Teresa Vietti, M.D.,
medicine always comes first for pediatrician
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Teresa Vietti, M.D., medicine always comes first for pediatrician |
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Sept. 11 memory: Love won a great victory
By Writer's Name Frank K. Flinn, Ph.D., adjunct professor of religious studies in Arts & Sciences and a noted authority on religious thought and expression, comments here on his experience of Sept. 11 and his hope that love will flourish in wake of terror and destruction. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was on a Delta Air Lines flight from Barcelona to Atlanta. About 10 a.m. New York time, I sensed the plane was loosing altitude. I opened the shade and saw full sunlight directly out the window. I deduced that the plane was no longer heading toward the American coastline. In fact, it was headed north. Soon I spotted some islands. Having once landed at this spot in the Atlantic Ocean, I deduced again that the plane was going to land in the Azores. The plane was flying well, so I guessed that something else was going on. Maybe a hijacking, I thought.
The woman traveling in the seat next to me was returning from a pilgrimage to San Juan Compostela. We had talked of spiritual things prior to the announcement. At that moment, we held hands and said the Lord's Prayer together. The plane landed and parked at the end of the runway. We were all hustled into the waiting room of the airport. Then the captain told us what had happened in New York and that our plane was being checked for a bomb. We made our way into the airport restaurant just as the crumbling towers of the World Trade Center flickered over Portuguese television. We gaped in horror. Some of us who had been to New York a lot wondered how many perished with the buildings' collapse. To this day, as my sadness for those lost deepens, I marvel that so many escaped. Travelers were frantically trying to reach loved ones. Many were calling New York. Those with cell phones kindly reached theirs to those without. The captain and the crew marshaled all the local people they could to make sure we had a place to eat and stay that night. The next morning I woke early and walked in grief to a church to meditate, but it was locked so I sat on the steps. That afternoon, we were flown back to Madrid. I did not make it home until late Friday. As I watched television in Madrid over the Spanish, German and French channels, it became clear that al-Qaida was involved, and my inner self quaked at the possibility of worldwide religious war. But reporters started talking of something extraordinary that had taken place. Just at the moment when victims were aware that they could or were about to die, their last words were "I love you." "It looks bad, I love you." "Take care of the kids, I love you." "Tell Grandma goodbye, I love you." "I love you." "I love you." No words of revenge. No hatred. No resentment. Just "I love you." It happened everywhere, again and again. From the World Trade Center, from the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, from the Pentagon. "I love you." In the coming months, my thoughts of world affairs kept drifting toward the dark pit of hopelessness. My wife, Alice, kept calling me back. In January, went we to New York. We took the subway to Ground Zero. Amid the throng of people, we quietly said the prayer of St. Francis, "Lord, make me a channel of your peace." I turned toward the cranes and dust wafting up from the hole of devastation, and an inner voice spoke to me, "Love won a great victory here." It is this lesson that has kept me from despair. Today I pray that this great lesson does not get overwhelmed. Too quickly our leaders have deflected our attention from love to patriotism, and revenge and war in a kind of mindless militarism. But that is not the message those who lost most left us. They taught us that the only way to conquer the hatred that showed its gaping maw on Sept. 11 is to learn to love, to learn to continue to love. Gandhi once said true patriotism is love of your neighbor, even if your neighbor is a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian or someone who has no belief at all. "I love you" is stronger that all the hatred the world can spew forth, and it is the only way the pain of the world will be healed. "I love you." |
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