Category: Family

Remembering 9/11

The Watchers

Gary Allison Furr. September 11, 2020

I wasn’t on a plane, or a family member receiving frantic calls,

I was not one of the air traffic controllers or military leaders

Or an advisor to the President. I wasn’t at the Pentegon that day

Or even a taxi driver or cop on duty in New York that day.

I sometimes wished to have been more useful as the Towers fell,

Reaching out to help someone else or at least console them.

LISTEN to Gary read “The Watchers”

I was a witness like the rest, but I was where I’ve been since then,

Watching on television, failing at first to understand what was happening.

I knew people on planes that got stuck somewhere, and know people

Who knew people who were on the planes.

But I am just one of the Americans who watched with disbelief, then despair,

And then rage. I wanted annihilation, if I’m honest,

of the merchants of Nihilism guised as a religion,

who hijacked their own faith along with the planes into fanaticism,

carrying us all into a cauldron of misery and death and revenge.

Justice is as elusive now as then, consequences were dealt but no one seems to have learned.

A generation starting their lives changed course,

And Lord, the mourning, etched on us, next to Challenger and Columbia

And Saigon and tsunamis and Katrina and Pearl Harbor for the eldest,

Who remembered shock and fear when there was no instant news.

I was just there, helpless, watching with everyone else,

Paralyzed, then on high alert, then grieving and outraged.

We prayed. We read stories, of lives and people and restaurant workers

Of miraculous escapes, brave firemen and women, lucky misses

Bodies, surrendering to the inevitable, hurtling to the ground

To die by choice rather than smoke and fire. We wanted to know

about the enemies who did this and their perverted spirituality,

their hate of us, their idolatry of a cult of destruction and a single man who caused it,

And we read about war that came to us and mushroomed,

Dead sons and daughters and the boiling clouds of poison and bloodshed

Across the region where three religions were born and peace always goes to die.

And most of all, we watched the cities, the centers of our economic and political lives

Brought to a complete and unnatural stop.

I prayed and led memorials, put out my flag on the mailbox, and prayed some more.

“We’ll never forget this,” we said, and for a while we meant it, truly did.

But time moves on and the present presses memory aside for the next terrible darkness.

Now there are those who don’t remember it at all. And the Pearl Harbor guardians,

They are gone, almost all. Now it is up to those of us who were there.

We can remember every terrible piece of that time, not alone but together.

We can remember stories and read them, cultivate decency and help for each other,

Try to remember how just for a short time we stopped complaining about our lot in life

And blaming one another. For just a while, we revered the dead and honored the heroic.

For one bittersweet episode, our pride and competitive ruthlessness gave way

To family and neighbor and the brevity of things.

There were terrible reactions, and there were stupid people who did thoughtless things

But more often there was a determination not to forget, to comfort the grieving

And to hold onto the deepest about us.

God, we need it back.


One day, we went to the memorial, stared down into that terrifying waterfall

Pouring down, down, disappearing into the earth. It is hard to look at,

And saw families stopping next to names cut out in the ribbon of memory,

Some touching one, perhaps their son or sister or father or friend.

They paused, or left flowers or a note, a wailing wall for Americans.

I saw names I recognized from that day and from my years of remembering,

People who were about an ordinary day, flying to a business meeting,Or to start a vacation, or driving to

the restaurant with the best view To have coffee and breakfast

when the Evil same upon us the earth

And so I remember how fast all can disappear

And hope in a time when we cannot seem to speak to friends

Who voted differently or who don’t share our ideas

That we won’t forget what it felt like to be united in sorrow

And humbled by death

And laid down our selfishness for a holy indignation for what had been done.

I will carry these memories as long as i can, try to hand it on,

tell its stories, and let them speak.

Tom Dooley

Some years back Vickie and I vacationed near Boone, NC, home of Doc Watson. We stayed in a place with a view of Grandfather Mountain and traipsed around in the Smokies for a week. It was great. We ventured over to Wilkesboro, NC where the events remembered in the old murder ballad “Tom Dooley” happened. There are many versions of the story and many versions of the song, but here is a more traditional one I recorded a few years ago more in the style of Doc.

Read a most interesting piece on the migration of lowland Scottish people to Appalachia via a stay and invitation to leave Ireland for the new world. Fortunately they brought their music with them and a century later, thanks to their geographical isolation, they had preserved it almost without alteration. Because they were from the lowlands of Scotland, they emphasized the fiddle rather than bagpipes, for which we may be grateful. The highland pipes are wonderful, but you can’t listen to a two hour concert of them. They’re like the accordian–better confined to Lawrence Welk reruns or background. (Yes, I know the old definition of perfect pitch–you through the banjo into the dumpster without touching the sides and it lands on an accordion).

