Dear Friends in Christ,

Twenty-five years ago today, I was in a fifth-grade classroom at North Chevy Chase Elementary School. When the North Tower of the World Trade Center was hit at 8:46am, our teachers said nothing. There were no televisions in most rooms, and this was long before smartphones. There was a passing period I think, and by the time of the second strike at 9:03am, news was working its way through the staff.

Children are incredibly perceptive—we knew something was happening that the adults were keeping from us, and that sooner rather than later, a voice would come over the P.A.

And then it did: something euphemistic about an emergency in New York. There had been a plane, then another. We should expect our parents to come collect us early.

By the time of the Pentagon crash at 9:37am, the school was locked down. Half of us were sequestered in the multipurpose room and the other half—my half—in the library, idly, anxiously, looking at books as the teachers huddled around a television in the staff room; its flickering blue light illuminating their faces, the screen deliberately turned away from our eyes. Someone winced. They turned it off.

Though Northern Virginia feels like a world away from kids on the other side of the Potomac, we were only ten miles directly north of the Pentagon, as the crow flies. My stepfather is a war correspondent. I wondered if he was in the briefing room that day. I knew my mother was traveling that week but didn’t know the day. When they shut down the Metro and all the major roads, my father walked the seven miles up 16^th Street from his Federal office on the Mall. All I knew was that ashen-faced parents were coming in and whisking away my classmates. Names were being called to the office, and they weren’t mine.

Some 2,600 innocent people perished that day. (In the years to come, more causalities were added to the list, reaching a total 2,977). Thousands more were injured. Thousands more, still, grieved the loss of loved ones, of friends, of colleagues. And millions of American schoolchildren lost something of their innocence.

I narrate the morning of a scared, anxious fifth grader not because it was exceptional, but because it was so totally prosaic. So totally ubiquitous. Shared by every other child in a prosaic, public elementary school.

And yet it is seared in my mind.

Most of you readers will remember exactly where you were. Perhaps the shirt you were wearing. The coffee you were holding. The color of the clear morning light. The smell of a crisp early autumn morning. And then how in an instant, the whole world changed.

Why God?

This is the question so many of us asked. It is the question so many continue to ask.

It is the question hundreds of New Yorkers asked—people covered in dust, people bleeding, people weeping—as they fled the collapse and streamed into Trinity Church on Wall Street… Where the priests prayed a service—for the dead and for the living, for the stoic and for the fearful—and then when they came to the end, prayed it again. And again. And again. Until the daylight waned.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

A quarter century has passed. Children have grown up. And yet we pause again to remember, to pray for the dead, and to take comfort.

“The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.” (Wisdom 3:1)

Yours, faithfully,

—Fr Matthew