The fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is tomorrow. And with this anniversary I'm reminded of what a major moment this was in the history of our country and in the lives of most Americans who were alive and old enough to understand it fifty years ago.  It's one of those moments where people remember where they were and what they were doing when it happened or when they heard.  People remember it as a "Turning Point" where there was a "Loss of Innocence." 

I don't remember it.  I was born after the fall of Camelot.  I was born into a world where the Loss of Innocence had already happened, the Turning Point was past, and we were in the age of cynicism.  I have some sympathy for Steve Friess who wrote an article in Time titled "Five Reasons People Under 50 Are Already Tired of JFK Nostalgia" and Nick Gillespie who wrote in The Daily Beast, "JFK Still Dead, Boomers Still Self-Absorbed."  Those of us younger than the Baby Boomers have been steeped in Boomer nostalgia for as long as we can remember.  And right now we're hitting the 50th anniversary of all those Major Moments.  (And for those of us in Generation X, the only thing worse than Boomer nostalgia is people talking about how Boomers need to make space for a new generation -- the Millennials.  It's particularly annoying to see Boomers cede ground to their own wonderful children, leaving out the forgotten generation between.) 

I'm not as cynical as all that--most of the time.  I do think the Turning Point marks a Loss of Innocence and was a Major Moment, but I do think that it was primarily that for the Boomers.  Our country had had crooked politicians before.  Our country had had war before.  People had seen death and suffering before.  The Loss of Innocence that happened at this shot heard round the world was the Loss of Innocence of the Boomer generation.  This moment is terribly important -- for them.  And that, in and of itself, is worth spending time reflecting upon.  Their grief, their fear, their shattering loss, all of that was very real and very important, then and now. 

I saw how important this death was for my Boomer friends during the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama.  There were so many comparisons being made between Barack Obama and JFK -- youngest presidents, change agents, Caroline Kennedy saying Obama will be "A President Like My Father."  There was such fear that I heard from Boomers of assassination.  It was almost as if someone like Obama, who was being closely associated with Kennedy in many minds, was already marked for assassination.  The fear I heard from some Boomers was very real and very present in their minds.

So, yes, Kennedy's death continues to matter.  And to not understand the impact it had on this large American generation, in particular, is to ignore a large pastoral issue in our country -- a very real grief that continues to need to be honored and understood.

As someone born after the death of JFK (and RFK and MLK, for that matter), the only thing I can relate it to is the fear and shock we (and maybe this is stronger for those of us who are younger) after September 11th, 2001.  September 11th, 2001 is a date that I mark before-and-after.  Before 9/11 we lived in a country that had not had a major attack on our soil in fifty years.  After 9/11 we lived in a culture of fear where many things would be done differently -- the way we travel being the most obvious example.  Before 9/11 we lived in a country where fear of hijacking was minimal, and we would assume hijackers wanted to take the place to a location of their choice.  After 9/11 we understood that the goal was death.  Our heroes became those who managed to crash their plane themselves in the fields, rather than into the terrorists' target.  I know I've had arguments with at least one Boomer over whether or not 9/11 should be memorialized in our culture.  For them, it's not as pivotal a moment.  Their Turning Point had already  happened; 9/11 was awful, but not seminal.  For my generation, however, 9/11 was a Turning Point.  For me, happening at the beginning of my ministry, I feel like it changed my profession, my understanding of the mission and purpose of ministry.  It was a big Turning Point.  But I hadn't lived through JFK.  The biggest cultural moment for me prior to 9/11 was the Challenger explosion. 

These are called "Flashbulb Memories" -- the memories of events that are so strong that we can remember everything about that particular moment.  And unlike all the other 1960s nostalgia we'll be hearing about, JFK's assassination was a Flashbulb Memory moment, as were the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lennon, and the Challenger explosion and September 11th, 2001.

So, Gen X and Millennial friends, we need to get over our cynicism and stop rolling our eyeballs.  This nostalgia and sharing of 50th anniversaries is going to go on for a while.  Probably it'll go until 2019, as we mark the anniversaries of the peace movement, the civil rights movement, etc.  We've got the anniversaries of the assassinations of Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. yet to come. But what we need to do is cut through the surface level, the media level, that we'll be hearing about, and talk to people about what this moment really meant to them, how it changed them, why they continue to focus on it, what it's deeper meaning is.  We need to get past the nostalgia and into the real work of the grief and fear, and the way it continues to shape our country.