At any rate, these fierce, independent mountain people of the South were hard working, resentful of interference and suspicious of outsiders. And occasionally murderous. Wilkesboro was the capital of the moonshine runners who eventually took their souped up cars and started NASCAR. “Family Feud” was not a television show. It was a matter of honor and violence.

Thank goodness the territorial domination of men over women is no longer the same among intelligent people, but the song is a memory of a time when things were a certain way and shame was powerful. You may have heard the Kingston Trio’s version or any of a hundred folkies in the Sixties. I was attracted to that version when I started playing, but I like this one better.

In Wilkesboro they put on an outdoor drama every summer of the story of Tom Dooley and the murder of poor Laurie Foster. It starts with a Civil War re-eneactment, allowing the men and boys to shoot off blanks for way too long with almost no relevance to the story advancement, but it’s great fun. We waited out a downpour to see it, and had a great time. It’s a sad story and justice was severe in those days, but at least there were concessions. It’s worth a see. Take some earplugs.

Maybe it’s true what Elie Wiesel told us–to forget our sins is as great a transgression as to have committed them in the first place. Remembering and grieving are essential to healing.

Stay Connected

Every Mother’s Day for the last dozen years of my ministry as a pastor, we’d combine Mother’s Day with Graduate Recognition. This is because our college students ended earlier than high school students and if we wanted to see them all before they went to Cancun or their senior trip, we’d better get it done.

So, oddly, we celebrated Mother’s Day (which is lauded above Father’s Day). For all of my childhood, I figured Mother’s Day was in the Bible and we often got a sermon on the woman described in Proverbs 31. This was the only time we heard a sermon on this text unless a woman over 75 died, in which case they had asked that it be read to describe them as a virtuous and industrious woman, whether their family had recognized it or not. By Mary and Martha, those unappreciative kin were going to hear it on her way out.

Graduate Recognition is a time when a church, well, marks the end of one phase of mothering, so to speak. As I told one son-in-law when they announced their marriage, “Son, I’ve done all I can do. She’s all yours.”

Now they move to the next phase, which in this most odd time is less clear. Will the moving be metaphorical (Online college? A virtual backpacking trip to Europe? A job, perchance?)? or will it be literal (huge carloads of stuff to cram into some undersized cubbyhole of a dorm room)?

Whatever comes next, the American Dream of parents is what I called in a sermon the “threefold test of maturity.”  You are:

  1. Out of the house.
  2. Out of school.
  3. Out of our money.

My daughter Erin said, grinning, “Two out of three isn’t so bad, Dad.”

          But this “getting out on your own” has really flown into the Twilight Zone over the past year, and it isn’t over yet. I remember at the end of my freshman year of college packing up a Mustang Grande with my entire dormroom and driving to Denver, Colorado alone at age 18. No cell phone, no credit card, just a “gas card” and cash. That world actually existed.

          Yet I WAS going “home.” My favorite definition of “maturity” isn’t that one above. It is this, given my by a counselor, and I have not been able to trace the author:  “Maturity is to accept oneself and one’s origins as non-negotiable.” You won’t achieve that after high school graduation or even college, and certainly not in your twenties. You are likely to spend decades figuring out what the heck that means.

          Let me just say that what you discover isn’t far from what the poets tell us, that there is something permanent and real right here in us, with us, next to us, in the people we’ve been given, but we cannot know that right away. Wendell Berry said it so beautifully in his short poem:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

                                                          (Wendell Berry, “The Real Work.”)

So out you go, but the prayer of a parent is you will find your way back home. If you have to stay a while until you get it back together or if you have to, as John Denver once sang of the Prodigal Son, make your “way back home again over many a rugged mile,” you will discover the way. And it will be familiar and deep. What you loathed and couldn’t wait to escape or the great treasure you seek isn’t out there anywhere. It is within.

          This past year has had plenty that was terrible and depressing. But it has called forth from us something by necessity—to connect where we can with other humans. Loneliness and distance have caused us to dwell in the Far Country even as we didn’t leave home for months and months. And an ache for the people who mattered most and on whom we counted grew deep until we thought perhaps we might not take them for granted ever again.

          On this Mother’s Day, just after my wife and I returned home from the embraces of grandchildren from whom we’d been separated for over a year, as we survived an invisible virus and the stupidity of our fears toward one another, something eternal has endured. And the stream that is bouncing off the stones is singing. Listen.

          Blessings on you all. Stay connected to the people you love.

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Prayer for a Requiem

I am grateful that I have served with three wonderful worship leaders over the twenty-seven years at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church before I retired–Dr. Milburn Price, Dr. Terre Johnson, and Rev. Marty Watts. Thanks to being in a church with these outstanding musicians, we were exposed to some of the great music of the Christian church. Terre Johnson asked me to compose a closing prayer following a presentation of the Requiem by John Rutter, a beautiful and somber remembrance of human sorrow. Before we can hope again, we must grieve honestly to reckon our loss, and the Rutter Requiem is one of the most beautiful I have heard.

