25 years ago.
Much has been written about that morning.
I only want to look at a few minutes of it.
First the stairwell in the north tower, where thousands of people are moving downward, dusty, quiet, in one long stream toward the light - and where in the middle of that stream, tight-jawed fearless men are going the opposite way. Up. With thirty kilos of equipment on their backs, step by step, toward something everyone else is fleeing from.
They didn't know the tower would fall. But they knew what waited up there, and they went anyway.
343 of them never came down.
Same minutes, higher up, where no stairwell led anywhere anymore, people took out their phones. They had a few minutes left of their lives, and they knew it.
You'd think the last thing a Human Being would say would be about what was happening. About the fear. About the hatred. About those who did it. But not a single one of the calls we know about was about hatred.
They called home. They reached answering machines and said "I love you, tell the children I love them, you'll be okay" - and then they hung up and waited. Their last breaths were spent on Love.
All of them.
And then there are those we almost don't talk about. Those who stood in the windows, where the fire was, and where no stairwell and no phone could reach them anymore. They'd had everything taken from them - their morning, their future, their right to grow old - and in the end they were left with the only thing no fire can take from a Human Being - the way to meet it.
None of us can claim to know what they thought. But we know what the witnesses saw. They saw people who didn't fall - they stepped out. Some in pairs. Some held each other's hands all the way down. Even there, in the uttermost that a Human Being can be subjected to, they reached out for another Human Being.
That's not a picture of defeat. It's the last, strongest picture of the fact that a Human Being is not something you do something to - it's someone, all the way into the last second.
And over Pennsylvania, in a fourth plane, ordinary people found out over the phone what their plane was going to be used for.
A salesman. A rugby player. A grandmother. They decided to storm the cockpit - but first they did something I can almost not bear to think about. They voted on it. Imagine that. A vote, in the back of a hijacked plane, with a few minutes left. They died in a field instead of in a parliament, and they managed to be a civilisation all the way into death.
I've often thought about why those images keep working in me, today twenty-five years later. And I think it's because they answer a question we've forgotten to ask - what is the Western human being actually made of, when all the outer has been burned away?
It showed itself that morning. Not in speeches, not in doctrines, not in regulation, orders or legislation - but in what people did, when no one could see them, and nothing could be won.
They went up the stairs for strangers. They spent their death on loving. They stepped out into the air with a stranger in their hand. They held a vote in hell's antechamber.
That kind of thing doesn't arise from nothing.
It comes from a specific place - from the sentence the Jews handed us, that Man is created in God's image, from the Greeks' stubborn claim that Truth exists and can be sought, from the Romans' insight that Law must stand above the strongest. Jerusalem, Athens, Rome.
Three rivers that flowed together and became what we call the West.
The men in the planes thought they hit the West when they hit the steel. They were wrong. The West didn't stand in the towers. The West went up the stairs and left messages on answering machines.
And here's what I can't let go of, twenty-five years later -
The civilisation that can do that cannot be destroyed from outside. It proved that itself that morning.
But it can be seduced from within.
And that's what has happened to us in the meantime. Not through an attack - but through a teaching. It took place in our own institutions, the ones we built to pass the inheritance on - the universities, the schools, the media, the culture.
There we learned, generation after generation, that the refined thing was to see through things. That Faith is naivety, until you've seen through it. That the fatherland is something you apologise for. That marriage is a construction, sacrifice a stupidity, and the man on the stairs - if we really have to talk about him - probably mostly a toxic product of his culture.
We learned to roll our eyes at everything the dead had in their mouths.
And whether they meant it well or not is, in the end, irrelevant. Some believed they were liberating us. Others knew perfectly well what they were tearing down. The result was the same - you can't teach a child to see through everything without also teaching it that nothing is sacred.
That's not a side effect.
That's the entire operation.
That's how cynicism became cultivation and shame became wisdom. We can cite everything the West has done wrong in our sleep - but we stammer when our children ask why anyone went up that stairwell. Not because the answer is gone. But because we got twelve years of education in being embarrassed about it.
And meanwhile others stand ready to take out a patent on the inheritance - those who shout its words loudest and mean them least.
The West belongs to NONE of them. Neither those who are ashamed of it, nor those who sell it.
It belongs to those who carry it forward.
So do one thing today. Not a post, not a flag. Tell a child about the stairs. About the calls. About the vote. About the two who held hands all the way down. Say it out loud, and feel that you still know that it's true.
And when you've told that, then tell the child - also the one living inside yourself - that which the whole story rests on.
That it's not random either. That it's created, with intention and with a purpose, and that it's loved - not for something it has done, but for what it is. That innermost in it is placed a spark, which no fire, no tower and no time can extinguish. And that the image it carries inside is God's own.
Because that was what they knew, those who went up the stairs. Maybe not with the words. But with their legs.
And it was precisely that certainty they wanted to hit, the men in the planes. Not the steel. Not the economy. The faith that Man is inviolable. They couldn't reach that with fire. Only we ourselves can give that away.
There are people growing up now who weren't born that morning, and they shouldn't inherit our fear. They should inherit the answer to what a Human Being is worth.
Twenty-five years. It's our watch now.
And a civilisation doesn't fall when its towers do. It falls the day no one goes up the stairs anymore.
So let's keep walking.
Carefree and Without Fear.
Home.
John 14:27
❤️🔥🪽
