A beautiful passage from some stirring remarks:

"It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free."

I particularly liked the affirmation that for Americans

none of our worldviews, with God or without God, should ever become the worldview of the state, and that no sanctity ever attaches to violence.

Amen.

(Photo: A woman mourns the loss of her son ten years after he died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, as she visits during tenth anniversary ceremonies of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center site September 11, 2011 in New York City. By Carolyn Cole-Pool/Getty Images.)