On my way to breakfast, I noticed that a crowd had gathered around a big-screen TV in the lower level of the Geiger Center. This was around the time the second plane crashed into the tower. My management class was in the Bailey Business Center, which had a large projector on which we watched the news reports in stunned silence. When news broke of the Pentagon crash, my professor immediately left the room to call his daughter, who at the time worked for the Defense Department in counterterrorism (she was unharmed).
Later that morning, I had an hourlong ministry seminar. The other students were all freshmen, and I didn't know any of them. (I changed my major to religion halfway through my second year, so I hadn't taken Intro to Ministry as a freshman.) The professor, Rev. Dr. Tom Wilks, convened a prayer session in Stubblefield Chapel. This was the only time I ever went into that building.
Later in the day, I had a Bible class (maybe Pentateuch? maybe Exegesis of Acts?). I do remember the professor deliberating about whether we should have class that afternoon. There was nothing we could do, after all. The attacks were intended to incite terror. If we abandoned our studies, would the terrorists win? Anyway, we went on with the lecture and discussion. It seemed the right thing to do.
That night, I remember watching President Bush give a comforting address to the nation on TV, quoting the 23rd Psalm. The next day, OBU President Mark Brister spoke to the university community in chapel. I don't remember which Oklahoma Baptist minister was scheduled to give the sermon that day, but he knew that OBU needed to hear from its leader in that moment. I thought that was pretty classy.
I had become more interested in politics in the previous year. My study of the Bible was helping me form values that had serious political implications, challenging some of them and crystallizing others. I had been following the national debates over stem cell research and tax cuts. I had also become interested in the sociology of religion, and particularly how people of the same religious faith could arrive at such vastly different social and political views. A few months after 9/11, I sat in the library and read an essay in The Atlantic by David Brooks, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible." Looking back, it's amazing how 9/11 ushered in a moment of national unity. Yet in the years that followed, our response to 9/11 accelerated an already palpable polarization.
In the 11 years that have come and gone since then, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on those issues. I'm eternally grateful for OBU. The experience, knowledge, and wisdom I gained there have been invaluable as I've grappled with moral, ethical, theological, and political issues in my personal and professional life. Like everyone, I've made mistakes and poor judgments. But when I've been at my best, OBU's influence on my life has been most profound.
For my generation, 9/11 was a tragic part of our coming-of-age. Over the years I've met many people who were personally affected in much more dramatic ways than I was as a 20 year old college senior in Shawnee, Oklahoma. But on reflection, I do see how greatly that day affected the unfolding of my own life.
Yet today I remember my countrymen, the loved and lost. In all that we do, let us seek to honor their memory.
That was my senior year at OBU too. The night before I had sat out on the back porch of my apartment, writing a letter to my army-boyfriend. On the morning of Sept 11, I had math-for-history-majors at 8:00, and then went straight to the music hall to practice the piano for a few hours alone. I had no idea what had happened until I went to an early lunch that day and saw the student body gathered around the big-screen TV in the cafeteria. Dr. Humphrey saw me looking stunned and bewildered and she invited me to eat lunch with her, and explained what was going on. And I too remember sitting in Raley Chapel that night. I will never forget the golden evening light and listening to President Bush's disembodied voice over the radio, and watching the colors from the stained glass windows reflecting in the tears on my friends' cheeks. Those were harrowing days, and OBU was an amazing community with which to go through them.
ReplyDeleteMy roommate woke me up to inform me that the 1st plane had hit the WTC, as I went into the living room the 2nd hit. I will remember that day for the rest of my life. I am thankful for the OBU community and Dr. Brister and how he and many of the faculty showed grace and the love of Christ.
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