My wife, our three-year-old daughter and I arrived in England on September 4, 2001, embarking on what would be a stay of two years and four months. I was starting work on a graduate degree at Cambridge.
At about 2:30 on the afternoon of September 11, a neighbor whom I had met the day before pounded on the door of our flat. Roy was about 70, a working stiff in a flat woolen cap, and he had a crazed look in his eyes when I opened the door. "Tom! Tom!" he shouted. "They've flown an aeroplane into the Fair Trade Center! In New York! Turn on your telly!"
Between my initial assumption that the Fair Trade Center must be in Guatemala and a good deal of puzzlement at Roy's East Anglian drawl, I was slow to process this information. In due course, though, we rushed back to the kitchen and turned on the 1970s-vintage black-and-white TV our landlord had provided.
The following weekend, I sent the message below to friends. I'm posting it verbatim on this anniversary as a document of its time.
--Tom Wood, Nashville
-----Original Message-----
From: E. Thomas Wood [mailto:Tom@The-Wood-Family.org]
Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 3:25 PM
To: Bruce Feiler; Townes Duncan; Paul S. Marchand Esq.; Thomas Hodges; Clark Parsons; David Wood; Ray & Lisa Waddle; Kirk Porter; 'Steve at Home'; David Ralston; Richard Quest
Subject: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Dear and far-flung friends,
As has consistently been the case in my wordy life when the truly profound has confronted me, I am dumb in the face of the present situation. I don't know what to say to anyone else; I don't know what to say to myself. Like more than one character in the novels of Graham Greene (is it a coincidence that such an anti-American writer comes to mind?), I the unbeliever stumbled into church yesterday, driven by an impulse I could not fully identify.
The Round Church on Cambridge's main drag is not a working parish, serving mainly as a tourist attraction. Its original bits date from Norman times and are the oldest structure in the city. Somehow amid all the WWII air warfare based around Cambridge, this one structure suffered the only major bomb hit locally during the Battle of Britain [not quite true, as it turns out --ETW] -- but it has endured that, and invading armies of brass-rubbing Americans, and much else in the past Millennium. The feng shui there would be as good as anywhere, at the designated 11:00 hour yesterday, for my three minutes of silent meditation on the future of civilization as we have known it.
A Briton met me at the door, offering free city bus tours and other kindnesses if I happened to be one of those displaced Americans wandering the south of England because I could not go home. Evidently some of the other 30 or so people in the pews (more or less a capacity crowd in the tiny hall) were refugees of this type. I took as isolated a seat as I could find and spent my three minutes trying to envision something beyond the horrors of the past few days, entirely without success.
And then came the ritual. As something of an impartial observer, I have always been an enthusiast of religious ritual (and, conversely, the type who always cringes at self-written wedding vows). A Latin hymn, a Kaddish, or the sight of Romanian bus passengers giving themselves the Orthodox cross each time they passed a church -- I have many times felt a chill, the momentary illusion of belonging. This day, it was the Lord's Prayer, closing the ad-hoc service after the moment of silence. Words I have heard so many times before rang through the church, and one couplet among them kept ringing in my ears afterward:
"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."
It's a mission statement, innit? The job ahead really couldn't be simpler in the essence to which these ritualized words boil it down. Let no temptation impede us from waging a just war against evil. Okay. We'll get right on that. If only simple meant easy.
The temptation of unproductive revenge is obvious; less so the temptation of nostalgia, the allure of pretending everything can someday again be as it was before Tuesday. Somehow, ordinary Americans will have to get their minds around the fact that our country is not as exceptional as we were raised to believe. Somehow, a people conditioned by politics and education to look inward will have to engage the rest of the world. Of all the ink spilled since the blood was spilled, the New Republic essay appended below is the most well-reasoned assessment of how we must move forward that I have seen. I submit it for your consideration.
You are all in our thoughts.
-Tom
It Happened Here [reposted version of TNR essay is second item down]
Video postscript: "That plane is making fire on the building."