Plenary, 11 Sep 2002
Meeting date: Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Official Report
382KB pdf
Time for Reflection
I welcome to lead today's time for reflection the Rev Johnston McKay, of the religious affairs department of the BBC.
The Rev Johnston McKay (Editorial Consultant, Religious Broadcasting, BBC Scotland):
A Scottish postgraduate student at Brown University in New York wrote just after 11 September last year:
"Everyone in the city has a World Trade Centre story, and everyone you talk to tells you their story, or the story of their friends. By degrees of separation you hear so many narratives, spread across the city, and it doesn't matter any more whose they are. It was one friend's wedding anniversary. Another friend was on the subway when it happened, going to Brooklyn, and probably underneath the World Trade Centre moments before it was hit."
She goes on to list many more stories.
Some of the stories about 11 September were too painful for some of us to bear, even two thousand miles and a split second on television away. The stories of messages of love sent by mobile phone from the doomed aircraft were the ones that some of us stopped listening to, not because they were too powerful, but because they were too personal and too poignant.
The journalist Aaron Hicklin, looking back on 11 September, said in a television programme that what happened changed the way that New York perceived itself. He said:
"Before September 11th there were lots of divisions and subdivisions. There were people who thought you needed a passport to go into Queen's. After September 11th only one thing mattered: were you here or were you not here on September 11th."
We were all there.
One of the glimpses of hope that has emerged from the events of exactly a year ago is that because we were all there, and because we all have our accounts of where we were when we heard the news, 11 September has become our story. It is the story of Scotland's being linked in real and imaginative compassion with New York.
An incident, event or story of human suffering anywhere in the world that becomes the story of people around the world can become for us all a glimpse of hope, because anything that creates—for however brief a time—unity in this fragmented world, and that can provide, however imaginatively, a symbol of compassion in what is so often a callous world, is a gesture of defiance against the wild anger that led to 11 September.
It is by refusing to despair and continuing to hope that we deny victory to people of violence.