Welcome Guest
Join here
Members Log-In
Privacy Policy

Friday May 9,2008

The Defining Moment

by Rev. Galen Guengerich

A sermon preached at All Souls Unitarian Church, New York City on September 30, 2001

By now, all of us know the story of United Flight 93. About an hour into its scheduled trip from Newark to San Francisco on September 11, terrorists commandeered the cockpit and herded the 38 passengers to the back of the plane. But four of the passengers were not the sort one easily shoves around: a six-foot-five collegiate rugby champion, a former standout high school quarterback, a former judo champion in the 220-pound class, and a former collegiate baseball player. While hostages in the back of the plane, they learned about the attacks on the World Trade Center and realized that their jet too was now a guided missile. "I know we are going to die," the quarterback told his wife on his final cell phone call. "Some of us are going to do something about it."

What happened next was less a triumph of brawn and athleticism than it was a triumph of imagination. The defining moment for these former athletes was not a previous personal victory, nor was it the actual conquest of their captors. It was their ability, in one horribly lucid moment, to re-imagine their lives completely. Before the hijackers took over, the passengers had doubtless made the usual assumptions about how their lives would unfold. We'll land in San Francisco, and I'll go to the meeting. This weekend, I'll take my daughter to the park in her red wagon. When my wife gets her promotion, we'll buy a new house and increase our contribution to the World Wildlife Fund. And someday we'll retire to Boca Raton.

Then, in a moment, everything changed. The matrix of relationships and responsibilities within which they understood their lives shifted. The rest of their lives would be measured not in decades, but in minutes. Their life goals no longer had to do with work and family, but with saving lives by diverting the guided missile in which they were now trapped. The heroes of Flight 93 demonstrated stunning resilience. They adapted to the new situation, took responsibility for doing what they could, and committed themselves to a course of action. They were obviously successful.

Fortunately, most of us will never confront such a horribly desperate situation. But all of us face calamities: a serious illness, the loss of a job, the death of a spouse or child, a divorce, the betrayal of a friend, a national emergency. And when something cataclysmic does happen, everything is rendered profoundly different. Some people have the ability to endure and even grow stronger in such circumstances, and some people do not. This ability is called resilience, and it has been the object of scientific scrutiny for more than thirty years.

The original studies of resilience attempted to discover why some neglected and abused children were able to overcome their horrific upbringing, while others succumbed to violence and self-destruction. Over the years, the field of resiliency studies has expanded to include adults, organizations, even nations.