I'm pouring out post after post on 9/11 to get out of my system those things which I need to say but which don't belong in my sermon.  This is done in hopes that once these things are out, I can see what is left.  What I know is left right now is the stone of hope that is hewn out of the mountain of despair.  Perhaps it is connected to those five smooth stones.  Or perhaps it is one of them.  What mountains do we hew the other four stones out of, then?  Grief, hope, memory, and even joy are all the tumblers now as I polish the stones up. 

I've been rereading what I wrote in those days after September 11th, 2001.  Here's what I said at our water communion service on September 16th, 2001:

9/11 had a large impact on my ministry.  About two years later, in 2003, now ministering in New England, my colleague Jennie Barrington and I, were talking often how 9/11 had shaped our ministry.  We also were big Simon and Garfunkel fans, and Simon and Garfunkel were doing their "Old Friends" reunion tour.  We bought two tickets to go see them in New Jersey, and we hit the road.  We went two places: the concert, and Ground Zero.  That was it -- we didn't do a Broadway show or see the Statue of Liberty, or go to the Met.  We had two things we wanted to do: that concert, and see Ground Zero for ourselves.

I had been to New York City only two or three times before -- once to visit a boyfriend in college over the summer, once with my college's Glee Club on a concert trip.  I had driven through it a couple of times on my way to New England, also, but all I can say about that is that the tunnels and bridges are expensive, and that driving through New York City six months after 9/11 with a truck full of furniture is a nerve-wracking experience.  I had never gone to see the World Trade Center when it was standing.  I've still never been to the Statue of Liberty, although I saw it from the ferry my first time there. 

So we drove with our bad Mapquest directions ("take the exit" -- which exit?) down to our hotel in New Jersey near the concert venue.  We listened to Simon and Garfunkel all the way down and all the way back, hearing some songs that we had never heard before on their newest release, such as "A Church Is Burning," which we heard with stunned ears, and replayed over and over again several times in a row, weeping, as we drove down.  We talked about how to use the song in worship, something I still haven't done.  And we went to the concert, which was a special treat not only getting to hear them, but hearing them in home turf, in the New York City area.

And then we went to Ground Zero.

There was no memorial there, of course.   What there was was a big pit where work was still going on uncovering things that had been pushed down into the earth by the collapse of the towers.  The area was surrounded by fences, tourists walking around, and people selling t-shirts and tchotchkes.  It was a strange and surreal experience standing there by the fence with nothing particular to say or do once we got there.  It had become more tourist site than memorial at that time.  Yet it was an important moment, this finally seeing it for ourselves, and understanding how big the area was.

I don't remember if we wept or if we prayed, or if we just walked around and looked.  I do remember that it changed us.

When I was younger, particularly, but really for a lifetime, I can remember instances where people were talking about how they remember where they were when they heard that John F. Kennedy was shot or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.  I was born after both of those instances.  But I could tell that there was something important about sharing those memories.  For my generation, we had a bit of this with the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.  I remember that I was in science class at school when I heard about it.  But for us, really, it's now 9/11 that holds this strange fixed moment in our cultural consciousness.  I think it's true not just for us, but maybe a bit more so, since we aren't old enough to have experienced those tragic deaths of JFK and MLK, much less the World War II moments that still loom large for that greatest generation.

My story of 9/11/01 is intricately woven with the beginning of my ministry.  I was in my first month of ministry, fresh out of seminary.  I had started about a week into August, and the Sunday following 9/11/01 would be our ingathering  Sunday, the official start to the church year.  I was at home in my new Houston apartment when I got a call from our music director.  She asked me if I had heard the news, if I had my television on.  I hadn't.  I remember her saying, "The World Trade Center is gone.  It' gone."  I turned on my television as she told me the news.  And she asked me, "Do you think we should have a vigil this evening?"  I said, "I'm not sure, I'll call you back in a few with a decision.  Let me process this."

