the fallen, the injured, or the brave. I was only a girl in school with her friends watching the horror on the television screen.
Now, as the homily progressed Bishop Wright told us something that I think we should all take heed to remember. And you do not have to be a Christian to understand this. My bishop told us where he was that day. He was there. In the midst of it all. Praying, hugging, helping where he could with his friends. And after, when it came time to bury and memorialize the dead, he was there. An episcopal bishop burying and memorializing the fallen. It did not matter in that moment if you were Baptist, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Jehovah Witness, or if you did not believe at all. They all deserved the dignity of proper burial. They had all died together.
What I took away from the homily and I want you to as well, is this.
“We need to disagree, without being disagreeable.” -Bishop Robert Wright
This was the line that stuck with me. America is beyond blest. Through the tragedy that happened on that day fifteen years ago, America came together as one people. Not a bunch of different people of different races, ethnicity, and religions; one people. One country, held together by shared tragedy.
Though we are not currently under active terrorist attack, we are still one people. We all have our own September 11ths that we are going through. Our own tragedies that we are struggling through. We need to unite as one people. To put the Bishop’s words another way. We need to be able to be different without being separated from each other. It is okay to be different and yet through those differences we do not have to be against each other. America is the melting pot of the world, yet we are not melting together. We are allowing ourselves to be separated by our differences instead of united by our common goals and our shared futures. A country divided by differences is not who we should want to be. We should strive to obtain a connection with each other that goes deeper than the color of our skins or our early Sunday morning activities. It should not have to take another tragedy to bring us together as a people.