" When I don’t have any more birthdays left, will I be dead? "

These words, uttered a few weeks ago by Simon, the four-year-old son of a friend of mine, came back to me in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster. " Where is the building? " asked one of the survivors after the collapse. " Did it fall down? Where is it? " Like my friend’s little boy, the man was struggling to grasp something that was beyond his comprehension. It is the same for all of us right now, I think. The events of September 11 have made children of us all.

The unstoppable met the immovable last Tuesday, and something had to give. This was the paradox at the heart of the event. How could such a union lead to anything but the unthinkable? But then the improbabilities of paradox, as the poet and the preacher know, can lead us to profound truths. " All things are passing, and nothing abides, " said Plato. This is the lesson we learned as we watched these two opposing forces clash that sunny September morning. Nothing is immovable. Nothing is unshakable. Even the sky isn’t safe. As the World Trade Center descended into a mist of blood and rubble that day, so too did our sense of security.

The night of the — the what, the incident? — I went down to my local bar. Everyone, it seemed, was drunk. Some of the regulars sat in silence, others chatted with a kind of cheery hysteria. One guy was so plastered he couldn’t bring himself to say " building. " " Bli-ber-beerl, " he said. " Bridden. " Behind his head the television flickered that terrible loop: Boom! Boom! Boom!

" When I don’t have any more birthdays left, will I be dead? " When Simon asked his mother this question, she scooped him up and held him in her arms. She couldn’t tell him that he wasn’t going to die, of course, only that he had many more birthdays left, that he was safe, that he was here and he was okay. Who will do the same for us? The president? Peter Jennings?

As the rescue workers — as the clean-up crews — sift through the wreckage of Lower Manhattan and Washington and Pennsylvania, the TV pundits pick through the specifics of the assault with forensic diligence. We think we know the hows, the whens, the wheres, and maybe even the whys. And yet we are no closer to understanding what really happened that day. No one knows what will happen next (did you see the president’s face?). No amount of analysis will help us come to terms with the gnawing fear, the uncertainty we all feel.

CNN is in the details. For the big picture, we turn to God. I am not a religious person, but last Sunday I decided I wanted — needed — to go to church. Even non-believers need to have faith — in Good, if not God. But which church? Would I go with the Catholics? The Unitarians? The Baptists? It was like trying to decide on a cell-phone carrier. Who had the most redemption hours? In the end, I opted for convenience and walked into the one nearest my apartment: the Park Street Church in Boston, an evangelical Trinitarian ministry.

When I entered the inner sanctum, I felt like an intruder, an impostor. I realized I had an empty coffee cup in my hand — surely an act of desecration. I jammed the cup into my pocket (it wasn’t as empty as I’d thought), slid into one of the pews, and began to sweat. Within 10 minutes, the church was packed — standing room only. I was trapped. And then a man came in and lit some candles at the front of the church and I started to cry. I cried through the sermon, I cried through the hymns, and I cried through the prayers. " Our father, who art in Heaven ... "

As I walked out of the church into a brilliantly sunny day, I was reminded of another paradox — " When I am weak, I am strong " — and there was a measure of comfort in this. Then my thoughts turned once more to little Simon, to how, about an hour after he had asked the birthday question, he turned to his mother and posed another: " Are you going to die? "

Yes. This is the cruelest lesson we have learned these past days. The answer is yes.

Issue Date: September 20 - 27, 2001