Ashby Ponds Residents Remember 9/11

Residents of the Ashby Ponds retirement community in Ashburn held a memorial service Sunday morning to pay tribute to the victims of Sept. 11.

Carl Hemmer, a married Catholic Priest organized the service. He is one of a handful of retired ministers in charge of the interfaith church there.

“I volunteered to do the Sept. 11 service and I wanted to do something special,” Hemmer said.

Hemmer arranged to have a first responder to the Pentagon crash speak to the group.

The man, who is not authorized to speak to the media, is a relative of one of the residents of Ashby Ponds. He briefly shared what he felt when he arrived at the Pentagon 10 years ago.

Otto Jacobson, a retired Lutheran minister read a group of scripture from the book of Romans from the Bible.

Hemmer addressed the group with a homily on what we have learned during the past 10 years.

“I had read what others were saying on what we had learned and I wasn’t satisfied with the kinds of reflections being offered,” Hemmer said. “They weren’t asking the tough questions like, ‘How do you deal with your values if they make you vulnerable. Why not challenge Christian faith to say what it is you believe?’”  Hemmer said.

He compared 9/11 to early Christians in Rome.                            

“Early Christians under Paul were afraid their faith as Christians made them vulnerable. Like them we ask the same question,” Hemmer explained. “How must we deal with evil as Christians? How does our faith equip us to deal with troubling times?”

Hemmer went on to say faith doesn’t protect us from the forces of evil and faith doesn’t protect us from a terrorist’s power to kill.

“But our faith guarantees that the forces of evil will not be the final victors. God is always in charge of the world. Faith protects us from despair, not injury,” Hemmer said.

Hemmer said the cost of 9/11 goes beyond the trillions of dollars spent over the past 10 years, but it includes the lives of those killed and injured as well.

“There simply isn’t enough humanitarian aid available in the world to restore these broken pieces of humanity to decent lives,” he said. “We and the rest of our generation of humans on the planet can perhaps do only one thing for all these victims, remember them. And resolve that sometime in our lifetime this terrible waste of humanity will not be repeated.”

He went on to say hope for the future is what can be taken from that terrible day in 2001.

“A closely related lesson is that our response to the fears engendered by 9/11 has to exclude any response to evil with evil,” he said. “We cannot prevail unless we refuse to sacrifice the values that make us who we are.”

A moment of silence and a prayer by Mary Wilkins, a retired Lutheran minister, followed the homily.