Two more calls from church members followed in rapid succession to make sure I had heard the news and to find out if we would have a service.  By the second one, I said yes, and started to make all the plans -- called the music director to start planning the musical elements, called the president to start the phone tree so that people would get the news, and had somebody calling the television stations to get us on the list of services. 

In my memory it was that very day, but perhaps it was the next day, that I had a meeting with the local Houston-area UU ministers.  What a blessing that was.  They shared resources that they had been thinking about for vigils and for the following Sunday: Annie Dillard, Anne Frank, Adrienne Rich. 

I get the vigil we had and the following Sunday conflated in my memory.  I know at the Sunday service we had our usual water communion.  And I remember somebody bringing water from their trip to the World Trade Center.  Whether it was actual water from there or symbolic water, I can't tell you.  To me, it was water that came from the World Trade Center, and it was there with us in our water communion.  I've carried that water as part of our water communion since -- I took some water from that water communion with me to my next congregation, and to the one that followed (my current congregation), and saved water from year to year.  The World Trade Center is still there in the drops of water we pour every year into our common bowl at our water communion. 

Other things I remember from those services are that we had a fireman in our congregation who shared the Fireman's Prayer with us, and that even as far away as Houston, there were people with connections at the Pentagon and in New York City.  We shared with the entire country the pain, the fear, and the longing to get up and go and be of some help as we watched the endless process to try to find survivors and identify the dead unfold through our television sets.

This was the beginning of my ministry as a UU minister.  And that I ministered through this time is still one of my biggest accomplishments as a minister.  Nothing in seminary had prepared us for this situation.  Those of us who were new in the field had had no training on how to craft a vigil after 9/11, how to minister to the fear and pain that was a national experience like this, how to be a non-anxious presence when the entire country was feeling the most anxiety it had ever felt in our lifetime.  We were new and green in a raw and earth-shattering moment. 

I didn't do everything perfectly, I know.  I remember the competing tensions even then about patriotism and religion -- Do we sing "God Bless America"?  Do we use a flag print cloth as our altar cover?  But as I look back now as a minister with ten years experience, and open the files and read my words from that time in 2001, I wouldn't do anything differently.  It was real and genuine.  I'll be using some of those same resources my Houston colleagues shared with me from 2001 in 2011, and am still grateful for what I learned from them on that September day.  

There are a lot of people who have written a lot of wise words about how to talk to children about 9/11.  I'm not a child psychologist, or a teacher, or an expert on trauma.  I am a parent, though, and ultimately every parent has to handle this themselves, whether or not they are also a a child psychologist, teacher, or trauma expert.

So I talked to my child about 9/11 today on the way to school in the car.  She was born a few years after 9/11/01, so it wasn't something that had really come up before.  But we had switched the radio from NPR to her favorite music station--the one that plays all the pre-teen pop songs--and they were talking about 9/11.  So I just asked her, "Do you know what they're talking about when people are talking about 9-11 or September 11th?"  She didn't.  So I told her, in simple terms, that on September 11th, ten years ago, before she was born, some men, which we call terrorists, had taken over some planes, using knives, and wanted to kill everyone, so they flew the planes into buildings and crashed them, and that they did this with three planes, and two of the buildings, the World Trade Center or "Twin Towers" had completely collapsed, and a lot of people had died on that day.  And then I just answered her questions -- she's pretty bold about asking questions.  And that let me know where her thoughts were.  And I made sure to tell her two things -- first, that this was why they check people over a lot more now before we go on airplanes, so that would keep us safer, and, secondly, that there were a lot of people who were heroes on that day, like some people on a fourth plane who stopped that plane from hitting a fourth building. 

Her questions were:
Why do people want to remember this now, and talk about it?
Why did those people want to crash the planes?
Why did they hate us?

Ten years is a long time when you're not ten yet.  However, explaining why we want to remember, when people are still sad, is easy to do for a kid who has done funerals for her pets.  Answering "Why did they hate us?" on a car ride to school is less easy.  I told her that I didn't really completely understand this, either. 

How do we explain acts of violence to our children?  It's definitely not easy.  I'm still working on this one.  Meanwhile what I want her to know at her age, the age of nightmares, is that we've worked to make things safer, and that most people on that day acted in good ways, and that's a big part of what we want to remember.