Column: The Light That Shines in Darkness

By Drew Williams
Sentinel Columnist

It was a great privilege to be invited to join with the families of those who lost loved ones at the inauguration of the Greenwich September 11th Memorial in Cos Cob Park last year. The Greenwich community is deeply indebted to all those who persevered to make this honoring and compassionate vision a reality. The thoughtfulness and attention to detail in this project is breathtaking. The site’s horticulture has been landscaped and planted so that it will be most beautiful for this year’s fifteenth remembrance and for every September hereafter. The granite floor is inlaid with three steel lines that span outward from the center and point to Washington, D.C.; Shanksville, Penn.; and Manhattan. And at the end of the line that points to the New York skyline, lies a fragment of one of the original World Trade Center towers.

I was so moved by the memorial and the inauguration ceremony that I brought my wife to see the memorial the very next day. The sky was perfectly blue and the glass towers, touched by just a little rain from the previous night, refracted extraordinary patterns of light from the water droplets that had settled at the top of each tower. The stars cut into the design were almost incandescent.

As we quietly moved from tower to tower, I fell into conversation with a young woman. She recognized me from the day before as the man who prayed with a British accent. I apologized and said that I had felt a little self-conscience in a moment that was sacred to America. She stopped me and graciously but firmly disagreed. “When I heard your voice,” she said, “I was comforted. It reminded me that the world stood with us on that day and the days that followed, and it was good to hear that the world continues to stand with us in our grief.”

I had to agree.

I would imagine that we all remember exactly where we were as the tragedy of the events of that morning unfolded before us. I was ministering in a church in the U.K. whose old church building was located on a site that had been a place of worship and prayer since the eleventh century. The church tower was over six hundred years old. And on that morning of Sept. 11, 2001 it began to ring. The bell tower was furnished with an array of bells that ordinarily peeled over Sundays, weddings and celebrations.

On this morning, however, just one solitary bell was sounded—a sound that instinctively called the community to prayer. And they came running. As I entered the church, I found a sanctuary that was filled with people in fervent prayer. Sometimes we prayed with words and sometimes there was just silence as we trusted God with all that was in our hearts that we could not express. The Apostle Paul exhorts us to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). That day there were many, many tears. 

On the morning of the inauguration of the Greenwich September 11th Memorial a single bagpiper led the assembled community to the glass towers, each of them bearing the watermark of the American flag within which the name of each Greenwich resident who perished fifteen years ago is lovingly engraved. Their families gathered on the granite center of the Memorial. The wider community filled the corkscrew path that surrounds the site. And encircling the families, the community stood and wept.

There is much darkness in the world. Yet I fervently believe that we are not without hope. The Apostle John writes, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). That we have not lost our capacity to weep with those who weep remains an enduring witness to the light.

Drew Williams is senior pastor at Trinity Church in Greenwich.

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