Today, we are gathered to mourn, to remember, and to celebrate.
The root of the word hero means to keep or protect. In Greek, a hero was originally a demi-god who was by definition a preserver of order and life. Thus when the word hero made its way into English during the Renaissance, it retained an implication of superhuman strength.
The people we call the heroes of September 11, though they may have been endowed with superhuman courage, were in the end all too human, all too vulnerable. Many of them -- the firefighters, the police, the friends or colleagues or strangers who risked their own safety to help others in those terrible burning towers, the passengers on Flight 93 -- gave their lives to save the lives of others. This is one reason we remember them with praise and thanksgiving; but we also remember them because of their great courage and their intense dedication and their ability to transcend their own selfish needs and fears in a moment of great terror -- in the valley of the shadow of death.
Mortality in the face of impossible odds is, of course, the daily paradox faced by all those who keep, serve, and protect the public. Since that sad day, when so many hundreds died trying to help the victims of the attacks, still more Americans have paid the hero's price in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan. All of them died trying, in the only ways they knew, to preserve order, to protect lives.
On this occasion of national remembrance, we relive last year's grief, patriotic pride, and anger--but with a difference. We stir up our most painful emotions not in order to lay the ghosts of the men and women who died, but to let their spirits rouse us, the living, to further efforts by whose light we can create and sustain a better world where terrorism can find no foothold--a world where innocence need not be sacrificed on the altar of national ego or religious fundamentalism.
We have had enough and more than enough of fire, hatred, blood, the anti-hero; enough of chaos. On this solemn day, may we recognize that the spirit of heroism did not die with our heroes.
It lives on in all those who would preserve order, all who struggle day in and day out to build a civil and just society, all who are ready to save lives even at the cost of their own. It lives in all of us who dare to remember and still dare to seek understanding, all who work for a world where light overcomes darkness, love banishes hatred -- a world where true peace is possible.
