9/11 Taught Me What Matters Most

Last week, I was driving my teenage daughter and her friend across town after serving dinner to three homeless families staying at a local church. On the drive home, my daughter’s friend started asking me questions about my life. She and her mother had been reading my faculty biography on the school website where I will be teaching this year. She was amazed at my experiences and accomplishments.

Her jaw dropped when I answered her questions and told her that I have been in the same room as the president twice, met congressmen, and celebrities. She couldn’t believe that I have an award from the Secretary of Defense for my work as a 9/11 relief worker. In her mind, I have done amazing things that blew her away, but I didn’t see it the same way. That was simply my resume.

After expressing her amazement, I told her that meeting all those people, being a linguist, and interning at a prestigious think-tank on Capitol Hill were great experiences, but they are not the most important things I have done. It isn’t being around powerful people that matters most to me. It is the times I have been led to serve those who are suffering and those in need that matter most. It is the weak, vulnerable, and afflicted who are most important. I told her one of the most important things I have ever done is serving as a 9/11 relief worker.

It is easy to see why people are impressed when I share some of my experiences with them because of the people involved. These are people they have only seen online or on television. We are enamored with the powerful and the famous, especially teenagers. There are some people I really enjoyed meeting over the years—one of the highlights from my professional days was meeting Gary Sinise—but ultimately, rubbing elbows with the powerful and famous never impressed me much. I never felt at home with them.

Serving as a 9/11 relief worker taught me to prioritize the suffering over the powerful. We don’t think we will be a part of history making events, but I lived through one of the most significant of my generation. I had the profound privilege not of being in the presence of former president George W. Bush twice, but of sitting next to a grieving mother sharing stories about her son who died in an unspeakable way at the Pentagon terrorist attack site. I was blessed to help a man who had lost his brother find food for his inconsolable grandmother. I handed her a massive fruit platter the chef had generously made for her upon request. I saw her pain and her gratitude. I listened to a gentleman talk with great love about the daughter he lost in the attack. I witnessed grief-stricken people find peace when they could finally bury their dead loved one. This is ultimately what matters to me. Not the powerful people who stopped by, but rather, the broken-hearted who found themselves face down in the dust at the 9^th Station on the Way of the Cross and who were living crucifixion.

Being a 9/11 relief worker is the hardest thing I have ever done, and it was profoundly life changing. These afflicted families could not give me anything in return. There were no autographs or photo ops like there were with celebrities and power players. They experienced something so horrific that all they could do was hang on moment-by-moment.

Their poverty and vulnerability were gifts they unintentionally gave to me. Listening to the love they had for those they lost and the memories they carried touched the depths of my being. I was blessed to be a silent presence while they profusely shed tears of grief. What an amazing gift to stay beside them at the foot of the Cross with Our Lady of Sorrows in silence. There are no words for such an incredible gift.

When I look over my life, it is not the worldly successes that matter. I often think about this when I am at funeral Masses. When family members offer short reflections on their loved ones after Mass, I often interiorly struggle with the worldliness of it all. There is almost no mention of Christ.

I don’t want to be remembered for my worldly successes. My degrees, medals and awards, professional accomplishments, or powerful people I have met—they’re all dust. I want to be remembered for my great love of Christ. I want it to be abundantly clear to everyone at my funeral Mass that the Lord was first in my life. Despite my sinfulness, weaknesses, and failings, He used me to help others in accordance with his Divine Plan and for His glory.

I want it to be clear at the end of my earthly life that my family and I put Christ and serving others first in our lives, not the things of this world. That one of the greatest experiences of my life was holding a newborn baby boy who the Lord allowed me to help save from an abortion. That I have been blessed to minister to spiritual sons and daughters who needed a shoulder to cry on and a spiritual mother to fight battles for them. The gift from God through His Mother of a deep love for the priesthood. The blessings I received from the homeless who I ministered to and who ended up ministering to me. The sick I have visited in the hospitals and invited back to the Catholic Faith. The lost who returned to the Lord because I followed His will and spread seed far and wide without knowing if they would sprout. The long hours praying quietly before the Lord’s Real Presence. It is the Lord and the souls He wants to minister to through each one of us that ultimately matter, not worldly glory or success. It is the weak, lowly, poor, and afflicted who matter. It is the person He places in front of us each moment of the day.

As I said to a priest recently: “The suffering are my people.” It is not the strong and powerful who I feel at home with, in fact, I feel completely out of place in those circumstances. I feel more at home sitting next to a sick person on their hospital bed or talking with a homeless single mother who is searching for the Lord than I do among the rich and powerful or even at bishops’ Masses.

We misunderstand what this life is about when we believe it is about our worldly accomplishments. Our accomplishments mean nothing if they are not for the Lord. They mean nothing if they are the source of our identity, instead of the Lord. They mean nothing if all we care about is our own success, money, and power. They mean nothing if we prize status over the weak and afflicted. They mean nothing if we never learn the love of the Cross.

What is mind-blowing to me is not that I have done things many people never get to do, it is that the Lord used someone as sinful and weak as me to serve these people. It is only through my own poverty that I was able to serve them. If I was concerned about myself and worldly things, then I could not serve them. Each new person is a way the Lord leads me to die-to-self a little more. I could not love the lowly if all I cared about was power and prestige.

There is a great danger in the Church of giving too much emphasis to worldly affairs and power. I think of this every time politicians, celebrities, and the wealthy are given special privileges in our churches and at Masses. Is this truly how the Lord would operate? No; the homeless, grief-stricken, widows, orphans, and suffering would come first. The elderly and the handicapped would come first. We as a Church need to examine where we have become worldly and return to Christ.

When funeral Masses become about worldly accomplishments rather than holiness then we have lost sight of the purpose of this life. It is not to garner wealth, fame, power, and success. It is to learn how to love as Christ loves. To love as Christ loves we must seek the suffering, weak, and lowly. When we die, we should hope that the one thing our loved ones remember is that the Lord came first in our lives and that we served the suffering and the weakest among us. These are His beloved people.

Today, as we remember the 23^rd anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I am thankful for the witness of the grief-stricken family members and friends I encountered. I am thankful they allowed me to walk with them in their agony. I still carry the love they have for their lost loved ones in my heart. Their poverty taught me how to live deeper interior poverty in suffering. Their vulnerability showed me how to be vulnerable in my own periods of grief. They taught me that they are the ones who matter most, not the rich and powerful.

Who do we hold up as most important? Is it the same people the Lord holds up as the most important? If not, it is time for a deeper conversion of heart. It is time to show others what is truly most important in this life.

Photo of 911: Ground Zero, 10/03/2001. Retrieved from the U.S. National Archives.