This extract below comes from a moving article here in Sojourners magazine written by Carrie Adams, a media affairs associate at Sojourners who was aged 14 on the day of 9/11.
It is good to hear such words of faith and hope .
"The whole of my political memory has been war. Sure, I was around for Bill Clinton, but George W. Bush is the first president I remember engaging with and my memory starts with retaliation, with vengeance, with war. I have nothing else, but I long to move past it, to find a new way to heal, not through violence, but through dialogue.
And so here we are, 10 years later, looking back on a decade of conflict, still so blinded by our own fear that some of us rage against Islamic centers and spew hatred instead of hope. I am the 9/11 generation. It is the event that marks our lives: before and after. But we see our new world only through the fog of war, through the haze of misinformation that has become the norm.
We have the specter of war, but it has been so prevalent that we barely notice it. But when we do reencounter it, when it stares us in the face, like it does this weekend, how can we respond? How can we reconcile our fear and our need for closure? Bush chose violence, I choose peace.
Sojourners and the World Evangelical Alliance co-sponsored a press conference this morning overlooking Ground Zero. (The picture above was our view from the conference.) We brought together voices to remind us of every angle of this event, including the global impact, the ongoing healing, the biblical call to reconciliation, and the Christian response to terrorism.
More than 5,000 people have also signed our 9/11 Commemoration Pledge, agreeing to stand shoulder to shoulder with people of all faiths, and of no faith, who are helping to build a nation that reflects our best values.
I’m proud of this event, not for what it is, but for whom it represents. For the Christians who welcome Muslims into their neighborhoods.
For the Protestant firemen who let Catholic priests pray over them that day. For the little girls who sit at lunch tables with the new kid in school. We’ve been instructed to love our neighbors and as far as I can tell, persecution, prejudice, discrimination, and picketing outside a mosque aren’t part of ‘love.’
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