Prayer For the Bad Guys: A Memory of 9-11

It was bedtime. Patrick was 8-years-old, and I was tucking him in. We heard an airplane fly overhead. Any other night, we wouldn’t have paid it any attention, our house being in the flight path of Manchester airport. But there weren’t supposed to be any planes that night. It was the 11th of September, 2001, and all civilian aircraft had been grounded.

Hearing the jets' roar, we froze. (Who in America didn’t shudder that day at the bare mention of any fixed-wing aircraft?)

Patrick observed, “It’s an army plane.” Eight-year-old boys can hear the difference between a 737 and an F-14.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “It’s one of ours.” Probably the Air National Guard. Wasn’t there a base in Concord? Or it could be the Air Force; do they still use Pease?

“A good-guys plane?” Patrick asked, still nervous.

“Good guys,” I assured him, “They’re making sure all the bad guys are gone.” Ordinarily I discouraged this kind of simplistic thinking, but on that day, even adults were inclined to see the world the way little boys do, divided into Good Guys and Bad Guys.

“Okay. Goodnight, Mom.”

I turned to leave.

“Mom?”

“Yes?” Part of the bedtime ritual: One more question, to delay the closing of the door.

“All the bad guys died when they broke the planes and the buildings?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Are they in heaven?”

I thought, How young he is! I think most American grownups, if they believed in an afterlife, imagined the highjackers in hell, these men with their carefully planned malice, their disregard for innocent lives, and the sheer quantity of destruction they’d caused. I couldn’t say that, yet it would be patently absurd to suggest that such behavior merited an eternal reward. So, good Episcopalian that I am, I opted for the via media.

“That’s not something we can know. Whether someone goes to heaven or not is between that person and God.”

He seemed to accept this and said goodnight. I went back downstairs to watch TV: which meant, that evening, watching yet another replay of the same chilling footage: smoke pouring out of a skyscraper as a second plane flew directly into its twin…glass and steel towers dissolving into great balls of gray powder. I remembered thinking, in the incongruous way people do when the world becomes too strange, about the movie version of "Godspell," which Patrick and I had watched not long before. Jesus and his friends were dancing on top of the World Trade Center, which was brand-new back then. I’d never seen the towers anywhere but on a screen. Now they were gone.

An hour later, I was in my pajamas and had my toothbrush in hand when I heard Patrick’s voice. “Mom?”

I sighed and went to his door. Apparently he was still too anxious to sleep. I sat on the foot of his bed.

“What’s up?” I asked, adding playfully, “Besides you?”

“I’ve been praying.”

This struck me as the most rational thing anyone could do that night, and I was mildly embarrassed that my kid had thought of it without my suggesting it. “Cool,” I said.

He said, “I was praying for the people who died on the planes.”

It was an unexpected remark coming from a Protestant kid. Sure, we mention those who have died during the Prayers of the People on Sunday, but I never thought he was listening. It wasn’t something we’d ever talked about at home.

“That was nice of you,” I declared inanely.

He was quiet, and I waited, anticipating some theological question for which I might have a stock answer. I was a Sunday School teacher, after all. At last he spoke again.

“I also prayed for the men who stole the planes.”

“Oh?” I was instantly on the lookout for sprouts of heresy. What would an eight-year-old boy ask God to do about the Bad Guys? “What did you say?”

“That I hope they go to heaven so they can meet God and understand love.”

I don’t remember what I said in response to this. I babbled like St. Peter at the Transfiguration, my powers of reasoning incapacitated in the face of stunning holiness. Lying there in his bed, watching his fish, listening to fighter jets passing overhead, this kid had been figuring it all out. People who know the meaning of love don’t steal airplanes and kill other people with them. Since there is nothing but love in the presence of God, anyone who would do such a thing must not have met Him. Thus, the one fix for such people was to encounter God, be loved, and realize that hateful acts make no sense.

In the days to follow, we watched as more and more adults regressed to the age of 8, dividing the world into good guys who must win and bad guys who must be destroyed. Prayers were offered for the victims, living and dead, for the other people in the affected locations, and for the firefighters and medics and rescue workers and rescue dogs, all of them certainly deserving of our kindest thoughts. In all the whirlwind of prayers we were sending up, I never heard anyone but this one little boy spare a prayer for the bad guys, for a group of men who had done a terrible thing because they didn’t understand love.