The Day Our Generation Changed
Monday, September 14, 2026
Happy Monday, my friends! I was in eighth grade at St. Benedict’s School in Cambridge, OH. I can’t remember when we learned that something tragic had happened, but I remember the moment when our principal, Sr. Miriam, came into the room and whispered something into Mrs. Wilson’s ear. She quickly stopped her lesson and wheeled out the classroom TV so that we could watch the news which was just then making sense of a second plane hitting the World Trade Center in New York. We were 13 and 14 years old. We had no idea how our lives, our futures, and our world had fundamentally changed that day.
That change wouldn’t occur overnight or happen in some seismic way, particularly for a bunch of mostly white kids in Southeastern Ohio, but for millennials who supposedly had life handed to us on silver platters along with our participation trophies and our “I was there” medals it was both a defining moment in our collective lives and the first of a series of calamities that we’ve had to confront including at least one recession, a global pandemic, and the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, events that make us less and less like our Baby Boomer parents.
The great Black spiritual asks, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The not nearly as great Alan Jackson asked, “Where were you when the world stopped turnin’ that September day?” “Were you there?” and “where were you?” These are questions of memory and questions of participation. This past Friday we marked the 25th year since September 11, 2001. I don’t know of anyone who reads Monday Moments who wasn’t alive yet that day, but I know a few of you may not have conscious memories of the day while others experienced the horror and tragedy as adults, as people serving in the armed forces, as people who watched loved ones enlist in the days and weeks immediately following, and many who had to find the words to tell your children what happened as you were still trying to form your own understandings.
On September 11, 2016, the 15th anniversary, I was working at Iona University and living in New Rochelle, NY, a short train ride from Manhattan. During the campus remembrance service the Iona alumni who died in the World Trade Center, many of them members of the NYPD and FDNY, were remembered with a long period of silence during which we could hear commercial airlines overhead breaking the terrestrial silence in a way that spoke as much to the normalcy that had returned as to the eerie recalling of that morning in September.
Where were you on September 11, 2001? How did your life, your family’s life, or your community’s life change after the attacks?
Let us pray: Gracious God, bless the souls and the memories of 2,996 people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. Grant us the grace to remember that they included people of many faiths, traditions, races, ethnicities, national origins, gender identities, sexual orientations, and other identities. Form us as people worthy of their memories. We ask this in the name of your son, Jesus, our savior and liberator. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben +
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