As it is Good Friday, it seems appropriate to revisit this prayer. If you object to written prayers, I would simply say the act of writing in quiet is every bit as spontaneous and open to God as free-form prayers, which can become incredibly predictable over time. For me personally, Good Friday is a hard day. And so this prayer feels right for a Tennebrae service, a candlelight series of readings on Good Friday evening. As readings from the gospels are given, candles are extinguished one by one until we end in darkness and leave in reflection on the power of death and our need for the light.

I published this prayer as part of a book several years ago entitled Poems, Prayers and Unfinished Promises.. I hope, whether you share my faith or not, that this prayer might speak to you today.

We came here tonight to wait and to hope

That tombs and sorrow and death and loss

Are only prelude

To seek the Living shepherd,

Beyond our doubts, beyond our fears,

From death into life.

We wait faithfully

Hoping that

You might meet us in our gardens of sorrow as you met Mary,

We wait for unexpected visions in the midst of our tears.

And for you to come to us

As you came to them behind the locked doors of fear

To wait tonight is enough

For tomorrow we will walk to the tomb again

And discover the promise fulfilled yet once more

Tonight it is enough to shed out tears and grieve

For joy comes in the morning

And there is a purpose to the night that cannot

And should not be passed by

For when the morning comes

Its light is ever more brilliant

And our joy everlasting.

We wait as the people of faith. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mother and Son

Jaroslav Pelikan’s marvelous book Jesus Through the Centuries takes a sojourn through the vast and complex history of the interpretations of Jesus.  Among the chapters is one entitled, “Christ Crucified,” in which he notes the disproportionate focus on Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection in the gospel accounts.  By even the most “generous” reading, he notes, we have at most information about less than a hundred days of Jesus’ ministry on earth, but of the last few days we have an hour by hour account.

Says Pelikan, “What was said of  the thane of Cawdor in MacBeth was true pre-eminently of Jesus: ‘Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving of it.’”  It is clear that the gospel writers intend for us to focus our attention here, to the foot of the cross and the edge of the empty tomb.  These are the founding images of the Christian faith, called the “Passion” of Jesus Christ.

Surprisingly little is said of the actual method of crucifixion.  The most agonizing details of the death itself have been multiplied by morbid preaching, but the gospels pass over those details in near silence.  They do not seem to be interested particularly in the pounding of the nails or biology of asphyxiation.  The fact of his crucifixion seems enough.

We do, however, have seven short sayings and attributed to Jesus as he died on the cross.  They have fascinated preachers through the centuries.  Why, of all things he might have said, did he say these in his final hours?  And if there was more, why were these the sayings remembered by the gospel writers?  We will not know the answers to those questions on this side of heaven, but we can still listen in fascination.

After all, who can resist overhearing the last words of any dying person?  Every child at a bedside strains to hear a word of love, reconciliation, summing up, or release from a dying parent.  These words say some significant things to us if we have ears to hear them.  They seem random at first, but have resonated in the Christian tradition:

John 19:26-27-“Son, behold your mother…”

John 19:28-29-“I thirst”

Luke 23:32-38-“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Mt. 27:45-54-“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

Luke 23:39-43-“Today, You Shall Be with Me in Paradise”

Luke 23:44-46-“Into Thy Hands I commit my Spirit”

John 19:28-30-“It is Finished!”

While many of the words are about lofty things—surrender to God, eternal hope, abandonment, forgiveness, there are two that are very poignant for their simple earthiness and pathos.  “I thirst” is a cry of a suffering human being. And “Son, behold thy mother,” was Jesus speaking to John, we assume (the disciple Jesus loved, John humbly refers to himself). He was asking him to care for his mother. As a last act on his earthly life, he turned to maternal love and the anxiety of leaving her. We assume Joseph perhaps has already died and she is now losing a son. John says that from that day on, the disciple took her into his own home.

Now I’ve been thinking about that again as the pain of George Floyd’s death has returned to us through a trial. And beyond the infamous words of not being able to breathe, it was the cry for his mother that undoes me. For all the anger, pain and sorrow of what happened last year, at the core of every bit of human brokenness is love and sorrow. In the anguish of an ordinary moment on a city street gone bad, something in me feels sadness above all else. All the pain in the world ends up as the separations from one another—life lost, families broken, neighbor love replaced by anger and distrust, and all that wells up.

No, “Son, behold thy mother” is not housekeeping. It is every bit as deep and profound as all the theologically lofty words that followed. Perhaps in this moment, too, it is this simple recognition of one another’s profound and vulnerable humanity, a child and mother, that has been lost in this virtual world of ours, only revealed in those moments of terrible unjust suffering. Don’t hurry past it. Take it in. It’s the only way back.